On Tuesday 22nd March, we celebrated the presentation of the first edition of the Uniservitate Award. This new initiative of the Uniservitate Programme is a recognition for the best experiences of service-learning developed within the Catholic Institutions of Higher Education (ICES).
The objectives of the Award are to make visible and recognise projects that integrate academic learning with concrete actions of service to the community. In this way, the Uniservitate Award aims to become a source of inspiration for the entire university world.
The award will consider all initiatives – even the most incipient ones – that have been launched between January 2019 and April 2022 within the framework of ICES anywhere in the world.
María Nieves Tapia, director of Uniservitate, says: “Even though it is global, we are not in the World Cup. This is not a competition, but a meeting. We are helping each other to learn from each other. Even from the smallest service-learning experiences we can find inspiration”.
The submitted experiences will be evaluated on a regional level, considering the 7 regions that make up the Global Programme. The evaluation will consider the experiences that integrate quality, replicability and capacity to inspire other initiatives. The deadline for submissions is open from today until May 2nd.
The Uniservitate Award will distribute a total of 84,000 euros, which will be used to give continuity to the awarded projects or to initiate new ones. In each region, two prizes of 5,000 euros each will be awarded, and two special mentions of 1,000 euros. In addition, the two winners in each region will be able to travel to the 3rd Uniservitate Symposium, which will take place in Rome from 26 to 30 October. The winning experiences will be announced in July.
The meeting, in virtual modality, gathered more than 140 participants from all over the world and counted with the active participation of the institutions that integrate the Unisevitate regional hubs in the five continents. They will be in charge of organising and managing the Award in their respective regions: Tangaza University College (Nairobi, Kenya), De la Salle University (Manila, Philippines), Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (Eichstätt, Germany), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), Universidad de Deusto (Bilbao, Spain), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Chile), and the Association of Catholic Universities and Colleges in the United States, ACCU (Washington DC, USA).
For further information about the Award visit: https://www.uniservitate.org/award-2022/
