Skip navigation

Our Purpose

Our Vision 

In today's world we are faced with many social justice challenges, which requires an organisation that is adaptive, innovative and nimble enough to deliver real change through effective advocacy and promoting the human rights of those they walk alongside. As the justice and advocacy flagship of Edmund Rice Community Services, the Edmund Rice Centre for Justice and Community Education strives to do just that by being a global centre for social justice and advocacy leadership based in Wangal/Gadigal country (Balmain) in the heart of Sydney. 

Our History

The Edmund Rice Centre was established in 1996 - the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. Its reputation built on the basis of challenging popular beliefs and dominant cultural values, asking difficult questions, and looking at life from the standpoint of the minority, the victim, the outcast and the stranger.  Inspired by Catholic Social Teaching, liberation theology and writers such as David Hollenbach, the Centre strove to achieve a world in which:

  • The needs of the poor take priority over the wants of the rich;
  • The freedom of the dominated takes priority over the liberty of the powerful; and
  • The participation of marginalised groups - and of the marginalised earth itself - takes priority over the preservation of an order which excludes them.

These principles and aspirations still hold for who we are today.

What is our focus?

The Centre's work focuses on social justice and advocacy leadership including in the following areas:

  • Pacific peoples affected by climate change
  • Refugees and people seeking asylum in Australia and internationally
  • Indigenous peoples in Australia and overseas

Over time the Centre's focus may change and diversify - but its core approach to social justice and advocacy leadership remains consistent, with a clear line of sight to our values, our mission and our theory of change.

We believe that people can change their world. 

We want to help enable people to change the world through education that begins with awareness-raising and ultimately inspires advocacy and social action.  

For the Edmund Rice Centre, community education helps with understanding and interacting with the shape and nature of the world as it is and imagining and shaping a world as it could be. 

 We believe that when people are inspired by choice, capacity and motivation, they are in a position to act for change: