Community Engagement

Monash South Africa is committed to community engagement through which it can become an active and responsive player in the local, national and regional environment.

Learning has been identified as the key form of leverage in developing contexts and service learning is one of the options chosen to promote community engagement, responsibility and awareness.

Community engagement at Monash South Africa means an active, committed, co-operative, creative, innovative and mutually beneficial interaction that advances public good, with individuals, groups and entities outside of the university, in any sector of society.

In these interactions Monash South Africa is mindful of the mutual dependency which exists between itself and the broader society.  The imperatives for community engagement lie in the responsibility of universities to develop critical citizens and to be socially accountable.  Thus, Monash South Africa seeks to be critically responsive to society’s expectations that higher education institutions should become an engine of development for people, communities, institutions and democracy.
 
Monash South Africa has an active student volunteer programme.  Many of our students and staff are engaged in contributing to community development. Service learning, work-based learning, experiential learning and internships have been introduced to ensure that our community engagement is not incidental to our teaching and learning, but serves both to contribute to community development and to enhance teaching and learning and research.

Monash South Africa participates in community engagement in full knowledge that we are part of a national system of higher education in South Africa.  Thus, we will continue to strive for better working relationships, partnerships and collaboration with government, private sector and other higher education institutions with regard to community engagement specifically.