Bill Walker

Bill Walker is an honorary Fellow at Deakin University and tutors at Ridley College in an online unit on aid & development, which he helped to create.

Bill says, “I also serve on the Board of Ethos, the Evangelical Alliance’s Centre for Christianity and Society, and the Academic Board of Eastern College/MST. From 1987 until 2019 I worked at World Vision Australia, where my roles spanned management, advocacy and research & development. Since 2005, I helped pioneer a major approach which integrates advocacy and development in the many communities where World Vision works. This involved developing Citizen Voice and Action (CV&A) from Community Based Performance Monitoring, which has its roots in the emancipatory pedagogy of Paulo Freire, a major 20th century thinker and educationalist. Now used to influence public health, education, water and other systems in over 40 low and middle-income countries, CV&A frees citizens to increase transparency in public service delivery and public accountability to them. Completed at Monash University in 2018, my multi-disciplinary PhD on CV&A used case studies to understand and explain processes by which service-marginalised communities become active citizens who learn to grow in dignity, and through reduced shame discover how they can, through dialogue, evaluate and influence public policy planning and performance, which increasingly enables them to collectively flourish. CV&A is currently being further adapted in many countries for COVID-19 conditions.”