Decades ago, universities were places for only the academically outstanding and those who seek a life committed to research. Nowadays, most universities offer both a wide range of academic and non-academic services like mental health consultants, tax consultants, dental clinics and academic advisors. Despite this move towards treating students more holistically, many universities overlook a significant part many students’ lives: dating, with all the struggles and turmoil it causes. University of Toronto Cupid’s Arrow (UTCA) club is created to meet this need. The club is designed to bring people with different experiences and backgrounds together for the purpose of meaningful social interactions, safe group activities, and most importantly, responsible dating. Our “Theory of Change” An average North American goes into a happy marriage with the 7th person they date; this usually means they will experience 6 heartbreaking fall outs before they find the right person. How come? We attribute the causes to lack of experience, guidance, and opportunity. If there was a platform for young adults to safely meet others with the same romantic intentions, but still avoid the awkwardness of two strangers trying to woo each other, wouldn’t dating be much easier, and broken hearts be less frequent? UTCA is such a platform. How We Operate It gathers love-seekers together for fun group events such as evening socials, laser tag and movie nights, while still providing opportunities for alone time if a couple is interested. Members feel more assured since there are more friends around if they need support, and UTCA executives can act as reliable chaperones. The events UTCA hosts are not just places for love-seekers to couple up, they’re also great opportunities to find like-minded friends, and to seek the advices of more experienced members. At first, the only requirement for being a member was showing up to events. With this low threshold we quickly expanded to over 100 members. However, it became obvious that due to the intimate nature of the club members were sensitive to the words and actions of other members and more needed to expected of each member’s conduct. In particular, we received reports of unwelcome jokes by certain members. Alarmed, we quickly moved to establish ethical guidelines for all member communications in the group. Conversations in the large group is closely monitored by executives and people exhibiting inappropriate behaviour are warned once and then immediately removed upon second offense. Now that UTCA is better prepared and established, it is certain that the council can provide even better service and events to all of its members.
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Our mission at FOCUSED is to capture real life stories of Wilfred Laurier University Brantford students through the use of simple photography and very little editing. We want to create a web space for students currently enrolled to display their photography work while also showcasing the campus and campus life. Most importantly, students who are not enrolled and who are viewing our campus for their future education can access our photography website to see current students, read about campus stories periodically, and get a real grasp of what student life here is like without the glamour that may distract someone from the real things a students needs to know coming here.
Nothing should be masked with a filter, gloomy days happen and we don’t want to hide them. We want people to see what our campus can look like all year round without adjustments of extreme photoshop enhancement. This is why diversity is a huge part of this club; to show different photography styles taken by a range of students (different programs, backgrounds, ages). This creates a tasteful composite that we can display in meaningful ways. My final goal for the creation of this club was to create a photo archive of each school year that will encompass two semester themes. The themes was supposed to reflect a general pattern of a picture taking style that members try to capture and recreate using their own skills through the semester. We are trying to create a story through the use of simple artistic images that will transcend any particular viewer whiling remaining on our website for years to come. We want to make students feel closer to Laurier, and to students viewing us, possibly their future home. As the founder and President of Focused, I must say starting this club was difficult. Finding members and getting the word out about Focused was a challenging. As days go on, new ideas come into my head that push me forward to continue this project, while sometimes I feel as if the club will crash and burn. I have even contemplated not running the club entirely. If you ask me, this is normal. Contemplating with yourself is normal, and will eventually lead you to a better decision then when you started. Wheather I decided to run the club this year, I know the decision I make will be thought out and will be made with the solid 5 members (friends) I have helping me with this. No decision is ever a wrong decision, as long as you trust yourself and stand by your self. Anitra Nickel As more and more of our daily lives take place online, a growing proportion of social, political and economic activity shifts to cyberspace. Social and technological change are inextricably intertwined and so the questions raised require crossing traditional technical and social science disciplinary boundaries. Yet universities have been slow to adapt. Although ‘interdisciplinary’ has become a buzzword, there are still comparatively few truly interdisciplinary programmes or forums on campuses.
