Eve Alcock our SU President has been elected to the Democratic Procedures Committee for NUS and Climate Emergency Policy passed.
NUS is the National Union of Students. There are about 600 Students’ Unions in the UK, in colleges and universities that are affiliated to the NUS. These constitute NUS’ ‘membership’, which collectively aims to represent 7 million students in the UK.
NUS holds a National Conference every year, and NUS Delegates that are elected in all member SUs attend the Conference to pass policy and elect ‘Full-Time Officers’ who are effective SU Officers but nationally.
NUS National Conference 2020 was due to take place in Liverpool from Tuesday 31 March – Thursday 2 April 2020, but instead was hosted online due to Covid-19. The NUS delegates for Bath were Eve Alcock (SU President), Alisha Lobo (Community Officer), Jiani Zhou (Postgraduate Officer), Annie Willingham and Berge Schembri.
In the run up to Conference, Eve Alcock also wrote a policy to be submitted about how further and higher education should be leading in tackling the Climate Emergency. The policy got merged with similar policies from Goldsmiths SU, Kingston SU and Sheffield College SU. In the priority ballot – a democratic exercise to prioritise the 8 most popular policies to be discussed at Conference – the Climate Emergency policy got the second highest up-votes, second to a mental health policy.
If you’d like to read the policy, you can read it here and watch the speeches in favour of the motion here. The policy passed at Conference with 93% of votes voting in favour of the policy. The headlines of the policy are that NUS should declare climate emergency, and should lobby for a Green New Deal to help the fight back against climate change.
In the NUS Full-Time Officer Elections, Hillary Gyebi-Ababio (current UG Education Officer at Bristol) was elected as Vice-President Higher Education, Larissa Kennedy (Ex-Officer and student at Warwick) was elected as NUS President and Salsabeel Elmegri (current Vice-President for Education and Welfare at Bradford College) was elected as Vice-President Further Education.
There were also elections held for NUS’ National Scrutiny Council, which scrutinises the work of Full-Time Officers and holds them to account, and for NUS’ Democratic Procedures Committee which looks after the democratic processes of NUS and makings rulings for policy voting and elections. Eve Alcock our SU President ran for elected for the Democratic Procedures Committee and was elected for a term of 2 years with the highest vote count out of 18 candidates. You can see who got elected to the National Scrutiny Council here and the Democratic Procedures Committee here.
If you have any questions about NUS or the Conference, you can contact Eve Alcock on supresident@bath.ac.uk