Getting to work during lockdown

ELIA Executive Director Maria Hansen describes plans to set ELIA’s new Strategic Focus in motion, while continuing to facilitate events which are relevant and important to our members.

The new year has started and life continues for the ELIA Office in lockdown. With an evening curfew now in place in the Netherlands and schools closed, it is quite a challenge for the team to remain cheerful. I am sure many of you will recognise this. But we persevere and although we would love to see each other, we continue to be very productive from our remote home offices. At the beginning of this year, with a brand-new strategic focus approved unanimously by the membership, we want to get to work. We are cross-checking the strategic priorities to our plans, to ensure that we work on all of them and that all of you can be optimally engaged. Please let us know if there is a topic that interests you or your institution in particular.

It’s exciting to see that our platforms are starting to plan their first webinars, building on their success in the past year. First one out of the starting blocks is ETHO on 3 February with an online session for technical staff and colleagues from other departments around the topic of Equal Opportunity and Inclusivity.

We know that this is an important topic for you and we hope that you will invite your technical colleagues to be part of this. This webinar is the first of several events and projects around this topic in the coming months, so stay tuned! PIE will follow on 11 February with a Virtual PIE meeting on several topics that are key to our community of internationalisation officers.

One of my first priorities this year has been to focus some energy on the ‘green shift’, also one of our strategic priorities. ELIA has worked with other networks on the SHIFT Culture projects, creating training for networks and their members on some of the UN SDG’s. ELIA leads the work on climate change and it was my pleasure this month to moderate two conversations about this topic for several colleague networks based in the US. I invite you to have a look at this high calibre panel discussion on ‘Calling for Radical Change’ which involved an impressive slate of speakers whose ideas and work on climate crisis caused a stir in the performing arts community following the event.  

Speaking of SHIFT: one of the SDG’s we are working on is inclusivity. You might notice in this recording that all speakers begin with a ‘visual introduction’ of themselves, to create a more equal footing with those who are visually impaired. I wonder what you think – I really liked it!

Last but not least, we have been actively following the developments around the New Bauhaus initiative launched by the EU. You may enjoy the website that was launched last week about this – lots of opportunity to get involved. In the meantime, stay tuned for more updates from ELIA on how we plan to be part of this conversation.