Dr Mark Brophy

Professional experience

Dr Mark Brophy is the founder and director of Australian Study Circles Network

Mark Brophy has worked in education, training, public service and community engagement areas for over 22 years in universities, TAFE institutions, industry associations and government.

Mark initially became interested in Community Wide Study Circle Programs during his post graduate studies. For ten years he continued his research into study circles and in 2002 was awarded a Ph.D. from Victoria University for an extensive participatory action research investigation into the study circle process.

During this time, Mark received several awards including an Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship in 1997, Seacomb Conference Award Scholarship in 1999 and Victoria University Distinguished Academic Achievement Award in 2002.

In 2006, Mark was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to the United States and visited the Study Circles Resource Center, now Everyday Democracy to examine the viability of exporting and adapting the study circle process for Australia.

Mark has dedicated many years researching and developing his understanding of Community Engagement and Study Circles. He has created many resources, written extensively, presented and provided a significant number of workshops and training across Australia and overseas. Having established the Australian Study Circles Network, and developing Australian and overseas partnerships with key personnel and organisations that have expertise in the area, he is now internationally considered to be the key study circle authority and exponent in Australia.

Aside from his work with the Australian Study Circles Network and the Dialogue to Change program, he worked as the Statewide Community Engagement Facilitator for the Victorian Department of Sustainability and the Environment (DSE) for some time.

While at DSE Mark helped design and deliver community engagement workshops (Fundamentals/Intermediate/Advanced/Tools and Techniques/Planning/etc) for a wide range of audiences. He also worked on project teams as the community engagement representative, often coaching and mentoring project and policy staff.

The team faced many practical challenges and awakenings in our goal of embedding a culture of community engagement within the organisation. One of these challenges is that many people wanted to start engaging, using engagement tools and techniques, the 'fun' bit immediately, without thinking and planning beforehand.

One approach that was adopted to address this was to look at community engagement planning first (using for example the World Bank Stakeholder Analysis tool, IAP2 Spectrum and using engagement tools to do the actual planning, etc), then the tools and techniques.

In this way, participants have the opportunity to think, reflect, discuss - have the dialogue about what community engagement really is, the principles, ideas, culture, commitment, challenges, ways of thinking, etc.