On 28 and 29 November, the Politecnico di Milano hosted the European Conference “Welcome HOME – Promoting Quality Student Accommodation for Erasmus + Mobilities” in the scope of the Erasmus + HOME Project. Three contributions from the ENHANCE Alliance were selected, giving our partners the opportunity to share their experiences, projects, and best practices.  

Melih Oezkardes, the ombudsman for Diversity in ENHANCE, Mirosław Szyłak-Szydłowski from Warsaw University of Technology, and Fabrizio Bitetto, the CEO of our associated partners GaragErasmus all participated in this conference, highlighting an important point in regards of student mobility. As Fabrizio Bitetto remarks, “thanks to the European Universities, the number of students will increase and it is crucial to find a solution” to the question of accommodation, which remains sometimes a true obstacle to students who want to go abroad, detrimental to our objective of a seamless international mobility. 

The conference was a great opportunity for Mirosław Szyłak-Szydłowski to talk about a specific question related to accommodation impacting WUT: the assistance to war refugees. He put the light on this topic in a presentation entitled “The accommodation and humanitarian assistance to war-affected refugees at Warsaw University of Technology”.  

Our ombudsman for Diversity, Melih Oezkardes, presented our information tool “Mobility for All”, which also includes accommodation information for people with disabilities. “We know that especially students with fewer opportunities lack good information,” he explains, “and it is a barrier for them not to be able to find mobility related information when they are informing themselves about a possible semester abroad”. Therefore, this tool is very important: it can reduce this barrier and make information more accessible to the students who are strongly affected by the lack of thereof.  

We thank the Politecnico di Milano for giving the opportunity to three speakers from the ENHANCE Alliance to share their experience but also their solutions to the problem of student accommodation during mobilities. This conference also gives us the opportunity to “put this accommodation topic on the agenda with a higher priority”, as Melih Oezkarded says, and communicate about this central question, incorporated in our project.