It would be a mistake to say that the Edmund Rice Centre and its colourful director Phil Glendenning choose to live dangerously. Yet, given Phil’s habit of turning up in some of the world’s trouble spots - Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey and more latterly Kiribati and Tuvalu – it is self- evident that the down home tea and biscuits atmosphere of  Edmund Rice in Sydney’s West, belies the fierce sense of social justice that lies at the heart of its philosophy.

I couldn’t tell you when I first met the Edmund Rice Centre for Justice and Community Education, sometime around the turn of the century I suspect. I feel like I’ve known Phil Glendenning and his comrades there since forever, the reason being that you instantly recognise the people who you could easily be fighting alongside in the trenches of our beautiful, collective struggle for a just society. 

The image is wired to my brain.  October 1999, a group of five Australian Aboriginal leaders gather outside the gates of Buckingham Palace having just met with Queen Elizabeth to discuss the issue of rights and reconciliation.  In the lead up to the meeting, Patrick Dodson had invited youth representatives of ‘both sides’ in Northern Ireland (part of our Let’s Talk project) to join them at Buckingham Palace.  Nothing captures the relationship between our NGO 80:20 Educating and Acting for a Better World in Ireland and the Eddie Rice Centre in Australia better than that event.