ICU completes a democracy review
Category
Union updates
Date
30 jul 2025
Author
Camille Boutrolle - Union President 2024/25
Read Time
3 min
Last week, Imperial College Union's (ICU) Board of Trustees approved the recommendations presented following a comprehensive review of our students' union democratic structures.
This was the final approval needed following the go ahead given at Union Council earlier this month. Democracy is and should be front and centre to ICU's operations and mission. As such, extensive consultation with key stakeholders from both student and staff communities was undertaken to ensure a revised, refreshed and representative approach to how we gather and act on student voice.
Below are some key changes that we will be implemented on the back of this review:
- Changing our Deputy President (Clubs and Societies) to Deputy President (Activities) to better reflect the scope of the role, encompassing volunteering and other student activities that don't just fit into our clubs and societies.
- Removing our Deputy President (Finance and Services) Officer Trustee position because we agree this no longer serves the needs of the student body. We will be using that saving to resource a staff position dedicated to our postgraduate community. We recognise this is a significant portion of the student population that we underserve and we want to address this.
- To mitigate the loss of the Deputy President (Finance and Services) positions link to the commercial team at ICU, the commercial team will hold a termly student forum for student-led events within ICU venues and for general feedback.
- Our Union Council structure will be reformed, and we'll strengthen the use of forums chaired by each Officer Trustee to feed into Union Council. This is for better accountability and engagement with the wider student body.
- Our Liberation Community Officers (LCOs) will be appointed through AGMs from their respective Liberation & Community Networks which will be elected in Leadership Elections.
- We are introducing a funding pot for volunteers to use to deliver community-organised initiatives and events. This is focussed on bringing together underrepresented groups of students.
- We want to better support our Constituent Unions (CUs) and co-develop partnership agreements as to how ICU and CUs can support each other. We want to encourage postgraduate engagement and representation through CUs also.
The student body is ever evolving and it is hence unreasonable to expect this one review to remove all our current and future barriers to being a superb democratic students' union. To mitigate this, there will be an evaluation of the changes one year on from their implementation (towards the end of 25-26 academic year). This effectiveness review will also allow us to consider what a fifth officer role might look like.
If you notice anything that's changed that isn't working, or things that haven't changed and that we missed, we want to hear from you! We are a union run for and by students; help us shape the union you want to see.
You can always get in touch with us by emailing any of your Officer Trustees below.
📨 Deputy President (Activities)