The Edmund Rice Centre for Justice and Community Education exists to challenge popular beliefs and dominant cultural values, to ask the difficult questions, to look at life from the standpoint of the minority, the victim, the outcast and the stranger. 

The Centre was established in 1996 - the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty.

In enunciating the vision behind the Edmund Rice Centre's work, director Phil Glendenning has adapted the thoughts of writer David Hollenbach, who in his work 'Claims in Conflict' outlines three 'strategic moral priorities':

We wish to work together to strive for a world in which:

• The needs of the poor take priority over the wants of the rich;
• The freedom of the dominated takes priority over the liberty of the powerful; and;
• The participation of marginalised groups - and of the marginalised earth itself - takes priority over the preservation of an order which excludes them.

What is our focus?

The Centre's work focuses on:

• Indigenous people in Australia and overseas;
• Refugees and asylum seekers in Australia and internationally;
• Pacific peoples affected by climate change

We believe that people can change their world. 

We want to help enable people to change the world through education that begins with awareness raising and ultimately inspires advocacy and social action.  

For the Edmund Rice Centre, community education is fundamental to:

• Understanding the shape and nature of our unequal world
• Interacting with that world; and
• Imagining and shaping a different world. 

 We believe that when people are inspired by choice, capacity and motivation, they are in a position to act for change in their world: