FGUA

The SOLIDARY COOPERATION OFFICE was created to attend the demand of Alcala's University community to participate in solidary and development aid activities and projects in order to build a more plural, fair and participatory society. That demands an effort to overcome apathy and to promote social concern, to help understand the South issues and to encourage the solidary commitment from students, professors, and administration and services staff.

The Solidary Cooperation Office is an initiative from the Vice-chancellor's office on International Relations and University Cultural Extension in collaboration with the General Foundation to promote solidary work and international development aid in our University. This office was created as a way to bring the university community closer to the issues that affect us as people and to a more comprehensive knowledge of the world we live in.

Goals

The University must include all its members in different solidarity and cooperation activities, not only from the more specific and traditional areas in which it's already working -training, research and inter-university cooperation-, but from new spaces that offer a new way of approaching the world of development aid through programmes and projects in training, volunteering, technical assistance and public awareness.

The specific goals of the Solidary Cooperation Office are:

• Channel the request for participation in the university community and specially that of its students, in activities and projects on development aid.
• Encourage public awareness and solidarity from the university community towards Southern countries and activities on cooperation.
• Boost and strengthen mechanisms of exchange and cooperation among the university community and other actors, and activities on development aid.
• Boost mechanisms of access to information and consulting about development aid topics in the university circle.

Work areas

In order to reach the goals mentioned above, the Solidary Cooperation Office has developed the following work lines:

Training

Cooperation and university volunteering

The UAH relies on a great deal of human resources, highly qualified on the most diverse areas of knowledge. They bring their knowledge, resources and technical capacities to projects and programmes on cooperation to move toward spaces of cooperation and to then encourage collaboration and strengthening of synergies with Public Administrations, ONGDs and Universities.

Likewise, the University must take part on the channelling the volunteer demand that exists between its members towards the fields of development aid and solidarity. The SOLIDARY COOPERATION OFFICE will start the UAH's Cooperation and University Volunteering Web portal, which goal is to create an online network between the members of the university community who want to collaborate on social projects and organizations and institutions who need volunteers.

Raising awareness and Information

Raising awareness in the university community develops one of the main points of action of the Solidary Cooperation Office. In order to do that, different seminars, workshops, conferences, exhibitions, information and spreading campaigns will be organised, such as the Solidarity Festival or the Annual Prize on Solidarity and Cooperation, aimed to reward a member of the university community who stood out because of his or her work on the promotion of solidarity and cooperation for the international development. On the same level, a Resources and Information Centre will be boosted in which the demand about information on ONGDs, official notifications, subsidies, job offers, bibliographies, etc. will be attended. 

Related activities

As complementary activities that will be aimed at reinforcing the different lines of work of the Solidary Cooperation Office, several work spaces with the different actors of the Spanish cooperation will be opened with the objective of boosting cooperation and the complementary character of the different institutions and actions that work in the field of development aid. Institutions such as the Spanish Agency for the International Development Cooperation (AECID), the Autonomous Community of Madrid, the Autonomous Government of Castilla-La Mancha, the Town Halls of the Corredor de Henares, the Spanish Coordinator of ONGs for the Development, several ONGDs such as Acción Contra el Hambre (Action Against Hunger), the Red Cross and other civil agents are key actors to link the world of cooperation and solidarity to the university field. 

Location and contact