The Students' Union President, Zain Choudhry
With less than 99 days left in office, as Friday 29 June is officially our last day as the five full-time Presidents for 2017/18, it's time to start maximising our efforts...
Less than 99 days left in office, as Friday 29 June is officially our last day as the five full-time Presidents for 2017/18. It’s time to start maximising our efforts, so here are a few things that I am specifically working on:
Jamie and I have been working on this for a good few months, having important conversations with UWE staff and consulting with students who have been involved with the 'Why is My Curriculum White?' campaign since its launch in October. Now the plan is to re-launch our survey within the next week or two and then write a comprehensive report on its outcomes before our term ends to pass on to the university. This will leave next year's team in a good position to carry the work forward in attempt to reduce the Black Attainment Gap, which has been on the rise here at UWE over the past 3 years.
This has been a big piece of work for me as of late, and will be monumental once complete. Interestingly, out of all the candidates who ran in our recent Leadership Race elections, almost half of the candidates were from a BME background. This signifies the appetite to create a more robust team who can feed into various activities both at The Students’ Union and the university. The Students’ Union BME Network will accompany the BME Officer, and all roles within the network will also be up for standing through an online election process. If you are at all interested in this project, get in touch with me and I'm more than happy to have a chat with you: supresident@uwe.ac.uk
Sian has been doing great work over the past two years when it comes to crucial work around mental health. This year, we have been paying extra attention to BME Mental Health and have been collecting lots of feedback over the past few months on this. On 12 April, the university will be announcing its Mental Health Strategy which incorporates your feedback and voices. It is also signalled that problems with provisions of catering for BME Mental Health will be addressed in the launch of the strategy, which is great news.
We are in collaboration with the university who are launching a new online system called 'Report and Support', which is a tool that allows students, staff and even visitors to report any types of harassment. We currently have a lots of different methods in place to report harassment and this platform will allow it all to be centralised and easier to use. I am keen for this to be done in the most collaborative way as possible after seeing what a great system it will be at a demonstration session last week. Over the next few months, we will be engaged with student consultation over this system to ensure its effectiveness and give the student perspective. Last 99 days; but let’s not count the days, let’s make the days count.