In 2011, a humanitarian aid worker named Stephen McDonald walked through the doors of Deakin University to meet with Associate Professor Phil Connors. The idea they landed on that day — that field experience and academic rigour belonged in the same room — became the founding proposition of what is now the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership.
That first iteration, the Humanitarian Leadership Program, was built with seed funding from the Australian Aid Program and the expertise of partners including World Vision and Oxfam. It was designed from the start to give practitioners something the sector lacked: structured, accredited leadership development grounded in the reality of crisis response. When the IKEA Foundation invested in the program’s growth, it went global — and the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership was born.
What began as a collaboration between Deakin University and Save the Children Australia has grown into a global network of educators, researchers, and practitioners committed to transforming how humanitarian aid is delivered; and who gets to lead it. In 2018, the French-language Diplôme d’Études Supérieures en Leadership Humanitaire joined the Masters of Humanitarian Assistance as an accredited Deakin degree, extending the Centre’s reach to Francophone humanitarian leaders across West and Central Africa and Haiti. The Crisis Leadership Program followed, designed to reach frontline practitioners wherever they are — in five languages, across dozens of crisis contexts.
Today, more than 789 accredited graduates are working in over 100 countries. They include a Syrian computer engineer turned humanitarian leader who fled Aleppo in 2012; a Ukrainian non-profit leader who has progressed through every level of the CLP and now trains others; and practitioners from India, Indonesia, Sudan, and beyond who have gone on to reshape their organisations and communities. Their stories (more than 200 of them) are documented on our graduate stories page, and they are the most honest account of what fifteen years of this work has produced.
The Centre has also built one of the sector’s most significant convening platforms. The Humanitarian Leadership Conference — held in Melbourne in 2019, online in 2021, in Geneva in 2023, and in Doha in 2025 — has brought together thousands of delegates across four editions to tackle the sector’s hardest questions: who counts as a humanitarian, why the system is stuck, and what locally led leadership actually requires in practice.
2025 tested the Centre — and the sector — in ways few could have anticipated. The USAID funding freeze forced us to pause our francophone programs, impacting nearly 100 students and participants across West and Central Africa and Haiti who work on the front lines of some of the world’s most complex crises. Even so, our 2024 DESLH cohort graduated on time, 27 PLC participants completed their studies by year’s end, and the Crisis Leadership Program continued to expand into new contexts — including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Syria, and across the Arab-speaking world.
The work of this anniversary year is grounded in that same commitment. In August, we will mark 15 years with an event in Melbourne, timed to coincide with World Humanitarian Day; a moment to celebrate the leaders and communities who have shaped CHL’s journey, and to look toward what comes next.
In the meantime, we invite you to hear directly from our graduates about what the programs have meant for their work: Centre for Humanitarian Leadership – YouTube
