Hi everyone. I’m Elizabeth and my responsibilities this year are in the Society and Citizenship Zone as Convenor of the Environment and Ethics Committee and the FE zone. I also sit on the Disabled Students and Women Students Campaign Committees. I have responsibility for the London region. My email is elizabeth.somerville@nus.org.uk, my phone number is 07773704423 or I’m on facebook. Please get in touch if you need anything and I’ll help or put you in touch with the right person to help you. I thought that I’d take this opportunity to introduce myself and say how I’m going to work these blogs:

BLOGS:
I realise that the Irony Police may be coming to confiscate my laptop for this but sometimes I get so busy with doing the job that I forget to report on it. So I’m going to organise it a bit by having two types of blog: Report Blogs and Project Blogs. Report Blogs are going to have details of what I get up to on the NEC on a day to day basis. Project Blogs are about informing you of, er well, projects. That is to say single issues that I’m campaigning and lobbying on. I’ll give you background on the subject, what I’m up to with it and how you can get involved.

ABOUT ME:
I was the sabbatical Women’s Officer at Manchester last year. Before that I was an FE President (non-sabb) and so I’ve been involved in the movement for the last 5 years. When I was an FE President I was massively sceptical of NUS. I knew the brand but not the meaning behind it. I knew that people ran it but not that they were democratically elected leaders. I knew they wanted me to come to conferences and events but not what they were about and for. Last year as a Sabb I went to a couple of training events- very unwilling to get sucked into a culture that seemed to me removed from the lives most students actually lead. I just wanted to get what I could out of the training to enable me to get on with my job. Well, my ideas have changed a bit. I absolutely LOVED NUS. I met so many people from unions about as far removed from Manchester as they could be. All these people though seemed to me to be united in one aim- to improve the lives of their students. And why? Because as the West Wing (not the last time I’ll be dropping a morsel of wisdom from their over flowing table into a blog) informs us “we know that education can be the silver bullet. . . . for crime, poverty, unemployment, drugs, hatred”. I stopped thinking about NUS as being some kind of higher body floating above our heads and started thinking instead that it was the network that allowed us to share our troubles and successes and to see the bigger picture.

Well, that was abstract, now on with the day to day…

Elizabeth

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