4.2.3. How to establish an inclusive community network?

As said in the previous paragraphs, all members of Higher Education Institutions may play a role in establishing and fostering an inclusive community network.
Native and refugee students can play a role in this process, together with professors and staff of the HEIs.
The process to be followed while establishing and reinforcing an inclusive community network foresees different steps.
At first, it is important to make a network analysis that will provide relevant information on the processes and actions to be taken.
A network analysis can serve as a roadmap to orientate the strategy and following plans.
As a second step, it is important to identify the issue we want to address, as a starting point to engage in a relation with other potential knots of the community. Once we have a clear mind of the issue we want to investigate, we are ready for the third step that includes a brainstorming on possible stakeholders to contact.
The stakeholders may have already a relation with the HEI, they may have had previous cooperation experiences or they may have different priorities and issues to address/solve.
The fourth step is to envisage an inclusive community network, where all stakeholders listen to each other actively, observe the reality and identify common issues to be dealt together.
As Carlo Andorlini said in Peter Day says, it is important to envisage “the preparation of pathways that allow the production of meanings by all actors, to rebuild sense and responsibility together and reconfigure the field in which interactions and links are to be made. This may also mean promoting “breaking actions”, understood as the disruption of existing balances but also as the reopening of channels of communication, which can facilitate the necessary mutual recognition and develop new thoughts and relationships”.
This implies the possibility for generating win-win situations, where it is important that all parties gain equally from networking and everyone is included in the decision-making processes. Only in that way, everyone can develop a feeling of belonging and usefulness.
Moreover, the network should be constantly open for the activation of new knots and the dis-activation of some others that cannot bring supplementary contributions and energy to the established relations: this helps the construction of a network that reflect the dynamism of the communities and adopt a mind-set that prefer the generative disorder to the strategic order.
Are you curious to understand which steps have been already undertaken by your University?
- Start a conversation with professors, students, and staff members.
- Ask refugee students to join you in this search.
- Map your reality, community.
- Bring proposals and ideas, involving refugee students, to the decision makers.