Author: Lizbeth M. Sánchez Meneses, Director of the Internationalization Secretariat
The Ignatian maximum that identifies the trajectory of the UCAB throughout its almost 66 years of life is " in all things to love and to serve", which is concretized in its social commitment seen as a substantive function and as a seal of its academic and human education that allows future alumni to be sensitized to the surrounding environment.
At UCAB, social extension is understood as the permanent relationship that the institution establishes with the surrounding communities, through the articulation of efforts and resources, with the purpose of influencing the processes of social transformation, thus constituting an alliance to achieve objectives of development that benefit communities and their members.
To achieve these goals, 20 years ago - at a time when the universities with a technical profile were developing technology parks as spaces to put into practice and experiment with technology - UCAB decides to dream of a territory dedicated to channeling the vocation and initiatives of the University in the social field and creates the "Fr Manuel Aguirre Social Park, SJ" as a bridge of communication between the university and its environment and projection platform of the UCAB towards communities.
Fr Manuel Aguirre S.J. Social Park offers to socially disadvantaged communities multiple services such as community organization, training programs for human resources development, education programs for children and young people out of school, legal, economic, accounting and environmental sustainability advice, psychological guidance and health promotion. This work, that students, professors and professionals do voluntarily in the Social Park is oriented to seek the reduction of inequalities and to collaborate with the development of sustainable communities
Santa Inés Health Center (CSSI UCAB) forms part of Social Park; under an ambulatory model it offers for free or at very low costs, diagnostic services, laboratory, imaging, rehabilitation and preventive and curative medical care in fourteen different medical specialties to those users who due to their condition of vulnerability or social exclusion cannot pay the high costs of private health services that due to the malfunction of public health in the country are currently the only option
But in addition, eight times a day, five days a week, four weeks a month throughout every year, a contingent of specialists, teachers, students and volunteers mobilize to provide their services from Social Park to the most vulnerable areas of the humbles communities of Caracas
This is how, from the Fr. Manuel Aguirre SJ Social Park and with the collaboration of one hundred and sixty allied institutions, more than two thousand six hundred students and one hundred fifty-nine professors, UCAB carries out fifty programs and projects aimed at communities in social disadvantage of 17 parishes from Caracas directly benefiting almost sixty thousand people every year.