Zonal & external meetings, and the big ministerial sexual health meeting!

There were a couple of quieter-than-usual weeks where handovers were taking place everywhere, however I am pleased to report I’m back to being busy again.

Here’s what I got up to in July:

12th July- Strong & Active Union Planning Meeting

13th July- Welfare Zone Campaign planning meeting ****

14th July- Co-operative Housing Meeting, UMSU- a chance to catch up with the progress of the project, and explain the project and issues around it with the new Manchester officers.

17th July- Management team meeting, at HQ, FE Zone Planning meeting, and meeting with VP Welfare at ULU to help plan their campaigns for next year and what they can get from NUS.

18th July-Bilateral meeting with National Postgraduate Committee. Meeting with LIBERTY to discuss working with them. As a result of this meeting I submitted the motion below to the NEC and it passed:

Title: Liberty Affiliation

Submitted by: Veronica King

Date: 18th July 2006

NEC Believes:

1) In the Anti Racism motion in the welfare & students rights zone at Annual Conference 2006, conference resolved to do the following:

• To work with Liberty, the civil liberties organisation, and others to actively campaign against attempts to increase the time to detention without charge.

• Defend students' right to peacefully protest.

• Support the 'George Fox Six' and the 'Matthew Boulton Two', oppose Imperial's ban on the veil.

• Oppose ID cards, and anti-terror legislation that stigmatises communities.

• To condemn the Glees reports and all other racists, Islam phobic and undemocratic measures, and to support campaigns against them.

NEC Further Believes:

1. Many students are rightly concerned about their civil liberties, with regard to the issues outlined in conference believes (1)

2. Liberty is one of the UK's leading human rights and civil liberties organizations. Their work includes exposing laws that undermine civil liberties and human rights, and working with politicians to correct them; challenging unjust laws, by taking test cases to UK courts and the European Court of Human Rights.

3. Liberty are a well placed organisation to help us deliver on our mandates with regard to conference believes (1)

4. NUS should be working closely with liberty to defend civil liberities, and encouraging our member unions to do the same.

NEC Resolves:

1. For NUS to affiliate to Liberty, at an appropriately negotiated rate*

2. To write a joint letter from the national president of NUS & director of Liberty to our constituent members, outlining Liberty’s work and encouraging students unions to also consider affiliating.

3. To put together a joint campaign pack with Liberty for students unions, to include a model ‘No to ID cards’ motion, sample campaign materials and an order form for them to order free campaign materials from Liberty.

4. To continue exploring other campaigns and issues we can work with Liberty on.

19th July- Meeting with Caroline Flint, Minister for Public Health, regarding our sexual health campaign. We’d been waiting for this meeting for ages, and it was a big deal to me. The sexual health campaign was our big welfare campaign last year (which you can find out more about here- http://resource.nusonline.co.uk/media/resource/Lobby%20Pack-%20Final.doc ).

The minister seemed really competent, and aware of the problems- as a result she agreed-

1) They've set up a group to look at sexual health promotion in FE & HE which NUS are going to sit on

2) They're sending out guidance to PCTs- including info on working with students unions (and we're going to do the same from our end for unions).

3) The national sexual health campaign which is rolled out in Autumn, we are hopefully going to have creative consultation on the campaign and co-brand around campus (as we did with the home office on safety last year)

We will be pressing on with this campaign over the forthcoming year, as there’s still a long way to go, however, we were pleased with what we accomplished in this meeting.

20th July- Meeting in Leeds with Department of Health, to discuss the bursaries health students recieive. There were major problems with the processing of these last year, leaving thousands of healthcare students without their bursaries. Things seem much more under control this year but we will be keeping a close eye on them and holding them to account.

21st July- Up at 5am (ouch!) to get to Bristol to sit on interview panels.

24th-27th July- Action through Advocacy, Hertfordshire. Really enjoyable course, 3rd time I’ve been on it and it was probably the best so far. Again great to meet new officers, talk to them about our plans for next year, watch people develop over the course of the week. And I gave a somewhat ‘spectacular’ performance during our NUS extra-factor karaoke, if I say so myself!!! And if there’s one message I think I got across, it was that ‘fluffy’ is a dirty word where welfare is concerned!

28th July- Meeting with Portman Group at HQ, and blitzing of emails!

31st July-8th August- Annual Leave – A break which I was ready for after a grueling 13 months on the NEC and which I’m feeling well refreshed after.

If you want to get in touch about anything don’t hesitate, my email address is veronica.king@nus.org.uk

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