fields

Launching RFI…!

Universities are extraordinarily good at adding things. Sustainability offices. Innovation hubs. Interdisciplinary centres that sit adjacent to faculties rather than within them. The addition doesn’t disturb the host. It also doesn’t change it.

That distinction, between bolting transformation onto existing structures and designing it inside them, is the reason the RMIT Regenerative Futures Institute (RFI) exists.

But there’s a prior question, one that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems have been holding for a very long time: what does it mean to be in relationship with the places, communities and living systems that education is supposed to serve? Regenerative thinking, at its most serious, isn’t a new framework, it’s a belated arrival at questions that were never lost, only ignored.

RFI is an attempt to take that seriously, 37 Fellows drawn from every school and college, regenerative thinking finding its way into accounting, architecture, public relations, not as a corrective layer applied from outside, but as a question asked from within: what are these disciplines actually for, and who are they accountable to?

With this and many more questions in mind, I’m super excited to announce the public launch of the RFI on 14th May at The Capitol in Melbourne

Leyla Acaroglu will deliver the keynote. Tanya Ha will moderate a panel with Tamara DiMattina, Paul Paton MAICD and Hayley Morris. RMIT Vice-Chancellor Alec Cameron will officially open the Institute.

If you’re in Melbourne: free, 5:30–7pm, 113 Swanston Street.
If you’re not: a livestream link is coming, I’ll share it here when it’s ready.

🔗 Register: https://www.rmit.edu.au/events/2026/may/launch-of-the-rmit-regenerative-futures-institute

What would it mean for your institution if regeneration was designed in, rather than added on, and if the knowledge needed to do that had been here all along?

RMIT University RMIT STEM College RMIT College of Design and Social Context RMIT College of Business and Law RMIT Europe RMIT University Vietnam hashtag#RegenerativeFutures hashtag#SystemsChange hashtag#HigherEducation hashtag#FuturesThinking hashtag#Melbourne hashtag#RFILaunch