President’s Award for Civic Engagement

25 June 2010

DCU President, Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, today launched the first ‘President's Award for Civic Engagement’. The awards were presented by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Councillor Emer Costello, who traced DCU's engagement with its local communities back to the origins of the Access programme through to our recent ‘DCU in the Community’ initiative in Ballymun.

Interest in the initiative was extremely high and the submissions from both staff and students demonstrated the significant contribution being made to DCU’s civic engagement mission.

The winners were Emma O’Brien, BDI, (staff category) and the Maths Learning Centre (student category).

Professor Ronnie Munck, Head of Civic and Global Engagement at DCU outlined the university’s civic engagement strategy and its various component elements. “This award was set up”, he said “to acknowledge the huge effort made by staff at DCU to contribute to the social, economic, pedagogic and cultural development of our local communities’.

DCU are about to re-open their facility in Ballymun ‘DCU in the Community’ which will now play a key role in implementing the university’s civic engagement mission in partnership with Ballymun Regeneration Limited.  Further initiatives in the years to come include ‘Sustainable DCU’ dedicated to the ‘greening’ of DCU and a major project on citizen engagement to be carried out under the auspices of  the Creative Dublin Alliance.

According to Ronnie Monck, these were both exemplary civic engagement projects showing DCU at its very best in terms of commitment ‘over and beyond the call of duty’ to being good citizens. “I am sure you will join me in congratulating the winners and thanking all entrants”, he said.

The Lord Mayor of Dublin said, “ I believe civic engagement could be seen as the ‘third leg’ of your mission alongside teaching and research.  A good all round education must embrace how our young people become good citizens.  And the universities have considerable impact on our local communities, often in ways you might not realize. I would like to see more emphasis put on civic engagement.”