Leadership as a Civic Practice
Reimagining Participation and Social Cohesion
Across Australia, many of the challenges shaping public life cannot be solved by institutions alone. Declining trust, increasing polarisation, social fragmentation, misinformation and growing pressure on community systems require something broader and deeper: leadership practiced not only by those in formal authority, but by citizens themselves.
In 2025, the Menzies Leadership Foundation continued to advance a clear conviction — that citizen leadership is essential civic infrastructure. It is the everyday capacity of people to participate, collaborate, disagree constructively, build belonging and act in common cause. In a time of complexity, these capabilities are no longer optional. They are foundational to a healthy democracy, resilient communities and a cohesive society.
Throughout the year, the Foundation’s Citizen Leadership and Community Resilience Platform evolved from a set of aligned partnerships into a more coherent national body of work. Across urban governance, regional leadership, community foundations, local media, systems convening and civility, the Foundation supported practical experiments designed to strengthen the conditions that enable communities to flourish.
A central pillar of this work was the Foundation’s collaboration with Regen Melbourne, a city-wide movement bringing together community, business, government and civic actors to help shape a more regenerative, inclusive and resilient future for Melbourne. In 2025, Regen Melbourne increasingly evolved into a systems convenor, creating spaces for diverse stakeholders to explore new approaches to urban governance and collective decision-making.
This work was complemented by the Citizen Leadership Project, a joint initiative of Leadership Victoria and the Rural Leadership Collective. Supported by the Menzies Leadership Foundation alongside philanthropic partners, the project focused on the development of a Victorian statewide capability framework — moving beyond standalone leadership programs toward a more systemic approach to cultivating citizen leadership capability across communities. This work made an important contribution to the capability pillar of the Foundation’s broader framework, helping explore what skills, mindsets and enabling conditions are needed for communities to lead through complexity.
In Tasmania, the Foundation continued to support the Tasmania Community Resilience Initiative with Collaboration for Impact. This work focused on strengthening belonging, collective agency and community-led leadership across the state. By late 2025, the initiative was demonstrating growing momentum, with stronger collaboration emerging across communities, the for-purpose sector and different levels of government. The work pointed to the potential for community resilience to become not only a local practice, but a broader movement for shared responsibility and adaptive leadership. The Foundation also deepened its exploration of the role of community foundations in strengthening local resilience. Through continued engagement with Communities Foundation Australia, the Foundation explored how a Horizon 3 perspective could support the future development of the community foundation movement in Australia. The involvement of the Ballarat Foundation in the Foundation’s civility work further highlighted the important role community foundations can play as trusted local infrastructure — connecting people, resources and purpose in place.
Alongside these place-based and capability-building initiatives, the Foundation invested in shared learning and sense-making. In 2025, this included supporting international systems thinker Mark Cabaj’s visit to Australia and co-hosting the Transforming Systems Forum with Collaboration for Impact — a three-day space for collective inquiry focused on the leadership required to build bridges rather than deepen divisions. A key output was a set of emerging insights on leadership, belonging and collective agency, highlighting that difference is increasingly experienced as moral conflict, that leadership strength must be grounded in relational and moral capability, and that transformation is most powerful when communities are trusted and resourced to lead on their own terms. These insights, alongside the Tasmanian Belonging and Democracy Forum, helped bring together partners working across community resilience, systems change and social cohesion to surface common challenges, share learning and build collective understanding.
The Foundation also recognised that healthy civic participation depends on access to trusted local information. Through its engagement with the Local & Independent News Association, the Foundation explored the role local newsrooms may play in mitigating disinformation, strengthening community connection and supporting the conditions for constructive civic dialogue.
A major development in 2025 was the public emergence of the Foundation’s Reimagining a Civil Australia initiative. Sitting within the community resilience sandbox, this work responds to growing concern about polarisation, racism and the weakening of shared civic norms. Rather than treating civility as etiquette, the initiative reframes it as a leadership and resilience challenge: how communities build the appetite and ability to engage constructively across fundamental differences in common cause. The first phase of the initiative included pilots in Ballarat and Tasmania, with learning circles, local micro-experiments in Ballarat. A national civility coalition also began to form, bringing together partners including the Ballarat Foundation, Collaboration for Impact, The Ethics Centre, FECCA, the Municipal Association of Victoria, Purpose Made and Welcoming Australia. Early insights reinforced the importance of narrative, local context, exploration over prescription, and the role of common ground — including kindness, respect, inclusion and “calling in” rather than “calling out” — as foundations for stronger civic life.
Across these initiatives, a clear pattern emerged. Citizen leadership is not built through a single program, grant or convening. It requires an ecosystem: local trust, practical capability, participatory infrastructure, shared narratives, independent information, philanthropic alignment and spaces for collective sense-making.
In 2025, the Foundation’s work helped connect these elements into a broader platform for participation and social cohesion. The ambition is not simply to support individual community projects, but to strengthen the civic conditions that allow communities to move from frustration and disconnection toward agency, belonging and shared responsibility.
At its heart, this work reflects a simple but powerful belief: strong communities are not built for people. They are built with people — through participation, trust, courage and the leadership capacity of citizens themselves.
Across Australia, the challenges shaping public life cannot be solved by institutions alone. Declining trust, growing polarisation and social fragmentation require leadership practiced not only by those in formal authority, but by citizens themselves — and in 2025, the Menzies Leadership Foundation continued to invest in exactly that. Through partnerships with Regen Melbourne, the Rural Leadership Collective, Leadership Victoria and the Tasmania Community Resilience Initiative, the Foundation supported a growing ecosystem testing new models of participatory decision-making, distributed governance and community-led change.
Strong communities are not built through programs alone. They are built through participation, belonging and shared responsibility — and if you believe a healthier democracy requires more people stepping forward, not just better institutions, we invite you to stay connected with the Menzies Leadership Foundation and the work cultivating citizen leadership across Australia.
