By Dessa Bayrock and Nick Ubels (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: February 6, 2013
The SUS board of directors meets every two weeks on rotating campuses in public meetings open to all students. What follows is The Cascade’s digest of the important stuff that went down. Most of the time, one or some of our reporters will also be live-tweeting these meetings in real time using the hashtag #thingsSUSdoes.
Agenda questioned due to unavailability to membership
Last Friday’s meeting almost ended before it began. Veteran representative-at-large Jay Mitchell moved that the agenda be ruled out of order.
“It was not distributed to our membership and the room was labelled as ‘mystery room’,” he said, “so even if it was distributed to the membership, they wouldn’t know how to get here.”
The agenda was not posted on the SUS website in advance of the meeting. According to general manager Meghan McDonald, this was because of a mix-up during office administrator Megan Zacharias’ recent vacation. Zacharias is usually responsible for posting the agendas.
“This isn’t a common procedural issue,” McDonald assured.
President Shane Potter suggested skipping the decision items thanks to the error, but Mitchell relinquished his complaint.
“We can proceed as normal,” he said. “But don’t do it again. It’s bad form.”
AfterMath stung by fickle clubs
Bottom line hurting from cancellations and rescheduling of events
While clubs and associations have traditionally held close ties to the campus pub, AfterMath manager Brad Ross said that this semester has put a strain on their relationship. It’s a strain that’s hurting AfterMath’s bottom line.
“They are backing out of events.” Ross said. “If we’re going a month and a bit into the semester and these clubs and associations aren’t even being run anymore, it’s hurting us.”
Ross said that internal problems and delays in organizations like the Business Administration Students Association (BASA) are causing events to be continually pushed back on the calendar.
“[BASA] has put off their EGM and election for two weeks,” he said. “BASA cancelled a function on us again this week.”
Financial Aid and SUS join forces
Awareness campaign will hopefully help students claim more scholarships
The UFV advancement office and financial aid office have approached SUS to ask for funding and cooperation as part of a financial awareness campaign. The new program, dubbed “Moneybags,” hopes to educate students on the many awards that are available to them but remain unclaimed each year.
McDonald says she’s worked on similar financial awareness campaign in the past at Queens University.
“It just brought forward a lot of the existing options, but created a stronger awareness among the student body with promotional materials and speakers,” she said.
The SUS half of the funding would be pulled from SUS’s scholarship and award budget line, since not all of the funds have been claimed by students.
Dvdk cautioned against using the funding for this purpose, worried that there may be overages on other budget lines that this money could be used to cover.
“I would caution the board to save this money for other uses,” DvdK said. “We’re likely to need this money in other places.”
After debate over the final pledged amount, the motion passed and granted $1000 to go towards this program.
Farewell, transcripts; hello, summaries
SUS adopts new, simplified minute-taking procedure
Meanwhile in governance, VP internal Greg Stickland introduced a motion to simplify SUS’ detailed minute-taking procedure. In recent years, attempts have been made to keep word-for-word minutes of each board meeting, though this has resulted in errors and delays in posting them to the website.
“It goes from a verbatim transcript to a summary,” Stickland explained. “That’s the biggest change.”
Stickland noted that because SUS does not currently have a policy in place, the decision could be made without too many complications.
“It’s sort of like snapping our fingers,” he said.
Jay Mitchell also supported the decision, saying that this new procedure “is how it should be done professionally. Dialogue should be for reporting.”
The motion was adopted unanimously with one abstention.
Where’s the Funding? (WTF?) considering name change
Deemed “too edgy” by some government representatives
The student lobbying group with a provocative acronym Where’s the Funding (WTF?) is considering changing their name in an effort to be taken more seriously by provincial politicians. VP advocacy Dan Van Der Kroon attended a recent meeting of the coalition advocating for stronger post-secondary education funding at the Harbour Centre in Vancouver where the name change and other planning items were discussed.
“They have been getting feedback from government representatives that the name is a little bit too edgy to have credibility,” Van Der Kroon said during his advocacy report.
Clubs and associations get their semester funding
The International Friendship Club will receive $100 and the Nursing Student Association will receive $527.18, both pending completion of the proper paperwork.
The Teaching English As A Second Language Association and the Theatre Student Association were both granted $175 for this semester.
The Business Administration Student Association was given $1404.97 as an amalgamation of semester funding.
AfterMath manager Brad Ross addresses tensions between pub and student union
“Since the semester started, there’s been animosity amongst SUS and AfterMath. On my end and on your end. For the benefit of continuing to run AfterMath, it can’t happen.
There are certain people in this room, or not in this room presently today, that are our own worst enemy when it comes to advertising AfterMath. I have heard nothing but negativity from some of the SUS board members and staff that used to support AfterMath now making customers not come there. I’m not going to turn this into a name-calling match. But it’s happening. You guys are the owners. You have to be a little bit more supportive, regardless of the situation.
The budgeting situation, and that budgeting group that came forward, regardless of what you all think, I didn’t create. I had never even met Derek until that day.
The animosity between SUS and Aftermath, for aftermath to continue to operate properly, has to end. We can’t have board members going around saying “don’t go there.”
–Brad Ross
