A team of students from UCD have finished fourth in the world at the prestigious Enactus World Cup in Beijing.
The ‘Generation Accommodation’ team were up against teams from across the world, finishing fourth behind Morocco, Puerto Rico and eventual winner China. The home nation took the title in front of a crowd of 5000.
The annual competition sees the best ideas in outreach projects from 36 nations pitted against each other in front of a voting panel of 130 global CEOs. Through a written annual report and live audio visual presentation, teams are evaluated based on how successful they were at using business concepts to improve the quality of life and standard of living for people in need. The teams have to show how their work is transforming lives and enabling progress through entrepreneurial action.
The Generation Accommodation team pair homeowners with students seeking accommodation, through a stringent application process. They arrange face to face meetings and, if the match seems to work well, will then arrange for the student to move in with the homeowner.
The student will generally rent the room for 40 per cent below average rates, while he homeowner can claim up to €10,000 per year without it affecting social welfare.
The project was inspired by the combined issues of loneliness having a serious, debilitating effect on elderly people living alone, and the student housing crisis.
The Generation Accommodation project has already paired 22 students and homeowners and plans to double that number next year, before going nationwide in September 2015.
The team – consisting of UCD students Aoife Buckley, Roisin Lee, Stephanie O’Malley, Patricia Kastner, Cian O'Sullivan and Andrea Harvey – won the national Enactus competition earlier this year thereby qualifying them for the World Cup in China.
Eanctus is an international organisation that aims to provide students with a platform to create community development projects. It is the world’s largest university-based partnership between business and higher education for social change.
A statement from Enactus Ireland commended the achievement, saying:
“This was a tremendous achievement for the Irish team as Enactus Ireland was only founded in 2011 and is the youngest member of the Enactus network.”
Team Leader of the UCD team Aoife Buckley, an MSc student in Management Consultancy at UCD, said: “Participating in the Enactus World Cup has been a fantastic experience and we are absolutely thrilled to reach the final four. Getting the opportunity to present our project, Generation Accommodation, on a global stage before a distinguished panel of judges has been a dream come true.”
