Meaningful alumni engagement and relations at UWCRCN have been a focal point. Alumni are an integral part of UWC’s mission as they are our peacebuilders and creators of a sustainable future globally. Our college and its alumni are mutually committed to engaging and adding value to achieve desired outcomes. Alumni engagement is carried out predominantly with the support of year representatives of each graduating class. The class of 2022 is about to graduate and transition into alumni of UWCRCN. The class will be led by their year representatives, Victoria Jensen (Denmark) and Pedro Pontes García (Spain).

“I believe that RCN is more than just the two years we lived in the Flekke bubble. It’s an international community for life. Maybe we wouldn’t see each other every day, but the strong community, experiences, and the fjord keeps us together. As a year group representative, I’ll work on the community we as RCN alumni shape together away from the Flekke bubble.”

– Victoria

“UWC is not just an education system. UWC is a mission, it’s a project that brings together people from all over the world, from all backgrounds, and makes them a force for change. But change does not happen at UWC colleges; it happens once we are launched into the outside world. As we, RCN 22’, become alumni, we have just begun to understand the complexity of making change, which is why our alumni connections will become vital in supporting each other’s projects, and in remembering what our fjord gave us: an opportunity to grow. Let this not be the end, but a new beginning.”

– Pedro

GC stands for Global Concerns, it is a special day every term when a student-organized event takes place about a global issue. On the 18th March, it was about the environment. Students organized various workshops and lectures around the topics of Land, Oceans, and Air from cooking with locally picked seaweed, planting herbs, and making art, to watching documentaries and running discussions about them. Please read the opening speech of our first year student, Vilde Helm:

“Mother Earth. Our home. A blue marble, a blue sphere out in the total darkness. A totally unique planet with the exact perfect location from the sun, creating the perfect conditions for an incredible diversity of life to thrive… I would like to ask you to just stop for a moment, and take a look at this picture. All the life we know exists within this sphere. Our home is not limitless. There is an edge to our existence…
But yet we too often take it and everything it gives and provides us with for granted There is not something new about the fact that the relationship we have today with nature is not sustainable
This is not about pointing out or blaming individual nations, or holding someone accountable. This is not about blaming generations that have been or putting all the responsibility on the shoulders of the generations to come. Because this challenge is something that extends far beyond any country’s borders or current generations.

It doesn’t matter from which part of the world you come from, your ethnicity, your gender, and sexuality, what socio-economic conditions you have been born into, what religion you might belong to, where you are young or old.
It’s about founding a common shared ground and realization around the fact that we are all, every single organism, life dependent on this blue small marble, this blue sphere floating in the darkness of the universe.

I’m not saying this to you as Vilde, an 18 years old girl from Sweden. I’m saying this to you as a global citizen of this planet, an individual and a human and an organism sharing this earth among millions of other species.

We are ultimately bound by and reliant upon the finite natural world about us. The relationship we have today with Mother Earth must changeAs far as we know this is the only place, the only planet with the perfect location, with the perfect atmosphere, the perfect temperature, the perfect conditions for life to exist…
Let’s all take care of our shared irreplaceable and unique home.
Let’s take care of Mother Earth…”