Our student union has a lot of potential. It has proven success at lobbying the university on the important issues for students. It also provides professional and personalised support to students who need it the most. The campaigns it runs are also highly successful. All of these brilliant achievements have only been made possible through the involvement and hard work of normal students at OUSU council and in roles within the organisation. But these ‘normal students’ who are involved are certainly a minority (which I guess makes them not that normal). This is where the potential needs to maximised.
The reason I ran to be president is that I believe that we need to take this potential into the wider student body. OUSU needs to re-brand and expand. Next year, we are going to look into the way OUSU council works, to ensure that it is more relevant to every student and allows for everybody’s voice to be heard. However, I know that council meetings are not the way in which every student makes their impact. It is for this reason that I want to use the passion of the student body to provide more for students.
I want OUSU to help students run businesses which serve Oxford students. I want OUSU to work with the Oxford Hub to support student charities and fundraising initiatives. I want OUSU to provide the amazing training and support it offers common rooms to student clubs and societies. I want OUSU to be supporting the extra-curricular life of every Oxford student. I want OUSU to help you more, not just in bad times, but also in good times. Thanks to the work on funding done by Tom and the other sabbatical officers, this should hopefully be possible.
We have more student societies than any other British University. I like to think this is because we are (statistically) more passionate about more things than anywhere else (shoe the tabs). Let’s use our passion. My hope is that through expanding OUSU’s role and improving our communication to students, we can expand the number of people we engage and increase the relevance of OUSU. By the end of my term, I don’t want you to see me as trying to ‘sell’ OUSU to you, rather, I want you to see me as a fellow member, working with you to build a union that we are all a part of in a variety of ways.
