Lively and creative discussions during Unite! Summer Community Event

A bright and mostly sunny Stockholm welcomed more than 200 Unite! staff members and students for the Unite! Summer Community Event June 13-15. The event gathered members of the Erasmus+ Task Forces and the Horizon 2020 Work Packages and around 30 meetings were scheduled. In addition, a number of open seminars were arranged on different Unite!-related themes.
Due to the COVID situation earlier this year, the fifth Unite! dialogue in Stockholm in March, hosted by KTH Royal Institute of Technology, was changed into an online event. However, the on-site meetings for the task forces and working groups, that should have taken place during the dialogue, were re-scheduled for June.
 
"KTH is extremely happy to have been hosting the on-site Unite! Summer Community Event as a complement to the March 2022 KTH Dialogue. The importance of this event is also given by the fact that for the first time the whole community convened physically in the same venue, including the colleagues involved in the H2020 project who have so far only had the possibility to meet online" says Mirko Varano, Key Liaison Officer for Unite! at KTH.
 
During the Community event, representatives from the different Task Forces, Work Packages, and Working Groups who have creatively worked closely together throughout these past three years had the possibility to plan the final phase of the pilot.  This phase will most likely lead to the full roll out of the Alliance in the even more ambitious November 2022 – October 2026 period (with a possible extension until the end of 2028) in which the joint activities of Unite! will be streamlined and implemented on a much larger scale at all partner universities.
 
The event also represented the first occasion in which a number of representatives from the two new future partner universities, Graz University of Technology and Wroclaw Technical University, will join the Alliance activities in person.
 
During the open welcome session, Stefan Östlund, Vice President for Global Relations at KTH gave a short speech on the theme of Responsible Internationalization.  The Community Event also offered seminars on the themes of the sustainable campus, Intercultural Competence, Gender Equality, diversity and equal conditions as well as a visit to the KTH Live-in Laboratory, where students live and sleep, monitored by sensors as a research project. There were also presentations of the winning students and student teams of H@ck your Covid hackathon and Unite!4Future competition.
 
The next Dialogue will take place in Torino in 20-22 September 2022 and will be the final Unite! Dialogue during the pilot phase.