UCC Student winner of Talloires Network COV-AID student Engagement Award

10 Sep 2020

Vera Stoyanovic, UCC Quercus Scholar and founder of BetterToegether, is one of ten students worldwide to be awarded the 2020 COV-AID Student Engagement Award by the prestigious Talloires Network.

Part of the Talloires Network – Open Society University Network Education Partnership, the COV-AID Student Engagement Award is a pilot grant program to publicly recognize and support undergraduate students who are currently engaged in their local communities in ways that contribute to more equal and more inclusive societies. The winners receive an award of 2500 USD and will appear on an upcoming COV-AID webinar.

Vera talks about her work:

In April of this year, blanket testing of Covid-19 was rolled out in all Direct Provision centres in Cork. In response I created a short explanatory video to reassure children living in Direct Provision. The video explained what to expect during testing, tips in case they were nervous and words of reassurance. The video was picked up by the Department of Justice and shared as a resource in Direct Provision centres nationwide.

As a separate project I co-founded the Sanctuary Mask Initiative in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This initiative recruited twenty women living across five Direct Provision centres in Cork to sew nine thousand reusable hygiene masks to distribute free of charge to all residences of direct Provision in Cork and other vulnerable communities and volunteers in Cork.