Dr Gianni Zappalà is the UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion’s inaugural Professional Fellow.
Gianni is an educator, facilitator and social impact expert with over three decades experience in the University, commercial, government and for-purpose sectors.
In his role as Professional Fellow, Gianni will bring his extensive experience as a social impact practitioner and academic to the centre’s various projects and university more broadly. This involves providing mentoring, guidance and supervision to centre staff on the application of social impact assessment approaches as well as contributing to research and evaluation projects, and facilitation of training workshops.
‘I am particularly excited to be working at UTS as I think it has developed several cutting-edge initiatives over the last decade in terms of approaches to transdisciplinary teaching, learning, social impact, and links to industry and local communities,’ Gianni said.
‘UTS was also one of the first universities to develop its own Social Impact Strategy and Framework, and takes seriously the university’s role to demonstrate how it makes a positive difference to the community through its activities.
‘I’m hoping to contribute to UTS’s innovative approach to social impact through cultivating and encouraging the use of holistic and systemic social impact assessment frameworks,’ he said.
For Gianni, the health of a university reflects the health and wellbeing of the community of which it’s a part.
‘Universities are critical to fostering cultural creativity, innovation and local action in their geographical spheres of influence.
‘I think UTS has done a great job of transforming the Broadway/lower CBD area of Sydney, and giving it a university town feel, with its iconic buildings, walkways and community spaces that build on and blend in the former working history of the area to create an exciting cultural and educational precinct while being conscious of its social responsibilities.’
As a certified practitioner of the Map of Meaning, Gianni pioneered Meaningful Evaluation, a holistic and systemic approach to understanding and assessing outcomes.
‘Meaningful Evaluation is a “right-brain” perspective encouraging a more participative worldview compared to the dominant “left-brain” evaluation perspective which tends to be mechanistic and reductionist in nature,’ he said.
It was this very framework which led to the centre’s connection with Gianni.
‘We feel that the approach addresses gaps in the evaluation field and can see its applicability to many of the community projects that we support,’ said Mitra Gusheh, Executive Manager, Social Impact, at the UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion.
‘I am most looking forward to learning from Gianni and growing the field of evaluation. The relationship will help build our capability at the Centre and hopefully we can equally contribute to the development of new knowledge and a framework that can enhance social impact,’ she said.