Areas of Work

EUniWell's professional activities are carried out within the framework of different work packages and arenas that bring together academics, experts, project management staff, and students from all EUniWell partner universities to radically renew European research and education and boost cutting-edge, inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations. 

EUniWell was  selected as a “European University” in the second round of calls for proposals of the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission. The work programme of EUniWell under Erasmus+ (E+) is structured into different work packages (WPs), which address different tasks and outputs from the work programme and interact closely with each other. Each work package fulfils its mission by distributing its tasks to several working groups.

The general objective of this work package is to establish and provide the framework needed for the realisation of EUniWell’s aims as a European University, its time and cost requirements, the coordination of the activities among partners as well as its quality culture, with the aim of being sustainable beyond the funding phase. 

The four main tasks of this work package are hence, (1) overall project steering (strategy and general management), (2) administrative, operational and financial management, (3) dealing with legal issues, and (4) quality assurance throughout the whole alliance.

The overall purpose of this work package is to rethink and design common courses enhancing the links between education, research and innovation, as a first step towards designing and implementing a joint educational experience. This work package aims to develop new, agile, interactive and co- creational teaching and learning formats in an international, transparent, authentic, and inclusive curriculum, to enhance students’ personal well-being and to prepare them for their future careers in diverse and multiple professional settings.

 

This work package has established the Research Arenas as EUniWell’s key tool to reform our approach towards research on well-being, the articulation between research and teaching and the role of external stakeholders.

The overall objective of this WP is to radically renew the research- education-transfer nexus on well-being-related themes

  • by further boosting cutting-edge, inter- and transdisciplinary research collaboration related to well-being;
  • by realising an approach to research design that is highly inclusive, diverse and based on co-creation. 

In this work package, EUniWell co-creates initiatives to bring together researchers, teachers, students and administrators from inside our universities (scientists, humanities and social science scholars, teachers, technicians, clinicians) with those outside (public authorities, hospitals, schools, businesses and wider societal and community organisations) to support and sustain civic well-being. 

The tasks to attain this ambition are structured on 4 levels:

  1. Training for university members to increase societal impact;
  2. Inside-out, sharing knowledge with the wider society and giving a space to university in the discourse of shaping regional policy;
  3. Outside-in, welcoming socio-economic actors;
  4. Measuring impact: measuring, monitoring and evaluating the contributions of EUniWell initiatives on regional well-being, in our partnership organisations and beyond.

This work package takes on the task of integrating general infrastructures among the partner universities to form EUniWell, from administrative to IT and HR systems. Institutional Transformation activities focus on creating foundational structures at the institutional level that will help build bridges between institutions; fostering bottom-up cooperation at the community level (research & education) through co-creational development scoping and mapping of good practices for engagement.

The work package builds on the third key component of the EUniWell mission concerning the improvement of synergies and enhancing organisational structures, opening boundaries and installing a holistic approach to the development of EUniWell.

This work package tackles the complex issues surrounding the creation of a common identity for our partner universities. This includes change management and culture awareness, mobility, specific tools and events. This work package accordingly groups together tasks to foster the identity of EUniWell at different levels: the students’ feeling of belonging; staff owning the project; external perception by academic peers and aspirational peers; external perception by various groups of stakeholders and the general public.

This work package ensures that we are a sustainable institution that strives towards the future and conducts dissemination activities to share good practices for the new and future European universities, and more.

For the implementation of its work programme and the development of its joint aim to co-create a new higher education organisation under a well-being agenda, EUniWell’s arenas are another core organisational unit in addition to the working groups.

Arenas as practical organisational units in EUniWell are devised as flexible and dynamic, inter- and transdisciplinary groups that meet and work together and accommodate the diversity of universities, departments, services, and status groups across the alliance to allow for a wide range of different perspectives on a topic. 

Next to its four Research Arenas, EUniWell has set up several arenas with a focus on administration, communication, quality culture, and mobility.

 

EUniWell #Research

EUniWell #Research is a top-up project funded as part of the H2020 programme under the Science with and For Society (SWAFS) call. 

EUniWell#Research aims to strengthen and complement the EUniWell Erasmus+ work programme that frames the overall action plan of the current pilot phase of EUniWell.

The work programme of EUniWell #Research comprises four different areas of work, i.e. work packages:

The general objective of this work package is to set up the conditions for a coordinated EUniWell research agenda, creating both the leadership and the collaborative working conditions which enable EUniWell’s research communities to focus on establishing structures and strategies relevant for the promotion of research on well-being.

Through this work package, the research strategy and enabling structures needed to strengthen next-generation research and innovation (R&I) will be devised and delivered, ensuring that topics such as green and digital transitions, diversity, inclusion and gender equality are embedded across EUniWell’s well-being-led research landscape.

This work package seeks to develop the Open Science agenda for EUniWell, in alignment with the EU Open Science Agenda and with the LERU Open Science Roadmap. Aiming at integrating EUniWell’s approach to Open Science with its well-being agenda, EUniWell’s Open Science Agenda is strongly interlinked with how to exploit the potential for and address the challenges of rapidly emerging new digital research practices, formats, software, methods and infrastructure and the speed of data production, their features, quality, flexibility and scalability within the “Learning Arena” structure.

This work package aims to reframe human capital needs in which principles of well-being are embedded, in order to prepare the next generation of researchers for the future world of work (inside and outside academia) and deals with their transversal career development at various stages of their career, focusing on two target groups that require specific attention: early career researchers and researchers at advanced career stages accessing to leadership positions.

This work package aims to secure a coherent and timely implementation of the project, avoiding bottlenecks and overloads, while promoting the full engagement of partners. This includes the smooth implementation of all work packages of the H2020 work programme, monitoring their time and cost requirements, and the coordination and support of all activities.

Furthermore, the work package aims to accelerate the measures outlined in the other EUniWell #Research related work package for a sustainable and post-pandemic recovery, as well as to coordinate the evaluation and the alignment of processes and structures with those developed in the EUniWell ERASMUS+ grant programme.

Training Academy

The EUniWell Training Academy provides training and outreach activities to the engagement of university staff, students and fellows with civil society partners. 

Various working groups, composed of expert representatives from each institution, have been established to explore opportunities for the co-creation of pilot schemes which will form the foundation of the Training Academy in the longer term. These working groups are dedicated to: Staff volunteering, Alumni Mentoring, Student Internships, and Service Learning.