What?
The Solidarity Academy aims to provide a platform to reflect on old and new forms of solidarity, to think about sustainable solutions to contemporary issues and to strengthen local forms of solidarity. In terms of content, the Solidarity Academy focuses on the just transition and the migration and refugee issue.
Alternative futures
The UCSIA Solidarity Academy strives for academic excellence and works with partners committed to creating alternative futures.s die zich inzetten voor het creëren van alternatieve toekomsten.
We reflect on the conditions for radical change and actively contribute to their realisation.
The academy focuses primarily on young people – especially students inside and outside the Antwerp Association – but is open to anyone who wants to work for a more just world.
The Solidarity Academy starts from local projects of social action and innovation working against poverty, social exclusion, climate change and other social and environmental challenges for which neither the government nor the private market offers sufficient solutions.
We want to support these initiatives, think about systemic, structural change and build a more just and sustainable society together.
Building on UCSIA's strong foundation
The Solidarity Academy builds on UCSIA’s strong foundation around the thematic lines: religion, culture and society; Europe and solidarity; ethics and economics; education and service-learning; and Jesuit heritage.
We explicitly use participatory working methods, based on the premise that society itself is a source of knowledge and change.
In collaboration with a wide range of partners, we aim to contribute to deeper insights, practical solutions and social innovation. Methods such as service-learning, moments of study, discussion and reflection, participatory research and the support of local social action are central.
Building on the successful experience with the city festival Baroque Influencers, the Solidarity Academy will also focus on experiential activities around various art forms to encourage new perspectives and connections.
Why?
We face immense challenges: digitisation, an ageing population, the climate transition, migration… each of which has potentially negative consequences for the most vulnerable groups in our society.
Wicked Problems
Demographic ageing puts pressure on public spending and forces some people already at their limits into longer careers.
Digitalisation poses a threat to those who cannot keep up, increasing their isolation and also threatening to weaken their position in the labour market.
The climate transition hits the lower social classes disproportionately hard: they are more exposed to climate disasters, suffer more severe consequences of necessary and urgent climate policies, and enjoy less of the benefits.
On top of that, geopolitical relations are shifting and migration pressures will further increase.
These are ‘wicked problems’ – complex and challenging issues for which there are no easy solutions.
These problems have important ethical and political implications, making their approach even more difficult and multi-layered.
As the ‘big stories’ have dried up and we find ourselves in a context of individualisation, fluid thought and changing political and social forms of organisation, we are experiencing increasing polarisation in our society.
This raises the need for places where participatory teaching, academic research and service are central.
The UCSIA House: a place of collaboration and knowledge sharing
The Solidarity Academy aims to create such a place in the new UCSIA House, where collaboration and knowledge sharing are possible and encouraged.
Here we can work together to build bridges, promote academic excellence and develop solutions to the complex challenges we face.
Participatory and iterative processes
The Solidarity Academy attaches great importance to involving various stakeholders in the process of problem analysis and resolution.
We support participatory and iterative processes that experiment with different approaches so that we can learn from experience and feedback.
We also apply systems thinking, placing problems in the broader context of social, economic, ecological and meaning-making systems.
In this way, we strive for sustainable and integrated solutions to the complex issues facing our society.
For the Solidarity Academy, strengthening solidarity is both an ontological and an ethical issue, as well as necessary from well-understood self-interest.
Solidarity is not only about justice, but also about recognising that our shared future depends on cooperation and mutual care.
Solidarity, on the one hand, refers to a fundamental togetherness within societies, which precedes concrete choices and actions of solidarity, and is the basis of society itself (ontological and creation perspective).
On the other hand, it calls for concrete acts of togetherness that express and shape this fundamental connectedness (ethical perspective).
Solidarity is a core value within religions and has strong spiritual expressions. In the Ignatian perspective, this is expressed, for example, in communal discernment.
Solidarity versus charity
For the Solidarity Academy, solidarity should not be confused with charity, although we do explicitly consider local social action as an important source of problem solving, change and knowledge.
The Solidarity Academy focuses on systemic change, focusing on the dynamics and tension between ‘cold’ and ‘warm’ solidarity.
Warm solidarity stems from a shared sense of humanity and belonging, while cold solidarity is structural and formal, imposed by social systems.
Core questions we explore in this regard are:
- How do initiatives of warm solidarity complement the shortcomings of cold solidarity?
- How can forms of warm solidarity boost institutionalised, cold solidarity?
- And where do both forms threaten to undermine the strengthening of the ‘bond of social union’?
Local social action and innovation
The Solidarity Academy takes local social action and innovation as a starting point for reflection, education, service and experience.
First, because good social innovation offers concrete starting points for thinking about solidarity (and the lack thereof).
