Fruitful cooperation continues

The long-standing and fruitful collaboration between Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences and the Görlitz district will continue. District Administrator Bernd Lange and the university’s Rector, Professor Friedrich Albrecht, signed the amended cooperation agreement on April 4 at the Görlitz District Office. “The university remains an extremely important partner for us, not only in terms of securing a skilled workforce, but also in order to navigate the profound structural changes ahead of us and to support businesses in our district,” said District Administrator Bernd Lange.

Rector Professor Albrecht emphasized that such cooperation is an explicit requirement from policymakers. “We see ourselves as good in this regard. We are in contact with the Chamber of Industry and Commerce, the Chamber of Crafts, the municipalities, and even Brandenburg, and we are happy to contribute,” said Albrecht.

In the future, the collaboration is to be even more targeted. To this end, all specialized departments within the district administration were involved in the preliminary phase under the direction of the District Development Office. The university handled the process in the same way.

Another new development is that there will be a task and financial plan attached to the agreement, in which specific cooperation projects between the specialized departments and the faculties will be laid out for a two-year period, and the budget will be allocated accordingly. “This provides planning certainty and creates transparency,” said Holger Freymann, head of the District Development Office. This task and financial plan is currently being developed.

The new agreement will initially run through 2021. The results will be presented to the district council every two years.

Close cooperation between the Görlitz District and the Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences has existed since 2010. However, even before that, intensive collaboration was maintained in the former districts of Löbau-Zittau and the Lower Silesian Upper Lusatia District.

The scope of this cooperation has ranged—and continues to range—from specific joint projects, supervision of practical and specialized assignments, supervision of Diplom and Bachelor theses, and internships, to the exchange of guest lecturers and translations. Key areas of focus include demography, social affairs, transportation, the environment, education, border regions, strategy development, and citizen participation.