Meeting Social Responsibility in Vienna

From May 9^th to May 13^th, 2016, the UNIBILITY partners delivered the joint Staff Training for staff members from marketing, organizational development, management or social projects of the participating universities. In total, 33 people from Austria, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Romania and Slovenia registered for the training. The training week was hosted by the University of Vienna, Postgraduate Center, Austria. The five-day training involved both input about social responsibility in the university context as well as practical analysis of good practice examples how universities can manage their social responsibility policies and how they can have an impact on local businesses, the community and society as a whole.

The training was conducted by members of the UNIBILITY-project and, following the results of the evaluation survey, in a cooperative, attractive, relaxed and successful way. This leads to optimism for the future: in July 2016 UNIBILITY-partners are preparing a Student Training Week on USR which will take place in Barcelona, for the duration of five days.

In this sense, the training was conceived to support staff members in promoting their university’s impact within society, institutional profile building and setting up strategies and action plans to transfer their USR practices to the community context.

Training materials about USR are rare and were prepared prior to this event to be used further in the participating universities after the training. Also, two main deliverables of the UNIBILITY project were presented: USR Reader and USR Toolkit of practices. All participants contributed to the training sessions with their active involvement, questions and sincere willingness to spread the word and to introduce projects or actions at their own universities.