Dear all,

I am sharing this here, in case anyone is interested!

Best wishes,

Alen

From: Katrien Van der Heyden <katrien.vanderheyden@ucos.be>
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2021 10:00 AM
To: Alen Maletic | Bridge 47 <alen.maletic@bridge47.org>
Subject: looking for partners in Erasmus + project

Dear Mr. Maletic,

I am contacting you concerning a potential partnership in an Erasmus + project. 

I am a trainer of UCOS (University Centre for Development Cooperation) at the University of Brussels.

Over the past decades, UCOS has been organising training for higher education students in Belgium who depart on an internship to the Global South (contested term, but used for brevity). By asking not only critical questions about students’ role, but also advising professors and institutions, we build towards meaningful encounters and active and critical Global Citizenship. After training more than 15.000 students, UCOS has become quite proficient in the complexity of setting up, meaningful partnerships between higher education institutes in Europe and low to middle income countries around the world. Such partnerships require close attention to historical imbalances, reciprocity, understanding of poverty, inequality, expectations, etc. We have developed various tools and principles to make such partnerships more equitable.

We now feel we have a solid foundation for taking these tools and expertise to a next level and are therefore looking for European partners with whom we can share, exchange, network, deepen our expertise and set up a European wide quality benchmark as a framework for mobility to the Global South. 

In order to do so, we aim to apply for an Erasmus+ project in Key action 2: Innovation and best practices - Knowledge alliances. More information here.

So, our question to your organisation is if you have knowledge about such projects already (no need to do double work) and/or if you would be interested to join as a partner in such a project or know any other organisation who might be interested and has expertise on this topic. 

Thanks in advance for considering this and feel free to forward this mail to anybody who might find this relevant.

Sincerely, and thank you for your time,

Katrien and Sebastian

Katrien Van der Heyden

UCOS - Brussels

+32-485897841