Blog
It's a whole lot of fun, budgets to be done.. Use your body and your brain, if you wanna play the game
This week, YUSU towers has been pretty busy and there’s a buzz of excitement again about the various things we're all up to.
This week I’ve:
Continued to work on Summer Ball, and Rory has been helping so that we can make the event as good as possible. Some special treats for campus coming up in the next few weeks.. Only 40 days, or so, to go! Our IT department are working on system upgrades to link the, ever growing, YUSU system backend, so that we can be hooked in at the Racecourse and support the IT needs.
Making more arrangements for our special guest who will be visiting York on Saturday week 6 for CO2: Beach Party. This is GUARANTEED to be a really great night - so make sure you buy your ticket and find some beach wear..
Chaired Rules & Revisions Committee where I will lead on some more constitutional tidyups.. Yes, these are very fun.. and important!
Participated in the Roses events de-brief. Some things went really great, other things not as great, and as ever - we will learn from this when hosting the events in two years..
Welcome Week planning is well underway. At Entertainments Committee we, fairly easily, agreed on the welcome week planner for 2009 and the distribution and allocation of events. Together with our JCRCs we will, I’m sure, put on a really great Welcome Week, though I lay down the challenge to Lewis to try and beat the two I have co-ordinated..
The Chief Executive of NUS, Matt Hyde, visited and we spent a good few hours discussing local and national issues. Matt made a special trip from London to visit us and take the time to feedback comments and ideas to the National Union. With the upcoming challenges facing the HE sector, YUSU should and I hope will engage fully with the National Union and make sure that the voice and will of Students is fully represented at a National level. Undoubtedly, the biggest challenge will be the HE funding review to take place, as neither Political party would like it to happen now, after the next General Election.
Budgets, Budgets.. As mentioned in the last blog post, our funding will be tight next year. Both myself, the Finance Manager and Chief Executive are meeting with department heads and full-time officers to discuss the budget needs and requirements for next year. We are working towards a break-even budget and have put pressure on our commercial departments to produce a higher performance in order to supplement the shortfall in our block grant, that is the money allocated by the University to enable us to carry out our services. We aim for this process to wrapped early next week in order to present a draft budget to the Trustee Board. After this, the budget will be revised if necessary and put forward to the next Union General Meeting at the end of the term.
One of the exciting things we are working on at the moment is a proposed re-use of the former Endsleigh unit in Market Square. This is a Unit we lease from the University and previous sub-leased to Endsleigh. There is a small project team within the Union to look at how we might make a front-facing office on campus, increasing our presence on campus and really engaging with our membership on campus, advertising what we’re about, what we do and how you can get involved. There will also be a whole host of other services provided that are being finalised, to be put forward in a presentation to the Trustee Board next week.
With only 6 weeks to go, the finishing line is in sight and preparations are underway for the departure of the full-time officers and the induction / handover process for the incoming officers.
