ENLIGHT at 5: Integrated, Sustainable and Impactful
Five years have passed and the ENLIGHT community has successfully achieved two and a half projects including Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe calls. In this timelapse, forced by the need to secure funded, the teams have been partially engulfed by project-related tasks; Yet, personal affinities and academic complementarities have also arisen. These are at the base of the alliance that the ENLIGHT community strives to build as a long-term inter-institutional engagement and a life & work transformational enterprise.
ENLIGHT is slowly moving from a project network into a truly integrated international shared space; we will produce an increasing number of activities activities fully embedded as core institutional strategy rather than add-ons, will have permanent dedicated staff and budgets at each partner. With a view to provide tangible and lasting outcomes, ENLIGHT is consolidating the strategy to select high-impact areas where we excel.
ENLIGHT is foreseen by Nati Mansilla-Ovejero as:
“An integral part of our universities' operations. Success will be visible in the routines we establish: joint teaching initiatives, seamless administrative cooperation and shared support structures. The alliance should feel accessible, predictable and strategically coherent: a natural extension of how we work, rather than an exception.”
The geopolitical, technologic and economic contexts are, nonetheless, extremelly challenging, this is why our ambitious goals need to be sustained and nurished at alliance level and also at eat institution internally:
“The success of ENLIGHT will depend on maintaining authentic institutional ownership and bottom-up innovation while demonstrating the systemic transformation the European Commission seeks”, Alexandra Doring says.
The priorities for joint action in the next five years include securing the best possible tools for mobility and collaboration, including digital platforms, mobility frameworks or administrative processes, where learners and staff are regarded as members of a community –just like home learners and staff. Also, developing cross-cutting areas like sustainability, inclusion and innovation where collective efforts can drive systemic change appear as key drivers for cooperation and the future of our respective institutions.
In this regard, significant human achievements are always as much based on people as they are in tools and action. In such complex cooperation environments, new professional profiles integrating extensive expertise are arising. It´s really about
“Connecting multi-level stakeholders and multi-actor networks across cultures, managing divergences between partners with different interests, breaking down silos and ensuring practical implementation of collaborative tools”, stresses the European Strategic Watch lead.
Collaboration is one of the most important outputs of ENLIGHT; In this regard, Leah Vandeveer, Secretary General of ENLIGHT, claims to be:
“Impressed by the overwhelming engagement of our academics and more particularly of learners in our bottom-up initiatives and course offer."
In the upcoming years, she remarks:
“We will focus strongly on deeper sustainability, embedding structures that last beyong funding cycles, strengthening our stakeholder involvement and building long-term external partnerships. The openness and willingness of our teams to collaborate across institutions has made the perception of ENLIGHT as a purely top-down initiative slowly fade, as more and more staff is getting involved.”
“I see ENLIGHT as a community of universities working together almost instinctively –co-creating, sharing resources and giving learners, academics and staff a real sense of belonging to something “bigger” than their home institution-“, she envisions.
We are off to a great ENLIGHT@10!