If you ever asked yourself which institution does finance a project aimed at renewing the existing training offer to make practitioners ready to operate in real emergency conditions and why, you will be interested in reading this article.
Let us start by saying that SAFETY is a project financed in the framework of ERASMUS+, which is the European Union’s programme to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe. Its budget of €14.774 billion provides opportunities for over 4 million Europeans to study, train, gain experience, and volunteer abroad. Erasmus+ does not just present opportunities for students. Merging seven prior programmes, it has opportunities for a wide variety of individuals and organisations.
In the rich menu of the opportunities offered by Erasmus+, there are also the so-called “Knowledge Alliances” initiatives. And this is the scheme that allowed us to have our project financed! This sub-programme aims at strengthening Europe’s innovation capacity and at fostering innovation in higher education, business, and the broader socio-economic environment and, in particular:
- developing new, innovative, and multidisciplinary approaches to teaching and learning
- stimulating entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial skills of higher education teaching staff and company staff
- Facilitating the exchange, flow, and co-creation of knowledge.
In the call 2020, the 7th for this program, among the more than 100 project proposals presented, just 32 were financed. Among them, clearly, our project.
If you follow our project, you know that SAFETY is giving its contribution to reaching all the three main objectives of the program. In addition to this, SAFETY is also encompassing the main features of a Knowledge Alliance, as it is trying to:
- Foster innovation in higher education and innovation through higher education in enterprises and their socio-economic environment;
- Provide sustainability of university-business cooperation, thanks to a strong and committed partnership with balanced participation from enterprises and higher education institutions;
- create results that can have an impact going beyond the project’s lifetime and beyond the organisations involved in the Alliance. In our case, the main result to exploit is the e-learning course.
So, if you have any ideas related to these domains, do not be shy: Knowledge Alliance could the scheme for making your dreams real.
Written by G. Pasta, A. Guadagni and U. Pascucci from ValueDo (Florence, Italy)
