Building community: university wellfare as an educational policy

Abstract

The Secretariat of University Welfare (SUW), as a management area of the NationalUniversity of Avellaneda, has been configured as an area for the creation andimplementation of lines of work linked, on the one hand, to the policies of care fromthe promotion and defense of rights and, on the other, to the participation of theuniversity community as a daily invitation, going through each of the actions, projectsand programs developed. In this way, we propose to conceive welfare as an ambit thatmakes it possible to accompany and sustain the educational and work trajectories ofthose of us who study and work at the university, a path that is strengthened in thecollective encounter with the unions and the representative groups of the university,along with a necessary articulation with other management areas, departments andcareers, as well as with public institutions and organizations that inhabit our territory.In this process, which is guided day by day and acquires meaning in the defense ofthe right to higher education, those of us who are part of it as teachers, non teachingstaff, graduates and students of the educational community are involved. In this way,in this article we propose to characterize the lines of work of the SUW, taking intoaccount the complex development and the framework built in these years to be able,in an articulated and interdisciplinary way, to work to house, care for, accompany,and break down barriers, promote solidarity and camaraderie as values against thegrain of scenarios of social fragmentation. We will also try to give an account ofsome reflections about university policy as praxis, problematizing university welfareas multidimensional and with the power to generate more egalitarian itineraries ineducational and professional trajectories, building community.