The OU Students Association Student Leadership Team are elected to represent the student views and develop initiatives that improve the experience of all OU students. These initiatives have been organised into four priorities and our Deputy President has written this article to introduce them to you.
When standing for election, each candidate puts forward a set of manifesto pledges that they hope to deliver, if elected, during their two-year term as part of the Student Leadership Team. However, the challenge was how to bring together 19 sets of ideas and pledges into a deliverable set of actions for the team to collaborate on as a group.
This was an important task, as to be effective as a team it is important that we are working cohesively and as a collective. Therefore, we decided to look at all of the manifesto ideas together and group those with similar themes, along with any new ideas we had developed since the elections.
Ultimately, we ended up with four different strands, in which individual ideas then sat.
These were:
- Representation
- Communities & Engagement
- Association Awareness
- Equality, Diversity, Inclusion (EDI) & Accessibility
Whilst having these strands helped us with organising and coordinating initiatives, we also developed supporting statements of intent to better demonstrate to our members what we hoped to achieve with this work. You can see this in the graphic above.
With the work to group the ideas together completed, we have now established smaller working groups with members of the Student Leadership Team and Students Association staff team in each. These groups develop the initial ideas into project ideas and present them to the wider Student Leadership Team for approval.
Once designed and approved, the real work begins on delivering the manifesto pledges the team was elected upon. Whilst it might seem like this has taken some time to get up and running, we wanted to make sure that we had firm foundations in place to support this work. We are also conscious that our time in the role is two years, and that this is a marathon and not a sprint.
0 Comments