Borderlands Cooperative has been involved in community, social and international development, ecological sustainability, social justice and participatory approaches to research and evaluation since 1997.
Borderlands was formally established as a not-for-profit cooperative with elected Directors in July 1998. We are a place for meeting of like and differently-minded people; creating space to operate as a social and ecological change hub for mutually supportive organisations and groups.
We work supporting community development, advocacy, organising, and education and training.
We also provide consultancy and research services to community organisations and local government bodies in the form of program and service evaluation, social impact research and needs analysis.
Borderlands provides:
- Administrative, intellectual and organising support for projects and activities around community needs, values and aspirations;
- A communication point to facilitate and obtain support for community action and campaigns;
- An on-site specialist library, including a collection of 16,000 books and more than 25 journals related to social and environmental change;
- A forum for meetings and seminars;
- The opportunity to hold discussions and conversations about alternative ways that we can live and work together;
- Research and consultancy services to organisations (government and non-government) in the form of program and service evaluation, social impact research, needs analysis, organisational development, international and community development;
- An operational base for other small organisations.
Purpose & Values
Jacques Boulet (Borderlands founder)
Jacques Boulet has studied, worked and lived in five continents, starting in his native Flemish Belgium, where he received his Social Work Undergraduate Degree in 1965. He worked for 3 years as a volunteer in a Community Development project in Congo and subsequently obtained a Post-Graduate Diploma in Community Development and Social Planning at the Institute for Social Studies in The Hague (Netherlands). He taught in Social Work education programs in Germany throughout the seventies also being involved in several grassroots community projects and processes. From 1980 to 1985, he studied and worked at the University of Michigan (US), attaining a PhD (in Social Work and Sociology). He became Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor between 1985 and 1996 in two Australian universities (Melbourne University and RMIT), leaving academia in 1997 to start a local community learning centre, the Borderlands Cooperative, representing a mixture of community activism, learning and research/consultancy centre and incubation space for good ideas. With Borderlands, Jacques is involved in consulting, research and activist work and has worked in community health, local government policy development, community arts, volunteering support and a broad range of organizational development projects. He was involved in some way with the over 130 projects the cooperative completed since its inception till today. The accredited Graduate School, OASES, equally imagined and developed by Borderlands, operating from 2005-2016 and of which he was the Founding Head of School, offered a Master’s Degree in Sustainability and Social Change.