A university ​​with a purpose‍‍

This impact report shares the journey of how we as Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) community have fared in the past years in our transition to become an impact-driven university. This report is meant to be a source of inspiration for everyone within our community as well as our societal stakeholders and partners. Readers will enjoy perspectives about how staff, students, alumni and partners have enabled and achieved positive societal impact. Through evidence-informed, narrative-based stories, we share our lessons learned and our path ahead. We hope, through this report, we can be proud of what was achieved and be humble about the challenges we still face.

This report was compiled in 2024, on request by the Executive Board, and under the lead of the Strategic Dean Impact and Engagement Professor Arwin van Buuren, by the Evaluating Societal Impact (ESI) strategic project team with broad support from the EUR community, including a representative sounding board of its units and strategic projects, whom we deeply thank. 

The report provides a varied but curated selection of the many great stories we received via different routes: by Schools after sending them a request to submit examples via a structured form and by people who nominated themselves or their colleagues/peers with Marketing & Communications after their call for impact stories. 

We hope everyone feels represented, and we appreciate your understanding of the limitations of this (first) EUR impact report. We hope to receive your feedback for the following years, which will continue to bring even more stories of how we benefit society together. Please contact Professor van Buuren with your suggestions at strategicdean@eur.nl.

Because of the many initiatives and inspirational stories collected, the impact report has become a very comprehensive report. To help you read the report, it is structured as follows:

Part I provides our leadership’s perspective on our evolving role as a university and our mission of creating positive societal impact, followed by a summary of our Impact Framework. Part II, ‘Becoming an impact-driven university’, shares the initiatives connected to each of the EUR core portfolios of education, research, engagement, and operations. Part III, ‘Advancing transformative change’, highlights the initiatives that are at the intersection of our core activities. Parts II and III include many inspirational examples of how our community is enabling and achieving impact. We end the report with an Afterword, describing what our priorities are for the next four years (Part IV).

The title page of each chapter gives a brief introduction to its chapters. In the chapters, alongside the main text, you will find two types of inspiring stories. The stories with a light green background highlight how different individuals or groups of people in our community are achieving diverse types of societal impact. The stories with a light grey background showcase how different units and Schools across our university are enabling and achieving impact. You will also see info boxes with additional background information, suggested additional reading materials, and contact information. Every chapter concludes with a 'lessons learned' section.

We recommend all readers interested in the high-level ambition and context of EUR, to focus on Parts I and IV. For those interested in a deeper understanding of how our university is enabling and achieving impact, Parts II and III should be the focus.