Welcome to Multicultural Employee Network of UCD (MENU)

Our aim is to provide a relaxed forum that brings together members of the multicultural UCD community to support each other, exchange experiences and ideas and promote multicultural awareness in UCD.

UCD Festival 2025

For UCD Festival 2025, MENU organized an open Capoeira workshop. Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial art that blends dance, acrobatics, music, and self-defense. It originated among enslaved Africans in Brazil, especially in the 16th century, as a form of resistance, expression, and cultural preservation. Capoeira is still very much practiced today in its traditional and evolved forms around the world. While its historical roots are deeply connected to resistance and cultural identity, modern capoeira remains true to many of its original elements, but with adaptations.

Key Features in Capoeira: Roda: Still central to capoeira — people form a circle, play instruments, sing, and two players take turns engaging. Music: Songs, clapping, and instruments like the berimbau are always present, preserving oral history and energy. Movement: The blend of kicks, dodges, and acrobatics remains — often improvised and responsive, not choreographed. Capoeira is officially recognized as intangible cultural heritage in Brazil.

Photo exhibition “Home - Sense of Belonging”

This year MENU invited its members to participate in a special activity: A photo exhibition exploring “Home and sense of belonging”: What does it mean for you? Do you think about home as a physical place, collection of memories, community or maybe passion you bring regardless of where you live. We received 23 beautiful photos and a poll was organized to cast votes. The photo that got the most votes was: My Home, by Carlota Sacchi:

I grew up in Italy and have lived in Ireland for 25 years. Home has become a very abstract concept for me, a feeling more than anything else. One of the things that makes me feel most at home is sitting down with a cup of "Italian" coffee with a family member or with a close friend. The ritual of preparing the moka, waiting for the gurgling sound saying that your coffee is ready, the beautiful smell that pervades the kitchen... that all feels so familiar and always brings me home, no matter where in the world I am!

Full photo gallery

5th Anniversary

We are 5 Years Old!!!!

Time flies when you have a good time. This well-known saying couldn’t describe better how the Multicultural Employee Network of UCD (MENU) has been since the group was set up under EDI umbrella almost 5 years ago.

Thank you to all of you who joined us on December 7th to celebrate our anniversary.

It was a truly beautiful time - music, food, talks and art. Most of all -great company.

We are grateful to Mayumi Nakabayashi for guiding us to make such a lovely art composition together that will become our logo.

We were delighted to have special guests for the day: UCD President, Prof Orla Feely; UCD Vice President for EDI, Prof Colin Scott; UCD Culture and Engagement Director, Rory Carey; EDI Senior Manager, Marcellina Fogarty and EDI professional team.

Special thanks to Ian Millichip and Elena Keaney for their lovely music, to MENU members who kindly baked for the day and to Vincent Hoban for the amazing photographs.

As we want to continue our multicultural journey in UCD we invite anyone who would like to contribute to our Culture Coffee mornings/lunch to email menu@ucd.ie.

This network will not be possible without our members and we've learnt so much over the past few years from you all. Any creative ideas are always very welcome by MENU!

Here is a selection of the photos from the day

MENU Turns 5 Celebration!

About

Find out more about the Multicultural Employee Network of UCD and how it was established

News & Events

Find about all the events organised by the Multicultural Employee Network of UCD.

MENU Cafe Collection of Recipes

MENU Café is a multicultural Recipe Collection curated by MENU and sponsored by the UCD Equality Diversity and Inclusion Unit. All the recipes were submitted by the MENU members from their personal collections. We encourage you to try them and to support these charities: the Irish Red Cross to support their Ukraine Crisis Appeal: https://www.redcross.ie and/or to the Irish Refugee Council: https://www.irishrefugeecouncil.ie/

International Women's Day

For International Women's Day 2022 MENU recorded a video highlighting its values: Justice, Dignity, Hope, Equality, Collaboration, Tenacity, Appreciation, Respect, Empathy, Forgiveness. We asked our members to record themselves in their native languages. (opens in a new window)Enjoy!

As it is tradition, on June 10th, MENU was part of UCD Festival. This year we proposed our visitors to make a collaborative collage with their own personal drawings and fill out giant UCD letters.