Andrew
06-02-2006, 18:03
Today, the members of the Students' Union are voting on some large-scale changes to our constitution - changing the roles of officers, streamlining the executive, and creating a Union Senate.
We'd like to draw your attention to two changes that affect societies significantly, both included in the proposed constitution.
CREATION OF A FULL-TIME SOCIETIES OFFICER
The benefits of this are clear: societies will have someone in the SU Office all the time every day. The new Officer will have ample time to meet societies and queries and problems will be sorted more quickly. This would be a far better situation than the current one- at the moment societies have just 2 part-time volunteers co-ordinating 101 societies.
SOCIETIES BUDGETING
At the moment societies are given money on a random basis during the Autumn Term. The proposed constitution moves budgeting for societies so all this is out of the way before the start of the academic year. This means we won’t run out of money leaving some societies without a grant, and everyone will have their grant available on August 1st each year, well in advance of freshers fair.
We really do think that these changes will benefit societies enormously, but they’ll only happen if you vote for them. Voting opened on Monday morning and will close at midnight at the end of Wednesday. All you have to do is login at http://www.yusu.org/union/vote and click through the motions (it’ll take 2 minutes of your time). The new constitution in full, with accompanying explanation, can be found at http://www.yusu.org/union/docs/ConstitutionwithNotes23-01-06.pdf
Please also read through and vote for the 'Societies Space and Storage' motion, giving the Union official and workable policy on this issue.
Thanks,
Carl and Adam.
YUSU Societies Officers
Haven't read it all properly, but seems like a good thing largely. Having a sab Societies Officer would be useful. We got lucky this time with grants, but it seemed pretty arbitrary to me. So that's probably good too. I haven't read through any other bits, so can't comment on whether it seems good overall.
The storage motion seems like they're asking for a mandate to winge (no action is promised, but I guess they probably don't have the power to ensure anything happens), but I guess it's better they winge with student support than without.
We'd like to draw your attention to two changes that affect societies significantly, both included in the proposed constitution.
CREATION OF A FULL-TIME SOCIETIES OFFICER
The benefits of this are clear: societies will have someone in the SU Office all the time every day. The new Officer will have ample time to meet societies and queries and problems will be sorted more quickly. This would be a far better situation than the current one- at the moment societies have just 2 part-time volunteers co-ordinating 101 societies.
SOCIETIES BUDGETING
At the moment societies are given money on a random basis during the Autumn Term. The proposed constitution moves budgeting for societies so all this is out of the way before the start of the academic year. This means we won’t run out of money leaving some societies without a grant, and everyone will have their grant available on August 1st each year, well in advance of freshers fair.
We really do think that these changes will benefit societies enormously, but they’ll only happen if you vote for them. Voting opened on Monday morning and will close at midnight at the end of Wednesday. All you have to do is login at http://www.yusu.org/union/vote and click through the motions (it’ll take 2 minutes of your time). The new constitution in full, with accompanying explanation, can be found at http://www.yusu.org/union/docs/ConstitutionwithNotes23-01-06.pdf
Please also read through and vote for the 'Societies Space and Storage' motion, giving the Union official and workable policy on this issue.
Thanks,
Carl and Adam.
YUSU Societies Officers
Haven't read it all properly, but seems like a good thing largely. Having a sab Societies Officer would be useful. We got lucky this time with grants, but it seemed pretty arbitrary to me. So that's probably good too. I haven't read through any other bits, so can't comment on whether it seems good overall.
The storage motion seems like they're asking for a mandate to winge (no action is promised, but I guess they probably don't have the power to ensure anything happens), but I guess it's better they winge with student support than without.