In which Nickers describes the second SEANUS Executive of the year and his travel back from Canterbury.

SEANUS Meeting two was a shorter affair than the first – though I did have to travel to Canterbury for it. Once there I intentionally walked to University of Kent to meet up with Katie and Liz rather than go straight to Canterbury Christchurch College to where the meeting was.

The meeting was attended by most of the Executive as well as Stephen Brown and Ellie Russell from the NEC. It was nice to have them there, as they’re always very willing to help us out.

We had a quick update on the current Campaigns and Projects. The SE Weighting campaign postcards have been distributed and will be sent from individual Unions. NATFHE have agreed in principal to support the campaign and there’s support from a Lib Dem member of the Home Office in our research. With 2006 heralding variable fees it is really important we all keep pushing the campaign.

We reported back from National Council, Becky Hulme (NEC Observer) discussed NEC meetings and I reported back from LGBT conference.

For the unified RAGs day we’re going back to Unions and getting our RAGs groups to identify when they’re free and look at events that we can all run on our campuses or combine in one location.

Steve from UCCA chatted about the University imposing a no-smoking ban on their bar and the financial affect this had on them. Issues of autonomy from Institutions led to Steve writing up a charter between Unions and their parent organisations.

I suggested that we should try and be sharing some of our Governance review stuff among each other as many Unions are undergoing changes and it would be useful to see where everyone was. Bubble is collecting all this stuff together.

We had a chat about neighbourhood forums and how they work at various places. This ranged from being a moan-fest at Students from locals to some very sensible work together.

I’m going to be doing some work on Volunteer Accreditation schemes and possible looking at a regional award for volunteers. I was quite pleased to get this and Governance in to the same meeting which shows how truly sad I am.

We decided to support the WMANUS PGCE campaign and encourage Unions to ask their MPs to support EDM 1229 – so do it! There’s been stuff from Wes Streeting sent out and also details on the WMANUS website (www.wmanus.org).
And with that we headed off home – though the journey was filled with the relocation of NUS and the trials of Staff Parties. To finish, here are my two favourite comments of the day.

“and now… she is dead”
“Where do you live?” “Wye” “Because I want to know!” “Wye”