It's time for a Union General Meeting

It took me approximately 4 months to really understand how the University and Union work. Both of these organisations are layered with bureaucracy, which doesn’t help. Additionally, you need to get to term time before various committees meet and the workloads hit a stage where acronyms like SRASOC* start rolling off the tongue. (*Student Recruitment and Admissions Strategy and Operations Committee)

As you would expect, being President I have to spend a good portion of my time thinking strategically, analysing the threats and risks to the Union and working out how to mitigate them. This is also true for my Executive Committee, who recently, and very unjustly, were criticised in a comment piece for their decision this term to ‘redistribute’ 10% of club funding. And redistribute is the right word. Clubs currently receive a cash grant to assist with their operations. This money is distributed at a rather hellish meeting known as CSB budgeting, which I attended on Monday for the third time in as many years.

At that meeting last year we made available a staggering £337,000 of the funding the College gives the Union to operate. For 2012/13 we are providing £303k. Our plan is to use the difference (£33k) to help clubs and societies in ways that are more effective than the £2 per each club membership that has been reallocated.

We intend on providing a new website with more functionality. We shall increase the volunteering opportunities available to our members, assist societies in finding sponsorships, provide even better training and establish a ‘club hardship fund’ to provide struggling societies with the necessary financial assistance.

This will all be done in the face of a probable 0% change in funding from College, a 5% increase in staffing cost (a college HR decision), inflation sitting at 4.2% and our bars running at a minimum profit level to ensure they are as cheap for students as they can be.

The result of this will be simple: we know that our plans will cost more than the £33k we have redistributed. As such, we will be spending more on Clubs, Societies, and Projects next year than we have this, and more than we did the year before.

However I do find two things rather worrying.

First is the huge disparity between the levels of support the Union provides for different activities. All overseas clubs societies, which have a current membership of 2,130, receive £5,270 of ‘cash’ support. Compare this to the £13,840 that the 61 members of gliding received for their activities and you might also share a little of my concern. Of course, there are reasons that we support gliding so highly, most of which relate to its high cost. But equally there does need to be a time when we ask if activities like this are sustainable and whether they provide a benefit to our members that means we can justify sacrificing support elsewhere.

The second concern is how little financial assistance we provide to the Representation and Welfare branches of our Union. This year we hosted Rep Week, a cross-campus event designed to make your representatives more visible and to get feedback on what you would like to see improved. For this we provided all Departmental Representatives with polo shirts. It was a small gesture, considering all of the hard work these people put in, and cost very little – about 0.1% of the CSB budget. However this is easily the most we have ever spent on our Dep Reps!

Now I guess some of you may be wondering about the title of this piece, especially as to what a General Meeting might actually be. So let me explain. A general meeting is an open forum of at least 200 members. It can be attended by anyone who wants to go and attendees can add items to the agenda. It’s a place where big strategic items and questions can be discussed. These meetings are commonplace in Student Unions across the UK but the last one held by Imperial College Union happened over 5 years ago.

I believe we should hold this GM to talk about the questions I have raised in this piece but also to discuss some other concerns I have.

In a comment piece last week, it was suggested that the Executive Committee structure needs to change. Though I disagree with this, I do believe that one Union committee does need to be altered: our Trustee Board. The TB can overturn decisions made by the Union Council, authorise expenditure over £1m and set out the Union’s strategy. It would be reasonable to imagine that such a Committee would have the people that you elect to lead your Union, the Sabbatical Officers, as members. However this is not the case. As President I am the only Sabbatical who has a vote. The remaining votes are taken by four students, the chair of council, a former President (the Court chair) and four external members.

If all Trustees are in attendance there is a majority to current students and their representatives. However some Student Trustees have variable attendance and, more worryingly, variable understanding of what students need from their Union. An example of this is one person being elected to this role last year to ‘get more weights in Ethos’ – something the Trustee Board is never in a position to do!

The result of this is that there is a giant risk that the voices of people external to our Union can be more influential than our members and subsequently decisions could be made about our long-term future that we do not support.

So in the Summer Term I shall invite all Union members to attend a General Meeting. Here we shall discuss our Trustee Board Structure and our resourcing. However I also believe we should use this opportunity to discuss the purpose of each committee we have, and adjust their structures accordingly. I also believe it is time to assess the remits and roles of our Sabbatical Officers to ensure they provide a benefit to the student body that matches their cost and justifies the commitment of the people who hold these positions. And finally, more than anything, I believe it’s time to host a meeting like this: one which is open and transparent, to provide all members an opportunity to hear about our potential risks and contribute to some potential solutions.