On 16–17 April 2026, over 150 representatives from European University Alliances gathered in Granada for a three-day workshop organised by the FOREU4ALL network and hosted by the Arqus Alliance. EUNICoast was represented by Begoña Arenas Romero, Quality Officer, and Petra Frent Kaab, Alliance Manager, who attended in person.
A shared challenge runs across all European University Alliances: the gap between what alliances deliver and the change they actually produce. Around 60 alliances at Granada identified the same five tensions: impact planning, data coordination, turning evidence into governance decisions, outward-facing communication, and the mismatch between short project cycles and long-term institutional transformation.
Granada offered a clarifying shift: impact is the durable change an alliance produces in people, institutions, and ecosystems, and it can be designed, evidenced, and communicated deliberately.
EUNICoast already has a framework for this. The impACT Pipeline structures evidence of change across three stages: Alliance Creation, Campus Adoption, and Transfer beyond the alliance. Presented as a poster at Granada, it generated substantive exchanges with peers from ENLIGHT, EU GREEN, Arqus, and UNIgreen, and was recognised as a coherent response to the very challenges the workshop had named.
The next steps are concrete. ENLIGHT's model of biennial impact reports combining quantitative indicators with curated stories, supported by a network of Impact Ambassadors at each campus, offers a blueprint for bottom-up evidence collection. From HEROES, the principle is simple: co-design definitions with partners, run a manual pilot, then automate.
The poster session confirmed that EUNICoast's strategic direction is sound. Peers from multiple alliances engaged with the impACT Pipeline as a practical model, identifying shared language and transferable approaches. The exchanges pointed to one clear opportunity: stronger documentation of the transitions from alliance-level creation to institutional adoption and ecosystem transfer.
EUNICoast returns from Granada with validated direction, concrete borrowings from peers, and a clearer sense of what comes next: impact evidence that feeds into governance decisions across 12 partner universities, grounded in the stories of real change in coastal and island higher education.
