Nickers Report to (the last) Student Council

You may not have noticed, but it’s been Election season. For this report I’m going to be discussing not only my mandates through my job role but also the manifesto pledges I made last year. I bet you can’t wait.

Vice President Development:
1) Be responsible for the running and management of student media

Junction11 work: I’ve been sorting out the new Mixing Desk, and helping with the Mixaphon. This is basically lots of chatting to people (Dave Wiley, Sam and Martin mainly) and then running around trying to do bits and pieces.

Spark work: I was an election candidate so couldn’t check Spark for a few weeks, which is a shame as I rather enjoyed the couple of weeks I did so am looking forward to resuming this with Manuela and co. I’m also looking at getting things like Press passes and contact cards for the Editors on Manuela’s request. At this point it’s appropriate for me to thank Manuela for her patience in a fairly turbulent time and commend her and the Editorial team for the way they’ve worked this term.

2) Be directly responsible for the running and management of other student development groups

Nightline – helped with Training and been doing some handover work with the new Co-ordinator Rachel. I oversaw committee elections and I think there’s some absolute stars coming up the ranks so will be a very exciting year.

RAGs – well where do I start? It’s got to be a colossal thank you to Julia and all of the committee for the hard work and innovation that went into RAGS week. It was volunteering and student participation at its very best and they did us proud. I was generally chatting to staff about stuff beforehand, helping with flyers and writing press releases with Julia. During the week I helped with the RAGS raid in Reading and collected £50 in an hour, was locked up but made £65, attended the Traffic Light Party and of course was covered in Baked Beans live on 3Sixty stage. It was a huge amount of fun and I really enjoyed the whole caboodle.

3) Be responsible for all student development matters of a collective or individual nature, paying particular attention to split site provision.
AND
4) To promote student development opportunities within the Union

There were three major events which promote and celebrate volunteering this term.

Re-Fresher’s Fayre was very successful, we had more people attending then last year and I know some groups had lots of sign-ups. Many thanks to all that came down and were part of a great day.

I ran a ‘Pledge Day’ which was a brilliant success and one I’m going to suggest that my successor Emily looks into running next year as well. Over 200 people put in pledges and, despite being covered in graffiti from the Debating Society it still looks pretty impressive. The NUS has used it as a case study on their website.

The Societies and Volunteers Bash was really good fun, the awards went down well – especially Martin Butt’s outstanding achievement to Junction 112 (sic) which I don’t think he wants to have changed! Big thanks to all those that made the evening possible, especially the calm and organised Naomi, who I couldn’t have coped without and the constantly energetic Gudgin.

5) Be responsible for all student citizenship matters both inside the Union, and in the local area.

There’s been a lot of work on getting a combined Volunteer strategy to the University tying in community Volunteering, the MASIV scheme and aspects of the careers’ transferable skills stuff. This is very exciting and will actually put volunteering on the University’s agenda as well as our own.

6) Chair a Volunteering Committee and report the decisions and recommendations of this committee to the Activities and Support committee.

This is planned for week 9.

7) To maintain editorial independence for student media within the Union.

Yep, including an interesting discussion about whether a Trustee can be a section Editor.

8) To ensure that equal weight is given to Bulmershe.

There’s still nothing for me to do on the satellite campus I’m afraid – but according to the Bulmershe chair the students there all know who I am and what I do. I went to Breeze Bar the other week and almost pulled so it’s all good.

9) Attend all relevant meetings as set out in the meeting regulations.All the relevant ones and also some that are completely irrelevant too.
10) Ensure that the website is always up-to-date, and update their minisite at least once every fortnight with a run-down of what they’ve been doing

My Blog has been updated but not very regularly over Election period. Mea Culpa.

Other work…

I attended Regional Conference in Bognor Regis which was good fun, though getting up early the day after Hustings wasn’t much fun. When I’m at Regional Conference I have to fulfil my obligations to RUSU as one of your representatives but also to the region as part of SEANUS and SE Rep to National Council. Along with my fellow representatives I reported back my actions from the last National Council and was also mandated to put in an emergency motion to make NUS accounts more transparent and to censure Joe Rukin the national treasurer. Which brings me nicely on to…

National Council which I attended on Valentine’s Day (no cards from any councillors, I was so upset). A full report will be up on my Blog soon (probably by the time Student Council meets) but the emergency motion I wrote was successfully passed (with one part) and the censure against Joe Rukin was one of 3, but the only one which went through. Wahey!

My Election Pledges 2005

Set up a new Modular Training Scheme - Yep

Increase MASIV participation – I know at Hustings someone described the rise as ‘steady’, we’ve quadrupled the numbers since last year, which I think is pretty good.

Make democratic events better publicised – Still some work to do on this, because the governance review shuffled things around a bit the work I’ve done on democratic awareness has shifted. There’s plenty to be done with the Campaigns Convention next term.

Set up a Group of Volunteers to do web design work – This hasn’t been forgotten, and I always intended it to be a summer term job which it will be. Since I was elected for VP Welfare next year I’m also going to be setting up the “Freshers’ Angels” volunteer group as well.