Second, because many local social actions make interesting connections between different forms of solidarity.
Third, because community initiatives often identify new social problems and seek creative solutions on an experimental basis.
Effective social action is a crucial source of knowledge about social bottlenecks, stemming from the experiences and knowledge of the ‘’people in the bottleneck‘’ themselves.
This knowledge, bubbling up directly from society, offers valuable insights into the challenges people face every day.
By embracing and framing these perspectives within systemic approaches to social problems, we can contribute to academic excellence, new insights and develop more effective and relevant solutions to the problems affecting our community.
Knowledge Commons
Through their normative and practical principles, small-scale social projects, with their concrete nature and proximity, often provide a stimulating pedagogical basis.
They act as ‘knowledge commons’, providing space for practical experience and participatory reflection on broader, structural issues of justice and solidarity.
Good social innovative projects deserve our support because they contribute to building society and experimentally seek solutions to often complex problems.
The Solidarity Academy aims to play a role in this by providing a platform for reflection, exchange, practical support and publicity. Together, we can increase the impact of these projects and contribute to a more just and inclusive society.
Transdisciplinarity
As a platform, the Solidarity Academy puts transdisciplinarity at the centre.
It aims to provide (a) space for and network social and civil society organisations, academic experts and students, citizens, businesses and policymakers.
In this way, the Solidarity Academy aims to involve various scientific disciplines and integrate insights growing out of society to the maximum extent possible.
Apostolische Speerpunten van de Jezuïeten
In concretising its substantive work programme, the Solidarity Academy draws inspiration from the four Universal Apostolic Preferences of the Society of Jesus:
- Promoting discernment and the Spiritual Exercises;
- Walking with the Excluded;
- Caring for our Common Home;
- Journeying with Youth
In this way, the Solidarity Academy aims to express the Christian inspiration that also underpins UCSIA.
Thematically, the focus is on sustainability and just transition on the one hand, and migration and refugees on the other.
How?
The Solidarity Academy focuses on:
Society-wide and transdisciplinary reflection on contemporary justice and sustainability issues.
Striving for academic excellence, the Solidarity Academy adopts a participatory working method, starting from concrete local social action and involving actors and target groups in local innovation projects aimed at social inclusion, sustainability and social justice by:
- Service-learning: engaging students with inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives;
- Through social organisations and initiatives, give a voice to those who have no voice (including future generations and nature) and reflect on social issues and outcomes;
- Strengthen social organisations by giving them access to the Solidarity Academy ecosystem and offering them a ‘place’ in the UCSIA House;
- Organising ‘’experiences” around various art forms.
Student-centred engagement in local solution-based social action.
UCSIA has become the go-to contact for service-learning in Flanders. The Solidarity Academy will
- promote service-learning and action-oriented projects in higher education;
- support the formation of students into change agents in the just transition by learning from co-creation and real-life social problems (authentic learning).
Support innovative social projects.
The Solidarity Academy aims to support creative social innovation in Antwerp and beyond by offering moments of reflection, establishing contacts with academics and students and making the UCSIA House a place of encounter and exchange partly with a view to fundraising and project financing, organisation of start-ups, etc. by:
- the development of structural networks and exchange moments and multi-year pathways building on previously acquired knowledge;
- based on concrete teaching cases and different transdisciplinary perspectives, encourage teachers to focus (more) on the just transition and the refugee issue and initiate research projects around it;
- help social organisations find their way in a broad network that can help support them and make them better able to acquire grants and project funds to expand their operations.
Spiritual experience through distinguished art forms.
We will often have to approach solidarity from the painful realisation of the lack of solidarity in our world and this threatens to keep us stuck in the past or the present and stick to ‘tried and tested methods of approach’.
To look to the future, think from the future, and work towards the future, we need the power of vision.
How do we imagine this sustainable inclusive future?
What social rituals and art expressions or literature do we have available to support this imagination?
What dreams exist about a sustainable solidarity future?
Broad communication
To maximise its impact, the Solidarity Academy will communicate its themes, activities and initiatives widely.
It will do so by using different communication tools tailored to specific audiences. This is another area where it can build on the experience of Baroque Influencers.
In addition to the online channels that UCSIA is using extensively, efforts will also be made to produce podcasts and webinars in the fully equiped renovated UCSIA building.
Publications will also be provided in line with specific projects and initiatives.
To strengthen communication, UCSIA will collaborate with partners as much as possible.
Our partners
The Solidarity Academy will collaborate with its natural partners (IgnAN, the associations in Antwerp, USAB, USOS, the Ruusbroec Society, Streven, Pax Christi, Tutti Fratelli, JESC, JRS…), the field of education, student organisations, the city, the province, the broad civil society, the rich field of social and religious non-profit organisations and the corporate sector.
