Sustaining Community-Engaged Work-Integrated Learning: A Decade of Listening-Centred, Community-Co-Designed Practice

Work-integrated learning (WIL) is now central to higher education, yet two questions have outrun its expansion: whether it builds the competencies a sustainable future requires, and whether the community-engaged forms that might build them can themselves be sustained. This paper takes up both through a collective case study of thirteen university-led WIL-for-social-impact projects delivered between 2015 and 2025 across social issues, disciplines, three delivery modes and two countries. The evidence is separated into two tiers. Eight projects carry the empirical claims, drawing on interviews, focus groups and surveys collected under institutional human research ethics approval and reported in the associated peer-reviewed literature. Five more-recent projects are used as documented practice only, evidencing implementation and transfer rather than outcomes. A single listening-centred, community-co-designed model recurs across this variation and engages sustainability at five interacting levels—issue, competency, pedagogical, delivery and relational—all held together by an ethic of listening. The findings are stated at the level the evidence supports: the model is structured to support recognised sustainability competencies rather than producing measured outcomes, and its adaptability across institution, scale and border is a claim of portability, not proven efficacy. The principal constraint is pedagogical: the workload, emotional labour and limited recognition the model demands of those who run it, and what that implies for institutional purpose.