June 2015: the first ReUniOn at the University of Bologna

For the first time, the alumni of the Alma Mater Studiorum will have the chance to meet on 19-20-21 June 2015. Three days to celebrate the community without borders of the world's oldest university.

The ReUniOn event is the first worldwide meeting of UNIBO alumni. This appointment, created for all graduates of the Alma Mater Studiorum, will be held in Bologna from 19 to 21 June 2015.

The three-day event, the first of its kind in Italy, will welcome all the alumni of the world's oldest university. It is an opportunity for ex-students to relive the thrills of their time at university, meet their old coursemates and flatmates, re-discover the important places of their university life and share memories with their families. For the Alma Mater, it is an opportunity to meet with its ex-students, thanking them for becoming ambassadors of the University of Bologna in Italy and around the world.

Re-Uni-On: Re (return) – Uni (university) – On (on!)
Three days of meetings, debates, exhibitions and installations, lectio magistralis, workshops and performances in various strategic points around the city: the streets, squares, museums, as well as the gardens and university classrooms will become the stage of this event, which aims to involve generations of ex-students and the local people, confirming Bologna's eternal vocation and a city for students.

The event will bring thousands of ex-students to the city, people who live and work in Italy and around the world. Every year around 15,000 students graduate at the Alma Mater, coming not only from Emilia Romagna, but the outlying regions - particularly Marche and Veneto - from Southern Italy (many from Puglia and Calabria), Sicily and Sardinia. There are also hundred of foreign graduates every year, helping to make Bologna Italy's most international university. A community without borders, which for the first time becomes the focus of an event. “This is an opportunity to understand how the Alma Mater has changed, how Bologna has changed, and how they have changed,” said the Rector of the Alma Mater Ivano Dionigi.

With the patronage of the municipality of Bologna, the ReUniOn programme will be defined in the coming months, also thanks to the involvement of the city, the trade associations and businesses invited to become partners of this initiative. The three-day event, which will also involve the Romagna Campuses, will be opened by the PhD graduation ceremony (XXVI and XXVII cycles) held in Piazza Maggiore.

ReUniOn will bring famous graduates to the city: men and women of science, culture, the world of entertainment, business, honorary graduates of the Alma Mater; at the same time, the event will offer a showcase for the many lesser known alumni, those who do extraordinary things for their own company, the city and the country they live in on a daily basis.

Shortly the  event website will publish a form to use to submit your own alumnus history in the creativity labs: a stage for anyone with a unique or important story to tell, starting from their degree at the University of Bologna. Because this is what ReUniOn aims to be: three days to continue to grow, meet and talk, finding new stimuli and 'learning' something more, telling how far you have come and imagining and building new challenges. Three days to celebrate the energy which has been fuelling the University and Bologna, the city of Towers and Gowns, for 927 years.

The University, the designer and proprietor of the event, has appointed its administrative management to the Alma Mater Foundation and the organisation to a Temporary Joint Venture of companies, Best Union, HBComm and MEC&Partners.

To keep updated on the event, there is not only a website, but also a Facebook page, Reunion Università di Bologna and a hashtag on Twitter #reunion2015. From January 2015 there will also be a free-phone number you can call to receive detailed information on the programme, accommodation in the city, transport and all other information dedicated to individual participants. Companies and associations wishing to become partners of the initiative can contact the JV organising the event, by sending an e-mail to partner.reunion@unibo.it.

The Alumni website
The network of ex students of the University of Bologna is an international network, which can meet up even virtually, and right now, on the new Alumni website: Almae Matris Alumni, now on-line.

This is the official web community of the University of Bologna, joining the different territorial and sectoral groups that have been set up on-line over the years in a single portal. Managed by the Alma Mater Foundation (FAM) and supported by the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna, anyone who graduated from the University of Bologna can join the website, from first cycle graduates to masters and PhD graduates.

The environment is integrated with the main social media and is designed for social and, particularly, professional networking. Here users can catch up with their coursemates, exchange messages, find out about successful alumni, organise sections by location or subject, support and fund programmes and projects, take part in events run by the university and propose their own events, creating a network of contacts that are functional to their own profession.

To encourage widespread subscription to the portal, a networking campaign will be launched, based on the member-get-a-member mechanism (members can invite their contacts to sign up on the website, earning badges and increasing their own status in the community) to become authentic ambassadors of the Alma Mater.