Lara Pugh

Lara Pugh is the Project Leader Learning City at Wollongong City Libraries. With over twenty years in education and project management including speaking in various contexts nationally, Lara will collaborate with lifelong learning stakeholders across Wollongong City Council and the Local Government Area to establish Wollongong as a UNESCO learning city by 2024. Lara holds a Bachelor of Education (Mandarin/Asian Studies) as well as a Master of TESOL and worked in the education industry for 20 years before moving across to project management in 2019. Lara has always been passionate about meeting the diverse needs of learners through the design, delivery and evaluation life cycle of a learning program, and is grateful to now be involved in developing a lifelong learning strategy that focusses on population-wide outcomes. Lara is interested in the ways in which libraries can play a role in learning city initiatives and the achieve of the Sustainable Development Goals, taking their commitment to lifelong learning to the next level through strategic planning and relationship-building. She is also excited to establish a learning city steering committee in Wollongong where lifelong learning is used as a tool for solving complex problems and building social capital.