ESF Scholarship winners
Announcing the 2025 ESF Scholarship Supported by Rotary recipients
ESF has been awarding scholarships since its inception and is this year delighted to be supported by Rotary to enable two more people to travel to undertake a study that will provide sector wide benefit.
Paul Fitzgerald, Fire Rescue Victoria, will be researching the topic of servant leadership.
Paul said, “'I am humbled to have been awarded the 2025 ESF scholarship to explore a topic of such interest to myself and importance to the sector. Leadership has a profound influence on people's lives, wellbeing, and careers, it's exciting to be undertaking research to help inform healthy, psychologically safe workplaces for our first responders.”
Mark Welch is Commander of Performance and Assurance at Fire Rescue Victoria, and his project is to explore how operational debriefs for potentially traumatic events can better protect the wellbeing of participants.
Mark said, “I am immensely grateful to ESF and Rotary for this opportunity to explore an evidence-based approach to debriefing potentially traumatic events. It is important that we learn from these events, but equally important that we do no harm to emergency services personnel when asking them to recount their experiences. The intent of these studies is to help close some current knowledge gaps about debriefing and inform us of improved debriefing processes that look after the wellbeing of first responders.”
Learn more about our scholarship program and view previous scholarship reports here