The purpose of the Internet Research Network is to provide such a forum for students and scholars from different disciplines to collaborate and share feedback on research projects concerned with the Internet and its relationship to society. Our members include scholars from computer science, psychology, political science, sociology and information studies and, since I founded the group in 2015, we have been holding regular seminar-style meetings where members present projects and ideas to get feedback. This has worked quite well, especially since we kept the focus of the group intentionally broad to make it as inclusive as possible. Every discipline has its own perspective on the world that we need to step back from to make room for others. What has become clear over the last two years is that this not only applies to how different disciplines solve problems but what they see as important problems to be solved. Computer scientists deal with technical problems, and so therefore naturally reason that because technology solves problems, the better the technology is, the fewer problems there will be. Social scientists on the other hand look at a technology ask how could this be used for political purposes, what might it change about society and why could this be a problem? The world as a social scientist sees it involves social and political problems foremost, technology then comes not automatically as a solution but as a new variable. How to bring these divergent worldviews together? Seminars for project presentations are a great way to get opinions from people outside one’s field, but since everyone is immersed in their own fields they are not always accessible for scholars from other disciplines. A sociologist’s project on institutions in Internet regulation will have little overlap with a computer scientists project on improving encryption mechanisms. Therefore, we are planning to complement seminar meetings with problem-driven workshops on specific topics such as digital rights and privacy, surveillance and encryption, malware and proliferation, etc. By focusing on specific problem sets with a technical and social component, we hope to foster even closer collaboration among our members and make sure everyone gets as much as they can from the meetings. Lennart Maschmeyer Approximately 465 people suffer from brain injuries daily in Canada, resulting in a brain injury every 3 minutes. The extent of brain injury outnumbers breast cancer, spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis and HIV/AIDS-combined. Traumatic brain injury is a major public health concern yet it does not receive a lot of attention. Brain Awareness Movement (BAM) club is a group at the University of Alberta comprised of students who are determined to reduce the prevalence of brain injury. BAM club was started in 2009 with a mission to educate the public about the preventive measures of brain injuries, support brain injury survivors and their families, and to advocate for brain awareness throughout our community. Acquired brain injury is the leading cause of death and disability for Canadians under the age of 35. It is clearly the number one killer of young adults. The fact that brain injuries can be prevented made the Education Program the main focus of our group’s mission. As the BAM club, we want to inspire our community to be safe and aware of the risks associated with brain injuries. We do this by delivering presentations to schools and explaining the importance of protecting the skull by exposing our audience to varying degrees of brain injuries. Brain injuries can happen to absolutely anybody. They can happen to people of any gender, any age, any ethnicity, your neighbour, or even your child. We focus on supporting brain injury survivors and their families. We work directly with support centres for brain injury survivors like the Brain Care Centre (BCC), and Networks Activity Centre (NAC), by providing volunteers to both these centres. Our volunteering experience is unique because our volunteers gain knowledge of what it is like to be impacted by brain injury as they work one on one with brain injury survivors. They take that experience with them and educate others about how brain injuries can have a huge impact on one’s life. Our volunteers also get to raise funds to donate to the BCC and NAC. We also hold fundraising events, and our main annual fundraising event is the Big BAM Fundraising Gala, which provides an opportunity for the brain injury survivors to share their experiences in order to educate our volunteers and others. Because our focus is to reduce the occurrence of preventable brain injuries, one of our values is to advocate for brain safety by campaigning on campus and throughout our community. We do this through advertising campaigns for example we participate at STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) oriented events in Edmonton, such as the TELUS World of Science and the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Even though our members have always sustained the group’s core values, which are to educate, support, and advocate, we have faced challenges. And that is because when we talk about brain injury we lack that deep understanding of its severity. We continue to face a main challenge of getting a lot of members who share the same vision as us. Initially the members were mostly from the Science background, but we have increased our scope of members by participating in the campus clubs fair as we continue to reach out to people who are moved by our cause. Our desire is to have more organisations that are raising awareness on brain injuries. TOGETHER WE CAN SAVE LIVES: JOIN THE BAMILY!!!!! Ruvimbo Maranga Director of Education Brain Awareness Movement University of Alberta One of the key reasons the Liberal Party of Canada invests so much time and energy into organizing on campus is that we have seen the writing on the wall; youth of today are a more engaged and active political group than the last several generations. We know that investing our time on campus, with populations that number anywhere between six thousand and sixty thousand, means beginning a relationship with students that will carry on from now until the next election. We held almost a hundred thousand conversations on campus during the 2015 election, all for the purpose of hearing what issues Canadian Youth feel strongly about.
