HECSOs Summer School on Community Engagement took place successfully in Turin the first week of June.

This international and interdisciplinary educational opportunity, supported by the European Union through Erasmus+ funds, brought together 30 students from Italy, Spain, Austria, Greece, and Cyprus. 

The HECSOs Summer School has been an experimental educational offering resulting from years of research and cooperation. It renewed and updated the competency framework for future professionals involved in community and local development. 

Thanks to the collaboration between universities and civil society organizations, the HECSOs Summer School addressed an educational need that is often inadequately met within European university curricula. It aimed to codify and systematize practical knowledge, ensuring replicability and strengthening the methodological robustness of individual experiences.

The five-day program, held across various locations in Turin, combined theoretical reflection with practical experiences in the field. It emphasized the importance of context and the lessons learned through hands-on activities in guiding methods, practices, and approaches for initiating participatory processes that generate change.

The multidisciplinary backgrounds of the students enriched the discussions, merging anthropological perspectives with socio-political and legal reflections, and integrating engineering applications with agronomy and STEM studies. This highlighted that “community engagement” is not defined by a specific field or discipline but rather manifests as a principle, method, and objective. It involves two key elements: the role of communities as process partners whose knowledge and experiences enhance shared understanding and generate collective benefits, and the goal of jointly addressing social needs.

For this valuable week, we would like to thank first and foremost: Social Community Theatre, Costruire Bellezza, Associazione Generazione Ponte, Fondazione Time2 for sharing their experiences and knowledge and for hosting the summer school sessions, and the project partners with whom everything was planned: University of Turin, Department of Management, Carlos III University of Madrid, Synthesis Research Center, Caritas Vienna, Polytechnic University of Science and Technology of Bucharest, Mind2Innovate, University of Thessaly.

Thank you to the students who joined us!