By Vanessa Broadbent (The Cascade) – Email
Students in leadership or volunteer positions are now able to win awards from the Student Union Society (SUS) recognizing their work on campus.
There are three categories of awards that SUS will be giving out: leadership, volunteer, and club or association.
“The idea for this was conceived when we were doing our strategic planning about eight months ago,” says SUS president Thomas Davies. “We wanted to create an opportunity to recognize excellent student service and contribution to the UFV community.”
The award winners will receive a $500 prize. SUS will also be hosting an awards ceremony and displaying plaques in the Student Union Building with the winners’ names on them.
Davies says SUS created the awards because they feel such recognition is lacking at UFV.
“Right now, there’s nothing truly recognizing [student involvement] on a broader scale,” Davies says. “There’s many different scholarships and bursaries … but we also want to recognize students from an actual award perspective.”
Nominations for this year’s awards will open February 3, with a deadline of March 11. A shortlist is scheduled to be announced a week after the closing date.
“In future years, we’ll probably have the applications open for the duration of the winter semester, just the launch time is a little bit later this year because it’s the first year,” Davies says.
Both self-nominated and peer-nominated applications will be accepted. Davies also adds that the three categories of awards may be added to in the future.
For both the leadership and volunteer awards, the nominee standards are not limited to those involved with the SUS. The clubs and associations award will be necessarily limited to officially registered groups.
Each award has a criteria guide, which is available through the SUS website. For example, the leadership award, the nomination package notes, “Leaders are not only those called president or manager; leadership is shown through action, not by title, and those actions are what this award recognizes.”
Davies feels that the awards will be a way to recognize students for their work and involvement.
“We feel it’s important … to recognize student involvement and student participation,” he says. “There’s a lot that students do on campus that sometimes goes noticed, sometimes doesn’t … UFV wouldn’t be the place that it is without the wonderful work of so many different students in so many different areas of the university.”
