ASEAN launches university-community partnership platform

AsiaEngage, a new regional umbrella organisation to promote social and community engagement by universities in the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) area, was officially launched at a conference in Malaysia last week..

It will work in collaboration with voluntary and non-governmental organisations, philanthropic foundations and industry.

The AsiaEngage network, with a secretariat at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) in lush, green surroundings on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, will support development in the ASEAN region by strengthening the civic role of universities.

Coming out of the ivory tower and being involved with communities “is not something new. It is one of our universal missions. This is because of the social contract we have with our societies, which fund us,” said UKM Vice-chancellor Sharifah Hapsah Syed Hasan Shahabudin.

“What is new is the efforts of like-minded institutions that want to work together for greater impact.”

AsiaEngage will be “an inclusive umbrella for engaging communities and mutually transferring our knowledge and expertise for community development.

“As much as our knowledge will empower and develop communities to their optimal potential, universities will also be enriched by knowledge from communities. It’s a two-way process,” she said at the launch on 7 May attended by 200 delegates from a dozen countries.

AsiaEngage, which already has 64 members in 16 countries, brings together the rapidly growing Asia-Talloires Network of Industry and Community Engaged Universities; the ASEAN University Network’s thematic university social responsibility and sustainability network set up in October 2010; and the ASEAN Youth Volunteer Programme.

The aim is to better facilitate partnerships.

“This is a platform that is not just for universities. It is for NGOs, foundations and industries to collaborate with us,” said Saran Kaur Gill, deputy vice-chancellor for industry and community partnerships at UKM and executive director of AsiaEngage.

In the past, partnerships between universities and industry, and with community organisations, have been ad hoc. The aim of the new network is to consolidate these.

“With our intellectual capital and knowledge-generation capacities, universities are suitably positioned to take the lead,” said Gill. “There is a real buzz about being involved. People want to learn so that they can move forward.”

The idea of the network is to identify social, environmental and economic challenges that universities can help tackle in alliance with organisations on the ground.

It will enable universities to be directly involved in improving the quality of life of people in the region, including helping to meet millennium development goals, and disaster preparedness and response, and creating links between between research, education and volunteerism.

“In our globalised world we are increasingly faced with complex issues – problems that extend beyond disciplinary, sectoral or geographic boundaries,” Gill said. These include climate change and the environment and their impact on communities, and inequity and human rights.

“These problems seem largely beyond the capacity of any one agency to solve. They require collaboration, and diverse people working together across boundaries to ensure that our communities are socially just, economically stable, environmentally sustainable, and literate and educated,” said Gill.

“While governments are often seen as key facilitators of these collaborations, universities play an increasingly important role in this agenda.”

NGOs on the ground have a lot of applied knowledge and skill but partnering with universities can help them professionalise, she said. University involvement can also help to produce evidence-based data from NGO fieldwork. “NGOs are a critical partner. They have depth and reach out to communities.”

Universities are already becoming involved in such projects in the region but the AsiaEngage platform will help support a more sustained involvement and the development of a model for universities to engage in the community that can be replicated in other countries.

“In the field of community engagement there is a great deal of difference in the level of universities; some are teaching universities, some are big research universities. But as long as they show an interest in community engagement, we will bring them on board to help them with building capacity to engage with communities,” Gill said.

Nantana Gajaseni, excutive director of the ASEAN University Network, said: “Universities in this region claim they are part of the community. Many of them do provide services to the community but not in a systematic way.

“AsiaEngage will provide a clear avenue to connect them, to show them how to do it, get together the results and [assess] the impact on the community.”

Janice Reid, vice-chancellor of the University of Western Sydney and vice-chair of the international Talloires network – which was set up in 2005 in the French town of that name to promote universities’ civic engagement – said the launch of AsiaEngage was “an important stride forward in the international higher education civic engagement movement.

“We believe that higher education institutions exist to serve and strengthen the societies of which they are part.”

AsiaEngage members automatically become members of the Talloires network, which has grown to 240 institutions in 65 countries.

The ASEAN countries are: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.