The Wattle Fellowship is Victoria's flagship sustainability leadership program.
We bring together a small, deliberately diverse cohort of students from across disciplines — medicine, engineering, law, arts, science, and everything in between — to develop as leaders and act on sustainability issues.
Grounded in the principles of transformative leadership, multidisciplinary collaboration, and practical action, the Fellowship empowers students to develop the capabilities needed to create lasting, positive change in their communities and beyond.
The program runs over a year and includes retreats, workshops, coaching, and the design and delivery of a sustainability-focused action project. It's immersive and demanding, built around the idea that the most important development happens through experience, not instruction.
We take the name from Australia's national floral emblem: the wattle is resilient, widespread, and capable of remarkable renewal. That's what we're trying to cultivate in our fellows.
What the program develops
Our approach is grounded in research and practice which identifies four things as central to effective sustainability leadership:
- Purpose: a clear and felt sense of why you do what you do
- Self-belief: the confidence to act, even under uncertainty
- Reflection: honest self-awareness about how you work and what you're still learning
- Action: the capacity to move from ideas to impact
These aren't things we teach directly. They're things the program is designed to draw out: through challenge, feedback, and the relationships fellows build with each other.
Who we're looking for
There's no single profile of a Wattle Fellow. We're committed to building a diverse cohort and welcome applications from all backgrounds and levels of experience. What we look for is genuine: real care about sustainability, honest self-awareness, a track record of acting on what you believe, and a willingness to be challenged and to champion the people around you.
To keep up to date with the program, you can sign up to our mailing list here.
