Education with a social vision has the power to shape individuals dedicated to the collective well-being, thereby paving the way for the emergence of alternative social, educational, cultural, and ecological frameworks for higher education. More universities are making engagement part of their mission, using their research processes and opportunities for external collaborations to contribute to social and economic impacts. For example, Colombia’s Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios’s (UNIMINUTO) work is shaped by its own social responsibility in the region.
Today, higher education institutions (HEIs) are facing challenges that go beyond offering vocational training programmes. Modern society demands structural changes for education to fulfil its social function of transforming visions and perspectives and to respond to the greatest challenges of humanity. HEIs can generate real opportunities for the most vulnerable communities by developing social innovations, researching to improve the living conditions of people, and working together with communities to understand interdependent problems (such as poverty, ecological degradation and social injustice) from different perspectives (Hathaway & Boff, 2014). These interdependent issues require global and especially political efforts to resolve them.
In this sense, universities worldwide are called to action, training professionals to read this reality with a critical view and bring profound changes. At UNIMINUTO, we are convinced that academic and local knowledge can jointly build projects, strategies, public policies, and programmes that ultimately improve the social conditions of disadvantaged people. Given this enormous commitment, UNIMINUTO, as one of the universities in Colombia with the largest territorial coverage, has an educational model that declares as one of its pillars “social responsibility,” in complete coherence with its vocational legacy of more than 60 years and the vision of its founder, Father Rafael García Herreros, a tireless promoter of social justice in Colombia.
For UNIMINUTO, social responsibility is an ethical and political posture that crosses teaching, research and social projection with the firm purpose of “promoting a conscious and critical awareness of problematic situations of both in communities and the country” (UNIMINUTO, 2021, p. 8). We ensure that each of the 207,000 graduates, during their professional training process, learns in a way that is contextualized, practical and with a clear social sense. The practice of social responsibility is a cross-cutting, transdisciplinary and compulsory subject in all curricula. It is developed within the more than 752 social and community organisations throughout the country.
Engagement with these vulnerable communities offers each student a challenging environment, a scenario to experience the depth of particular problems, and offers enormous opportunities to develop self-management and community work focused on social change. These scenarios, allied to UNIMINUTO, enables each student to transform his or her vision of social problems. They are what Betancur (2022) calls living classrooms, as they generate a vital learning experience that transforms lives.
The practice of social responsibility has the great goal to guide our educational processes, “learning by doing, living, feeling and serving with an experiential vision to form sensitive and transformative subjects of their environments” (UNIMINUTO, 2021, p. 4). From impact studies, we know that this experience changes lives, transforms social realities, and, in a particular way, focuses a social vision of the professions. It also helps social organisations to extend their services to more than 175,000 beneficiaries (generally children, mothers who are heads of households, street dwellers, and migrants) per year and strengthen their administrative, communication and relationship skills (UNIMINUTO, 2022).
UNIMINUTO has 19 Education for Development Centres, which are units specialized in training in social responsibility and are responsible for maintaining a permanent relationship with 752 social and community organizations. These centres work hand-in-hand with the leaders of social organizations to implement community projects and offer students a vital and transformative experience that encourages them to pursue a career with a social perspective. In addition, these Centres lead the university volunteer programme at a national level, which allows people to donate time and knowledge to serve those in need and, specifically, allows students to stay connected to the communities through solidarity actions once they have completed their internships in social responsibility.
In 2022, a total of 27,559 students shared knowledge and experience with partner communities through Social Responsibility Internships. The beneficiary social organizations included community action boards, foundations, associations, and rural schools, among others. It is from 81 social training projects that we are able to concentrate long-term efforts, with evidence of the improvement of social problems that also allows us to develop research processes in these territories. It is a source of pride for UNIMINUTO that, during this same year, 2,520 people donated their time and knowledge to the volunteer programme through 85 initiatives that make up the institutional programme and promote social justice in the less-favored territories.
Over the past five years, our research professors have carried out more than 60 formal research processes on territorial appropriation, educational processes with older adults and women heads of household, and the impact of migration, among others. Research ensures that the institution is permeated by social reality, recognizes other forms of local knowledge, draws on various paradigms of knowledge to understand local dynamics, and nourishes its methodological and theoretical approaches, always at the service of the country.
UNIMINUTO is recognized in Colombia for being the largest private university in the country with a presence in 80% of the national territory. Its social focus allows it to favour communities through its educational spaces. It has been recognized for its inclusive model of education for development aimed at the base of the pyramid by the IFC in 2011, 2012 and 2013, by the G20 in 2012 and by the Financial Times in 2013. UNIMINUTO also won Engaged University of the Year at ACEEU’s 2023 Triple E Awards. Its mission will allow it to continue to impact the most disadvantaged people who suffer the consequences of profound global problems; and its formative process will allow its professionals to transform society and build other ways of understanding social problems.
Summary
UNIMINUTO is dedicated to training competent, ethically oriented professionals who are in turn committed to social transformation. Its mission, principles, institutional educational projects, and educational model propose and materialize training in social responsibility, which allows more than 200,000 graduates and 90,393 current students to learn by doing, living, feeling, and serving as active agents that accompany the transformation of the communities belonging to the 700 social and community organizations in Colombia that participate in this process every year.
Betancur, C. (2022). Eco-leadership as a vital practice for social and educational transformation: a community perspective. La Salle University
Betancur, C., Mendez, G., & Sánchez, N. (2022). The systematization of experiences, an opportunity to make visible the educational commitment of UNIMINUTO from vital practices, community work and the care of the common home in the territories. In Experiences in communities for human life and the care of the common home. Systematization of social projection experiences of UNIMINUTO (1st ed.). https://doi.org/10.26620/uniminuto/978-958-763-581-2
Hathaway, M., & Boff, L. (2014). The tao of liberation. An Ecology of Transformation (E. Trotta (ed.)).
UNIMINUTO. (2021). Institutional Education Project (pp. 1–100). http://umd.uniminuto.edu/web/guest/proyecto-educativo-institucional
UNIMINUTO. (2022). Measuring impact. Social Training Projects in the Practice of Social Responsibility (M. Perez & C. Betancur R (eds.)). ONE MINUTE.
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Article Images credit: Claudia Betancur