Some great news overnight, with a CQUniversity team once
again winning the national Big Idea,
social innovation competition, in the hotly contented postgraduate division.
This achievement means that a CQUniversity team has now been
triumphant two years in a row (last year three undergraduate engineering
students won for ‘The
Shelter Project’).
The winning team this year was made up of Adelaide-based
postgraduate students Elisha Vlaholias and Tessa Beneviste, their project was
named The
Garden of Earthly Delights.
The project, if taken to fruition, would see part of
Adelaide’s Southern parklands transformed into a community garden that provides
flexible and transitional employment, education and training for people
experiencing homelessness. The project would be grounded in the ethics of
permaculture, earth care, people care and fair share and would be associated
with CQUni’s new permaculture program.
The Big Idea competition is co-ordinated by The Big Issue - an
independent, not-for-profit organisation that delivers solutions to help
homeless, marginalised and disadvantaged people to positively change their
lives. The Big Idea is a social enterprise planning competition for university
students that seeks to find new social enterprise ideas that can deliver
benefits to society both in Australia and abroad.
With social innovation being one of CQUniversity’s five
pillars of greatness, this is extremely exciting news for the whole university,
showing that we are not just a university that gives back but also a university
that inspires our students to become change makers.
Congratulations to Elisha and Tessa on this fantastic achievement!
Credit must also go to the many staff who coached them during the development
and presentation of this project, in particular Melbourne Associate Vice-Chancellor Lara Carton who
has been instrumental in getting CQUniversity involved with the Big Idea and
working with our students to ensure their success.
Our winners Elisha and Tessa. Well done!
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