The campus club branches of political parties are becoming an essential element of political organization; with the increasing numbers of youth between 18 and 24 participating in politics, (as many as 57.9% in 2015) increased attention is being paid to how university students organize themselves on campus. More political parties have realized that the current generation is both increasingly political, while becoming less partisan. The growing challenge has been to demonstrate to youth how their political aspirations and beliefs are reflected in partisan systems. Primarily, many students are issues driven; their primary organizing impetus is structured around a central political issue they feel passionately about. One common example found on nearly every campus is environmental activists, students that feel strongly about lobbying the government and other actors to craft policy that focuses on creating a greener future. The common issue for a political party in the face of such a narrow political focus is to show how the values that these student activists hold are reflected in a partisan context, and how we engage and broaden that focus to incorporate other issues. One way that we have attempted to appeal to issue-specific activists is by co-hosting events with other clubs on campus. By demonstrating to these clubs that we share the same values, environmental protection for example, we are then able to present ourselves to their membership and make our case for why we are the partisan group that is best able to deliver on their desires for environmental action. It also allows us to broaden our network and begin a conversation individually with these students that will continue throughout the semester, be it through email, phone calls, or other event invitations. The hope is that through continued conversation, interaction, and engagement, we will be able to identify other issues these students value, and demonstrate our commitment to being the best possible representative for those issues to our political party at large. Ultimately, the goal of our partisan campus clubs is twofold; to continue the movement of the Liberal Party of Canada on campus, and to increase our membership, and thus the amount of youth voices to give young people a chance to have a say in partisan politics. Peter McCauley, National Youth Organizer Liberal Party of Canada Birthdays. They come without fail each year, often an unwelcome reminder of sprouting grey hairs and wrinkles. Yet, you may recall as a child how you eagerly waited in anticipation, counting down the days on your calendar. This hopeful longing is also felt by many children who experience hardships, but they are forced to shift their priorities to align with the harsh realities their families face on a daily basis. Instead of wondering about which toys or coloured balloons their parents may buy, they are plagued with worries like… Will we have food today? Where will we sleep tonight? What happens tomorrow? The list goes on indefinitely. While there are many organizations working to alleviate poverty and homelessness, our club aims to bring a little brightness into the lives of these children. Founded at the University of Calgary in the fall of 2013, Birthday Wishes fundraises to organize group birthday celebrations for children and their families at local homeless shelters. We are currently working with Calgary-based Brenda’s House to deliver celebrations, but have worked with Inn from the Cold in the past. The inspiration to start the club arose from what was then a recently-founded local charity, Children’s Birthday Miracles. We have a shared mission to provide birthday celebrations to children living in homeless shelters and now frequently partner with them to organize celebrations. Some of our founding members directly worked with Children’s Birthday Miracles (CBM), and fortunately had knowledge and connections prior to launching our campus club. However, the majority of our members were recruited by word of mouth and at annual Clubs’ Week events… we all jumped in wholeheartedly, without knowing entirely what to expect. We believe in making a big impact with few resources. An average birthday celebration (for 20-30 children plus their families) costs less than $200 CAD to cover decorations, food and loot bags—CBM sometimes helps cover the cost of gifts. We typically have met or exceeded this amount in a one or two day fundraiser event like a photo booth, bake sale or bottle drive. The amount required is further reduced by acquiring in-kind donations from local businesses and through generous volunteers happily sharing their time as magicians, face-painters, princes and princesses. Additionally, funds can be used even more efficiently to