ComMUNIty Fund: eleven successful projects with bright future

The first project was the Festival of Inclusive Culture, organised by the students and staff of the Department of Special and Inclusive Education of the Faculty of Education. Both the first and the second year of the festival (link in Czech) featured events designed to include the teachers and the public as well as the students, in addition to the main programme aimed at developing student competences. “Most importantly, the programme involved the target group that we work with and that our students will work with in the future: people with disabilities and social disadvantages,” said Věra Vojtová, who heads the department, during the presentation. She added that the festival was also linked to the celebrations surrounding the department’s 30th anniversary to involve the wider alumni community.

Lucie Čejková from the Faculty of Social Studies presented the results of her project Educating Senior Citizens on Disinformation, Fake News and Cybersecurity remotely from Pennsylvania. In collaboration with Fakescape, her team organised 29 workshops before the European Parliament elections and linked them to a communication campaign. “We are very pleased that the project has exceeded its initial objectives. It turned out that older people are very interested in the topic of misinformation,” said Lucie Čejková while thanking Masaryk University for the support her project received.

Three years ago, Tadeáš Dvořák from the Faculty of Science was not able to cycle to campus. So he asked for support for a project of the same name, which aimed to improve the small-scale infrastructure around the campus. “We focused on building safe bicycle parking on campus and developed cooperation with the Brno City Council. High quality bike parking is already in place at buildings B22 and B06 and stands at the other five requested locations will be completed in the spring months,” said Tadeáš Dvořák.

In another one of the presented projects, Educating Youth in the E-sports Environment, the main objective was to inform young children about e-sports, gaming and, in particular, the related health risks. “As students of the sports faculty, we obviously wanted to add some form of exercise as well. Each year, we held three workshops for fifth graders and always involved a professional e sports player, who got the kids in the mood to start talking about the health aspects of PC gaming. The workshop always ended with a series of exercise challenges, where we wanted to demonstrate what healthy movement should look like and what the human body should be capable of doing perfectly well at a young age,” explained Ondřej Dudek from the Faculty of Sports Studies, adding that the project can continue thanks to the audiovisual presentation resources that were created.

Other projects supported included the MU Self Care Hub – a web portal featuring targeted support and assistance aimed at students of the Czech and English study programmes of the Faculty of Medicine; the Sign Language Dictionary (not only) for Ukrainian deaf refugees by Teiresias; EnvironMUsica: Education through Music for Sustainability, a project by the Faculty of Arts, which focused on learning about sustainability issues and problems through music; Universities and Fossil Business: Rules or the End of Cooperation?, a project of the Faculty of Law that analysed the rules of cooperation between universities and private entities, focusing on the so-called fossil business; a project to promote physical activity at home called Active Ageing of the Faculty of Sports Studies; a project to help people with disabilities and train future volunteers for swimming events titled Not Walking Does not Mean Standing Still – Promoting Volunteering in Para Swimming; and F.A.S.T. Run 2024, a team competition where the participants learned about stroke.