Anglicare Southern Queensland's Seed Grants Program: opportunities and challenges in establishing and sustaining research-practice partnerships in Australia's human services sector.

Abstract

Anglicare Southern Queensland (Anglicare) is a not-for-profit organisation that has been providing human services and social care in Queensland, Australia, since the 1870s. Since 2023, Anglicare has administered a Seed Grants Program that connects Anglicare staff with university-based academics to bring original research ideas to life through partnership and collaboration. Anglicare's Seed Grants Program aims to nurture applied research that can be piloted or implemented to benefit clients and/or staff. The objective is to feed research-based evidence back into organisational practice and decision-making to influence future service delivery, alongside the possibility of building towards larger research projects with organisational or sector-wide significance and implications. This practice paper explores the key opportunities and challenges that shape Anglicare's Seed Grants Program, with a focus on embedding organisational governance and knowledge co-production through the Seed Grant Model. Opportunities derive from the contribution that research makes to innovation and researcher development within the organisation. Challenges relate to securing academic partners and accessing human research ethics committees, while ensuring staff buy-in and accounting for staff mobility. Building on literature relating to research-practice partnerships (RPPs) in social care, the research-practice gap, and researcher development in the university sector, these insights offer transferable lessons for establishing and sustaining collaborative RPPs.