September

September is the time when you find the National Secretary in their natural habitat. The Natural Habitat of Nelson Mandela house on the outer reaches of Holloway road. This was a pleasantly welcoming environment coming of the back of three weeks continuous training. It seemed an exciting yet new concept to be back into the office after most of august spent away on training. It is always an interesting feeling when starting your computer up and guessing in order of hundreds how many emails in your account, was it 500 or 700 were my two guesses. It turned out to be only 600. So nearly right but no less a daunting task!

September in NUS was a month of meetings and I made a strong commitment that this year the NEC responsibility teams would do some work and not just as previous years be in name alone . One of the reforms I had made was to reform the responsibility teams the NEC the teams did not reflect the work of the NEC, we slimmed down the organisation of these. I was responsible for Strategy, Students’ Union development and Internationalism. They were all going to make a difference this year and contribute; this was certainly an easy point to develop on their irrelevance of last year.

First meeting I was to organise was the Students’ Union development. This team was responsible for Student activities and development, student media, projects and communication. This meeting went well with the majority of the team turning up and staff presenting their work to the NEC. It was exciting that the NEC in that room seemed determined to take some work forward. We also recognised that we needed to get some work done in this area. Student union development that is never prioritised by the organisation like Welfare or Education yet is core to a strong student movement and active unions within it.

The next meeting to be held was the strategy meeting which we had the grand total of two NEC members the National Treasurer and myself. We ratified many of the decisions we made in the management team saying what that they were jolly good ideas and very clever people must have made them. On a serious note we still had a lot of reform, reorganisation and relocation to do and we were working with the Acting National Director to get back on track, we needed to develop a clear business plan for stabilising the finances and taking NUS forward for six weeks, six months and six years. By this time it had become clear what the problems we were facing. Our income from the affiliations was falling annually as our members are finding their own finances in a mess. Our expenditure was going up annually incremental and continuous mission drift, a problem of having political leadership with no ability to say no! And finally a culture in the organisation, lost of direction and focus after the fees campaign, with people independently working on excellent things but in need of coordination and collective focus. Last year was a year of external pressure and change; this year needs to be a year of internal focus and internal change.

The final meeting to be held was the internationalism meeting It was not a single meeting but a day of meeting with different passionate NEC members with ideas and reflections on what we should be going internationally. Internationalism is one of the very areas that I get passionate about and have a strong view that NUS has a greater responsibility to the international student movement than it presently shoulders…

So 2004 to 2005 is an incredible year and NUS needs to make an impact. Students are one of the biggest groups in society politically active in international issues. However students’ unions are campaigning less and less on international issues, passing them off as Ultra Vires or not their role. Unions opt for Fair trade cafes but no trade justice campaigning, bit of a hypocrisy don’t you think?

In under a month in October the ESF (European Social Forum) was coming to London. It is a year, which has Comic Relief and Live Aid being 20 years since the original. The G8 is being hosted by the UK in Glen Eagles in Scotland. There may well be an election in May and Britain has the presidency of the EU. Plenty of chances to agitate in the name of the global good.

So our first priority as a campaign was to build links between other campaign organisations, many on campus others not. We were to get many of the international students’ and education issues back on the agenda to get people to aim campaigns at students and to have a good time doing this. We also had to get our act into gear on the ESF to try to get as many students to attend as possible, which would then in turn help the campaign for the rest of the year. What an opportunity four days to learn, act and make a difference with some of the most inspirational campaigners, educationalist, agitators, activists and catalysts in the world!

On the whole the campaigns were shaping up, our VP FEUD had gone AWOL. However, the NEC as a whole was pulling their weight and things seemed to be taking shape under these exceptional situations less than perfect conditions. The movement wanted reform and talk of a second extra ordinary conference in November was a foot. We needed to make this ratification before a penny was saved. But democratic savings was just the start. To get back in budget the organisation needed to be gutted or a new income need to be found.

A few issues which I would like to speak of. One was some of the projects NUS had under taken were causing problems in all areas. First the organisation still had a severe under staffing senior management which made it impossible to have good project management in some of the projects started last year. This was showing with web development running late and a guide which data collection was no going to plan. We had jointly developed a new membership database ‘Orwell’ which was meant to be able to download data to be formatted into the guide, but this was not to be so simple. We had out sourced the work, and due to data problems the project was running late and the contractor had to return the guide unfinished we then had to juggle the organisational resources to get the guide ready from what seemed like scratch. We also found the contractor was using the wrong data not a good start. So let me apologise for any delays and inconvenience caused to you.

The Website was also running late, the task was more mammoth than anyone had anticipated but with hard work of the web team eventually both sites were up and running. Don’t you find it interesting how technology rarely makes things easier? All it does is mean you take on more work, and when it goes tits up, the whole house of cards falls in!!!!

Certainly September made me realise the honeymoon in the organisation was over, that’s if it was ever there. Plans were now in place it was clear that there was a year of hard work ahead.

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