DON@. 'Donation Opportunities for Newcomers'

The Universitat Politècnica de València is pleased to present "DON@" (Donation Opportunities for Newcomers), an Erasmus+ project started last September 2022 in which UPV participates as a partner.

This project is intended to provide an inclusive and environmentally respectful response to support students with needs or fewer resources by creating a digital platform for managing donations and establishing a series of workshops on donation in European universities.

DON@ will facilitate free access to accommodation material, such as mattresses, sofas, kitchen utensils, school supplies or any household product necessary on a day-to-day basis, as well as creating a network of socially committed students, promoting values ¿¿of inclusion, participation and civic commitment and solidarity between students and the rest of the university community. In addition, the project will enable the circular economy by promoting the product's second life and reducing consumption, thus contributing to the environment. Therefore, DON@ is a project that promotes values ¿¿of solidarity, but also environmental values ¿¿and responsible consumption.

Three European Higher Education Institutes (HEI) and three non-profit organisations are participating in the project. Still, this new tool is expected to be transferable to other HEI, as well as associations, sports structures, youth structures, etc. DON@ is led by the Rouen National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA), a French institution. But, in addition to the Technical University of Valencia, the Vytautas Magnus University (VMU, Lithuania), the NGO IASIS (Greece), the Erasmus Student Network (ESN) France, and the ESN CosmoLyon (France) also participate.

The main UPV role consists in leading the creation of the digital platform, coordinated by the Centre for Development Cooperation, the area in charge of providing technical support to the project, and by Dr Pascual Pérez Blasco, from the Department of Information Systems and Computers, and Sofía Sanchez de Nieva Fernandez, communication manager at ESN-UPV València.

DON@ has started and is picking up speed. Currently, two workshops have been developed, one in November 2022 at INSA Rouen and the other in February 2023 at the VUM in Lithuania. By now, the DON@ team have already created the visual identity of the platform and defined the basis of the platform needs and structure. On the other hand, the teams are already planning and defining how the different universities will develop the different Donation Days.

The project, financed by the Erasmus + KA220-HED - Cooperation Associations in Higher Education Institutes program, began in September 2022 and ends in August 2024. By that date, the UPV will have already fully operationalised the tool and developed a Donation Day in the university community.