Social Commitment Unit (Unitat de Compromís Social)
Through Volunteering, the UdG wants to influence the development of transversal skills of students to contribute to their training as active and socially responsible citizens.
The volunteer program is based on two complementary activities.
On the one hand, the programme offers university students specific training related to the SDGs. The training is focused on issues such as health, addictions, development cooperation, disability, sustainability, gender, racism, etc. In addition it offers a specific introductory course to the SDGs and also deals with the SDGs individually via the interuniversity course “Visions of an unequal world ”. All courses are online and consist of a series of short videos that the student can look at whenever and wherever they want, within a period of time. In addition, an online roundtable is also held so that students can interact and ask questions to the speakers, and finally, they must complete one or more tasks in order to assess the assimilation of the content.
On the other hand, it offers the possibility of putting into practice the knowledge acquired in the trainings and applying the new knowledge and skills in the field, carrying out solidarity activities in collaboration with social entities.
We understand this program as a part of the student’s training and learning. So once the training course and the 25 hours of solidarity activities have been completed, the student can obtain 2 credits of academic recognition.
The model we follow is been proven successful because for the 9th consecutive year the UdG leads the ranking of Spanish universities with the higherst number of volunteer projects (with 270 projects in the 19/20 academic year and more than 1,500 participants, figure which accounts for 10% of the university’s student body).
To continue moving in this direction, we plan to incorporate new topics that have not been addressed so far, such as suicide or eating disorders, just to name a few. However, we want to improve the dissemination of the round tables that are carried out in order to be able to extend them to society and continue to work together with social entities in order to continue to expand the range of volunteering activity options.
We gather the results of the students related to SDGs competences and skills of the solidarity activities that UdG offers via evaluations surveys that the students and the social entities answer. These complementary answers help ensure that the competences and transversal skills are measured and guarantee the learning processes and the service to the community are combined.
The university trains the leaders of the future and therefore it is essential that it trains future graduates in the skills needed to rethink global challenges through their complexity and motivate them so that they can later become the change agents of the future that will achieve the SDGs.
In a context of personal and social diversity, it is clear that the program affects the competence/skill for coexistence and the improvement of interpersonal relationships with the acquisition of social skills, which in most cases need to be improved. This, actually, helps us to review and plan improvements in the next edition of the Solidarity Activities focused on SDGs.
It is a model that has been carried out at the University of Girona since 2011, and continues to grow year by year, given its transversality and rapid adaptation to changes that may occur (e.e. COVID19 pandemic).It demonstrates its adequacy in any context and territory.
