The first semester has come to an end, which means one semester left to go in my role. It’s been a remarkable couple of months. My main priorities over the semester included continued work on mental health services accessibility, student group accessibility for students and supporting our residents associations and restructuring the Council of Residence Associations. There have been many side projects as well including events, evaluation of services, growth of programs, and many advocacy meetings, but to keep this short I’ll stick with three topics.

Mental Health Services

The government mental health grant was announced last semester; I cannot stress the importance of this. We now have sustainable funding for the next three years for services our campus drastically needs. We have been working through the grant proposal in collaboration with the Dean of Students to ensure that we are not losing any services and that we continue to support all students within the mental health realm.

UASU Cares launched! This is another exciting step of coordinating resources. There is still lots to do on the website, but it is a fantastic starting point a hub of all the resources we have on campus not only pertaining to mental health but physical wellness as well. I’m thrilled to continue to work on this and fine-tune it to the best of my ability in the next four months. Students having access to resources is a huge priority for me, and I think we have made strides in that area this year.

We have struck an internal Mental Health Committee within the Students’ Union that seeks to create a mental health strategy for the internal workings of our Students’ Union. It is going to be an extremely busy year to make this happen and I’m absolutely thrilled to be working alongside extremely passionate people to get this done. This will really give proper goals to different departments and assess the progress in the mental health realm over the years.

I say this often and I will say it again, we have made progress but there is still so much to be done, and there will always exist different ways for us to support students within their mental health, I’m eager to keep moving in the positive direction.

Student Groups

As you may know student groups exist in many areas. You can register to be a Students’ Union student group that can use our name, host in our spaces, etc. Well this year, we have been working diligently on event approval/notification policies; conduct protocols and general student group procedure and policies. We look forward to sharing the documents and consulting on the many processes we have in order to make them as student friendly and accessible as possible.

The new version of BearsDen still does not fill the overall function it is defined for; I’ve been in the process of reviewing all the documents from the review of BearsDen in the past. The contract expires September; my hope is to design a system in house that fills the needs of student group registration, event approval and grant funding. Aspects of event promotion and a student group online hub will exist elsewhere. The contract will be extended for another year, but the new system will hopefully be piloted in that year, to be launched the year after.

Residence Associations

Residences have gone through a transition this year with the Resident Assistants unionizing; quite a few employees quit, which is truly unfortunate. I have been working closely with each Residence Association to ensure they support their students to their full capacity. We want to continue to offer advocacy, service and events within each residence. Supporting students living on campus is a big priority for me. I’ve been looking at setting up a Residence Association for PLH, and also looking at the advocacy for Greek housing on Campus.

A lot of my time as last year this role as well, has been dedicated into the meal plan. The meal plan is once again on the table and many students are not happy with it. I have worked closely with the LHSA to support making a survey and ensuring students voices are heard, and we will be representing the residents in the many meetings to come to ensure they get the best deal with the meal plan.

As Council of Residence Associations, we have been working on residence reports. Each residence will be doing a report on their residence including history, current state, long and short-term advocacy goals, and general recommendations for their successors to ensure that the history is there and that students can advocate effectively over the years.

This first semester has flown by; I certainly hope the rest of the year doesn’t go by as fast as there is still much to be done. Being your Vice President Student Life has been an honour and a privilege, I will continue to work hard in all of my areas to ensure we continue making progress in these important issues. I appreciate you taking your time to read through all of this and if you have absolutely any questions, feel free to message me or drop by my office anytime.