Last week, our President and CEO, Giancarlo Di Vece was one of the recipients of the Belfast Homecoming Ambassador Medal awarded to outstanding individuals who are helping to build Belfast, Northern Ireland. Since we opened our Belfast offices in 2017, Giancarlo, and our leadership team as a whole, have spent a great deal of time there and have developed strong ties to the city and its people.
Giancarlo received the honor at the Belfast International Homecoming 2019 where members of the global diaspora who are playing a key role in the transformation of the city to create a better future for its citizens were recognized. Though Giancarlo isn’t technically a member of the diaspora, he has become an honorary Belfastian and cares deeply about the city and the people who have embraced him and Unosquare over the past two years. One of his core beliefs and a driving principle behind Unosquare is that software engineering and success in business can be used to actively and positively impact a community and that is making an impact on our Belfast employees and the city as a whole.
At the conference, Giancarlo introduced an initiative called Invested Belfast, a partnership of companies and leaders who want to ensure equal opportunity to the residents of Belfast by defending the sectors of society that have been left behind. Through Invested Belfast, Giancarlo is working to share and expand Unosquare’s mission to generate well-being in every geography where the company operates by guiding and facilitating growth. By partnering with the private sector to create more inclusive companies with a commitment to long-term investment in the community around them, the positive impact is magnified and solidified.
Through a focus on education in the tech space in marginalized communities, Invested Belfast will aggregate the efforts of all the partners to create a transparent platform that shares the impact the program will create in the community. Education partners including Open University, Queen’s University, Hazelwood Integrated College (an all-ability integrated secondary school) and Coláiste Feirste (an all-ability Irish medium secondary school) are on board and awaiting an action plan from Invested Belfast members in the spring of 2020.
We congratulate Giancarlo on receiving this honor and look forward to being a part of Invested Belfast and having a greater impact on the way people live and interact with one another every day!