2009/10 Union Review of the Year
Friday 30 Jul 2010
It’s been a busy year at the Union, with a new management team, new facilities, new ideas and new plans. At the start of the year we appointed a new Operations Manager and moved into new offices on the second floor of the Union building. Our amazing new spaces for student activities were all open by Christmas, providing additional large rooms for students to shout and beat each other with sticks, among other club activities.
We hate paperwork as much as you do, so we’ve tried to reduce the barriers to running activities as part of Imperial College Union – we’re great with clubs but haven’t always supported smaller groups of students doing good work in the community. This is why we introduced ‘Projects’, which are like clubs but intended for small, short-term student-run projects which benefit society, whether locally, nationally or globally.
The paint was barely dry on Phase 2 of our refurbishment when Phase 3 kicked off, as we secured £2.4m to replace our tired bars and nightclub. The feedback we’ve had about the project has come from a broad range of students, and we’ve listened to it all. It’s very clear that we won’t be able to please everyone though! I won’t be around when it opens, but next year’s team will have an amazing nightclub and bar. For the first time in many years students will have direct control over events which are held in their nightclub.
As part of our drive to spend more money on club activities and student representation, we’re developing our conferencing brand to make maximum use of the building when students aren’t using it. We’ve had to take the difficult decision to cut funding this year, but hope the plans we’ve put in place for the next few years will allow that to be reversed in future. We can’t expect funding from central government and the College to increase, so we have to exploit our building and location to bring in external money, while ensuring that students can use our facilities when they need them.
Although lots of work has taken place on commercial services and student activities, we haven’t neglected our core function: representation. This has always been a less visible part of our work, as people only notice it when things are going wrong for them. For the first time we provided training and a handbook for student representatives and have documented the rep system and how it works.
Although we struggled at the start of the year, we’ve devoted time to postgraduate representation, embarking on a project to identify and communicate with postgraduate representatives who previously received little or no assistance from us (and many we didn’t even know existed!) It’s only the start of bringing postgraduate representation to the same quality as our undergraduate system.
It’s not been plain sailing all the way, and we haven’t achieved everything we set out to do, but it’s certainly been exciting. There’s been laughter and tears along the way, but it’s been worth it. We wish next year’s team the best of luck: there’s lots for them to be getting on with!
Ashley Brown
Union President 2009-2010
president@imperial.ac.uk