edujesuit: Best practices in the promotion of quality, lifelong learning for all

A few years ago, in 2011 to be exact, also in Loyola where we are assessing the steps of the journey today, we defined that the network we wanted to promote was going to be committed to linking local and international advocacy to influence public policies on lifelong education for all as a human right.

At that time, we defined we wanted to make a humble contribution in relation to three great universal challenges: to guarantee the exercise of the right to quality, lifelong learning for all; to ensure  equitable and inclusive education for those who live at the margins and  to guarantee basic education as a common good.

To achieve this, we agreed to focus on some strategies that involve reflection and awareness raising initiatives and communication within the Society of Jesus, inter-sectorial strategies and dialogue with decision makers in important processes of the international educational agenda.

By 2012, we started out thinking on a joint position paper on the right to education and when we began to receive financial support we launched a small but growing awareness raising platform, edujesuit. We understood this new approach had to grow hand with hand with technologies and we thought of the importance of a communication and online participation tool. A workspace for people and organizations to find reflections, testimonies and news about what is going on around the world on the right to education, as well as examples of Jesuit educational experiences in highly vulnerable contexts. Our goal throughout 2015 has been to follow the international education agenda which we believe is key to raising awareness within the Society and having a potential impact on the acknowledgment, on the side of stakeholders and policymakers, regarding matters of great importance to us such as quality, longlife learning, trained and well paid teachers and the risk of the involvement of the private sector in the educational responsibilities of the State.

In this sense, we attended the World Education Forum in South Korea and informed on the steps being taken by the international community in the Financing for Development Summit, the United Nations Assembly where the Sustainable Development Goals were adopted and the UNESCO Summit to develop the education framework.

We have also found and engaged with challenging and enriching colleagues along the way like Jesuit Networking at first, which gave us a glance of the “network world possibilities” around us and lately with ecojesuit and Educate Magis as guides for the future path together, like the awareness raising campaign we’ll be launching among Jesuit schools all throughout the world in the following months on the Right to Education.

In these years we’ve confirmed the sense of global networking as a means to deepen the universality of our mission. We are convinced that networking contributes to the feeling as an apostolic body coming from the conscience of a shared identity and mission. GIAN sets the grounds for a successful apostolic collaboration among organizations, Jesuits, religious and lay people…. As well as other initiatives from different institutions, provinces and international networks.  It has increased the exchange that enables knowledge sharing among organizations and provinces throughout the past years.
We feel a greater awareness about the strategic potential and multiplying value for  joint apostolic action by organizations and people and sense that there is a hard but worthwhile path ahead of us in the global advocacy of the Society of Jesus for the Right to Education.