Respond College is delighted to have been successful in their applications for grants to support the delivery of a number of  programmes. We were awarded €10 000 under the December round of ESB Corporate Responsibility grant funding and a further €1000 from the Saint Patrick’s Cathedral Dublin Charitable and Community Grants Scheme 2015 which has a focus on for projects in the areas of social justice, inclusion and community education.

The bursary scheme hopes to enable up to 60 individuals throughout the country to access further and higher educational opportunities. Respond’s educational outreach programme operates in some of the states most disadvantaged communities, bringing education directly into neighbourhoods – that we know from our own research – are suffering from multiple levels of disadvantage; poor levels of educational attainment, high levels of unemployment and very high poverty rates. Respond College is working in partnership with a number of local community groups to identify potential students who would benefit most from our programmes.

We have three flagship programmes that have been developed to offer maximum benefit to this cohort

1. The Certificate in Community Studies (Level 6).
2. The Certificate in Healthcare Support (Level 5).
3. The Certificate in Health Service Skills (Level 5).

Education is the engine of social mobility, it is also one of the principal ways inequalities within society, and between communities, remains unchanged. Therefore Respond has always placed a strong emphasis on education as a means for social change and transformation. We seek to unfold education’s full emancipatory potential to break thcycle of poverty, disadvantage and social exclusion: to enable social integration. In our view education is the vehicle toward human flourishing, that it has the capacity to encourage both personal development and societal transformation.  Respond teaching philosophy aligns with the wider community development ethos of Respond, and our curriculum, and teaching approach, twinned with smaller class sizes, has been developed to bring these aims to fruition.

Respond College has a national reach. We run educational programmes throughout the country from our offices and community development buildings. At Respond we seek to complement and support what is already there in these and other areas, by focusing on the provision of high calibre courses aimed at communities, community leaders and trainers. Our programmes are designed to equip community workers and others with the skills necessary for personal development and/or to make meaningful interventions, so we can work collectively to overcome the social injustice of educational disadvantage.

We would like to sincerely thank the ESB and St Patrick’s Cathedral Dublin for granting us this opportunity for an eductional bursary.