#66 Tuscany in Brussels (part 1) w. guest Simona Costa

Brussels has a lot of university liaison offices representing universities from all over Europe. They do a tremendous work – I have seen it with my own eyes. Some universities decide to gather into a collaboration around their Brussels activities. I have an old contact that is representing exactly such an initiative in Brussels. Simona Costa is Head of Office of the university collaboration Tour4EU. It is a collaboration of seven Tuscan universities where they have decided to join forces with a spearhead office in Brussels. Of course I needed to invite in Simona for a talk about how that works. Seven universities are a big mouthful to represent so we discuss of course how they have organized their approach. It became a long talk, so this one is a two-episode release. In this first part we talk about the background for the collaboration, we dig into the key functions of the office and how they are organized and finally we have a talk about the issue of distance between the liaison office and the region back home in Italy. A really strong episode. Time codes: 00:06:32 Fly in 00:14:55 Functions and organisation 00:22:19 The connection home