As you know, we did not manage to send you a report over the last three years. If I am honest, it is mostly because I (Sr Helen) was elected Vice Rector at the end of 2017, as well as Vice Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, so the amount of work increased a lot for me. Nevertheless, we should have found a way to keep reporting to you! Anyway, as the phrase goes: “better late than never”: in this report we will give you feedback over the last three years, with the relevant accounts.

One of the main developments that occurred over this period is that we concluded the “Studio Realtà” programme of scholarships, with the last students in the programme completing their degrees in June 2020. Over the three years of this report, 20 students were given formation with the support of Studio Realtà. One of the highlights was the dramatic presentation of the ethnographic research that the Romanian students in the programme had carried out, covering the lives of Romanians in Rome. This special event, held in March 2019, involved the reading and dramatic presentation of parts of the stories our students had collated and it drew a large audience from among the immigrant communities in Rome. It was a very powerful, involving many members of the Romanian community. The year before, in 2018, we had run a very extensive evaluation of Studio Realtà, involving an external research institute. With our help, they contacted all the former and current students of the programme so that they could complete an anonymous questionnaire. They also ran some focus groups to get richer feedback from students. Their report was then used in a process of “participative project design”, where current and former students and other potential stakeholders worked with us to put together a new programme to support the integration of migrants which was able to build on what we had learnt from Studio Realtà. As a result, we were able to launch STRONG, a kind of “daughter” programme of Studio Realtà, in December 2018. It was important to do so at that point because in the same month the international “Global Compacts” on Refugees and Migrants were signed by many countries, the crowning result of a process that the Holy Father had been strenuously supporting. By launching STRONG at the same time as the compacts were signed, we were signalling the support among the Pontifical Universities in Rome for the Holy Father and his initiative.  

STRONG is an acronym of the activities that are included in the programme: Selection, Training, Research, Orientation (to the workplace), Networking, Global monitoring and control. The “Selection” activity is time-consuming, but represents a very important part of this programme (and an advance on Studio Realtà, because we did not put so much effort into the selection process at that time). A “Call for Applications” is now sent out through an ever-expanding network of associations and organisations in order to offer opportunities for formation to as wide a group of students as possible. Every person who applies is given an interview of 30 minutes with three of our lecturers, allowing us to listen to each of them and to give them advice and support. This helps to build their confidence and their sense of dignity, even if at the end we cannot give them a scholarship (to give you an idea: in the most recent selection process, we had 40 applicants and 16 scholarships available). Other improvements compared to the Studio Realtà programme include the chance for students to participate in a research project, helping to learn how to do social research, and the inclusion of career orientation and advice, both in groups and on a one-to-one level. We will tell you more about these and other aspects of STRONG in subsequent reports.

In the last report we sent you (around Easter 2018, with financial accounts from 2017), we told you that we had done some research into the teaching of Catholic Social Thought in Central and Eastern Europe, and that we would be using the results in further work. Later that year we were able to launch a new programme called simply “Catholic Social Thought in Central and Eastern Europe (CST-CEE)”, which involved a small number of scholarships for students from Central and Eastern Europe to study with us, as well as a Summer School for students from the region and an “Expert Council” involving professors of Catholic Social Thought from several of the higher education institutions across the region. Two of the students, who have completed Licence programmes with us as part of CST-CEE tell us something about themselves below.