TRIGGER partners discuss advancements and sustainability of their activities in Madrid
12 October 2016
The TRIGGER partners met in Madrid on October the 7th to discuss not only the advancement of their activities, but also to further understand the best strategies to ensure sustainability after the end of the project (December 2017). In fact, it is especially important that some of the activities designed and conducted during the four years of project will continue afterwards, to ensure that gender equality stays on the agenda.
The presentations by other European project that have already achieved this objective, i.e. EGERA (presented by Maxime Forest, Science Po Paris) and GENOVATE (presented by Uduak Archibong, University of Bradford), have been especially inspiring. Both have highlighted the importance of working with allies inside the university and stakeholders that can help maximise the project’s impact; this has been especially important in the case of GENOVATE, where the “Change Academy Model” (Jackson 2004) has been used as a framework to guide the project activities. Also, advertising the project to a wider public and involving students, as in the case of EGERA, can be strategic to achieve change on a wider level.
Finally, and most importantly, the participants in this meeting have also taken action and drafted a petition to ask the European Commission to keep separate funding for the gender equality and structural change projects in Horizon 2020: in the new Science with and for Society Scoping Paper 2018-2020 (in which the priorities for the next bunch of research funding are listed), gender equality is not a topic on its own, but it has been subsumed to the more general topic of Responsible Research and Innovation. The TRIGGER partners, together with other project partners and researchers, believe that, to advance gender equality, it is paramount to ensure specific funding instruments. The petition has more than 2000 supporters and hopefully will contribute to shape the future research policies.
