2025 Research Grant Program - Recipients Announced

23/06/2025

Volunteering WA has a well-established Research Grant program for projects that facilitate connections between Volunteering WA, researchers and our members. We were fortunate to receive a large number of high calibre applications and we are pleased to be able to award two Volunteering WA Research Grants this year.

Congratulations to the following grant recipients, who will be conducting research to advance the sector in Western Australia:

  • University of Western Australia | "A Roadmap to AI Adoption Within Western Australia’s Volunteering Sector. Opportunities, AI Readiness and Risk Mitigation" 
  • Curtin University | "Family Influence on volunteering participation in Western Australia"

A roadmap to AI adoption within Western Australia's volunteering sector

This project will provide the WA volunteering sector with evidence-based guidance to: make informed technology investment decisions in a rapidly evolving AI landscape; help organisations implement AI responsibly and build stakeholder trust; investigate effective approaches to building AI literacy and capabilities within Volunteering WA and member organisations.

This 18-month project commences on 1 July and includes 35+ in depth Volunteering WA member interviews to be completed in Phase 1 and 400+ Volunteering WA member surveys to be completed in Phase 2. Project deliverables include an Industry Best Practice Guide, an interim and a final Knowledge Exchange seminar and a Final AI Adoption Roadmap Report.

Chief Investigator Dr Ronnie Das, Associate Professor, Management and Organisations, UWA Business School, will jointly lead the project with co-Project Lead Prof. Sanjit Roy, Vice chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow AI Adoption in Service industry, Edith Cowan University.

The project team includes three Associate Researchers from the UWA Business School, Dr Tristan Reed, Dr Miguel Loyola and Dr Mubashar Hassan, and four International Academic Advisors: Professor Mariann Hardey, Human-Ai Interaction, Durham University, UK; Dr Wasim Ahmed, Digital Transformation, University of Hull, UK; Dr Jose Moreno AI Development and Large Language Models, Audenia Business School, France; and Associate Professor Kshtij Sharma, AI & Computer Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Family influence on volunteering participation in Western Australia 

This project will utilise data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey to: profile volunteering patterns among WA families; apply rigorous statistical methods to examine how exposure to volunteering by family members influences an individual’s likelihood and intensity of volunteering later in life; examine the drivers and barriers to volunteering within families and across: generations of the same family; demographic groups and geographic areas.

The research will be the first to address the dynamics of volunteering within families and across generations of the same family in WA. The project will provide Volunteering WA with a data-driven evidence base to better understand how volunteering behaviours are shaped within families and across generations. Understanding how early exposure to volunteering within families fosters lifelong engagement will help to inform practical, on-the-ground initiatives to boost participation, particularly among young people. Recommendations from this research will support Volunteering WA in shaping its strategies to build sustainable volunteer networks in WA and strengthen its advocacy with government and community agencies.

To ensure effective communication and dissemination of research findings, the team will produce policy briefs, host a stakeholder workshop, and provide accessible, solutions-oriented project summaries and briefing notes for the Volunteering WA website.

This 12-month project will commence in July 2025 with Professors Alan Duncan and Kirsten Holmes advising the research team which includes Senior Industry Fellow Chris Twomey; Senior Research Fellow Dr Abebe Hailemariam; and Research Fellow and lead researcher, Dr Lili Loan Vu.

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Read about ongoing and past research projects.