University & City
How Bayan works with the city and the region, and how organisations, students and staff take part.
What we mean by community engagement
Bayan is a university in Erbil, and the city is not a backdrop to it. Community engagement is the part of the university's work done with people who are not its students: sharing what its staff know, and putting staff and student effort onto questions the region actually has.
It is not a single office or a single programme. It is a set of activities that colleges, centres and student clubs run, and it is announced and reported like everything else — upcoming items on events, reports in news.
The forms it takes
- Open sessions — public lectures, awareness sessions and open days where staff explain their subject to a general audience.
- Volunteering — student clubs organising campaigns, collections, clean-ups and visits.
- Work with schools — talks about what studying a subject at university is really like, and hosting school groups on campus.
- Student project work with an outside organisation as the subject, the client or the beneficiary.
- Hosting — making campus space available for meetings and events that serve the public.
- Professional short courses for people already in work, listed as training courses.
For organisations
If you are a school, an association, a public body, a company or an informal group and you want to work with the university, write through contact and say who you are, what you are proposing, who it would serve, what you would need from the university, and when. It is passed to the college or centre whose subject it touches — see centers — which replies on what is possible.
A concrete, small, well-defined proposal goes much further than an open invitation to collaborate.
For students
Community work is normally organised through registered student clubs, because registration is what gives a group a room, a budget line and permission to act in the university's name. Join one, or take a short proposal to Student Services and start one. Activities looking for volunteers are announced on events.
For staff
Public engagement is part of academic work rather than something beside it. If you are asked to speak, advise or take part outside the university in your capacity here, tell your college — so that it can support the commitment, and so that it is recorded with the department's other work alongside research.