sponsor celebrations abroad with partner organizations, as the cost for goods is much lower: about $50-100 CAD will cover a group birthday, including gifts. Bringing joy, however, comes with some important responsibilities. When working with children and vulnerable individuals, their privacy is highly important us. This is why we never share photos of the children on our displays or website, and typically only take photos with volunteers. Confidentiality is vital to protect the identities of the families staying at homeless shelters. We work directly with the shelters and establish and follow their protocols during celebrations to maintain safety. For similar reasons, we also limit the number of volunteers that can attend a birthday celebration. Understandably, amazing people are the cornerstone of our club! Our club could not be run without the hard work of all our members and volunteers, especially in contributing to organizing fundraising events. The very relatable and unifying mission of our club also means that we attract students from multiple disciplines, like Business, Arts, Engineering and Science. This is wonderful as we can share different perspectives and backgrounds to tackle problems collaboratively. For anyone looking to start a similar club: go for it! If your motivation comes from within, you will impart joy to these children, and enrich your own lives in the process. It is easy with good people at the helm and open communication: we maintain group chats to discuss progress and respond to problems in real-time. If the associated costs concern you, garner support from those around you! We have received a considerable amount of positive feedback on our aim from the university community and local businesses. The response in your community will likely be similar. Moreover, you are not limited to working with homeless shelters. There are many organization positively impacting the lives of children to whom you can reach out—for instance those assisting new immigrants to Canada. Think outside the box! Above all, disregard any notion you may have that initiatives like ours are unnecessary or superfluous. As soon as you enter the room, the dynamic and energy makes it readily apparent that the children we impact do not feel this way. More than presents, cake or any material object we could provide, we offer them an experience. We bring them an opportunity to make lasting memories. We give them time to relish in that special feeling of simply being a kid. If only for a day. Natalie D'Souza VP External Communications Lions Clubs International is the world’s largest community service volunteer organisation with almost 47,000 clubs in 210 countries. We are men and women of all ages and cultural backgrounds that simply care about improving lives and bettering our communities. In particular, we do a lot of work in the area of vision, recycling eye glasses for instance. We want to give students the opportunity to join our vast, community service network, but in Canada we face one large but simple barrier: tabling.
In my nine years of experience dealing with campus clubs, I have found that schools in the US are far easier for outside organisations, like Lions Clubs, to obtain permission for a table from which to hand out information and recruit members for new campus-based Lions Clubs. In general, Canadian schools either charge high fees (something that is not in our budget) or simply prohibit outside NFPs to get a table on campus. Some Canadian schools have an annual volunteer fair at which we are able to have a table, which is a fantastic opportunity, but these are few and far between. I would love to see universities, colleges, and student unions develop more inclusive and accessible policies to allow NFPs to table at least for one day in order to gain interest from students. Indeed, any effort towards making rules more consistent would be welcome since right now rules from one school to the next are drastically different. This would greatly help national and international organisations that offer the kinds of volunteer positions students are looking for. Indeed, Lions Clubs provide many scholarships but often cannot reach student candidates. The most immediately available solution would be if universities and colleges, who don’t currently do so, could have a volunteer fair at the start of each semester and invite NFPs to have a table at it. I understand their thinking when they say if they open the door, there would be many requests, but standards could be set that ensure the highest quality opportunities for students. In the end, our communities will be stronger for it. There are currently fewer than 15 Campus Lions Clubs across Canada! Paul Baker New Club Development Consultant Lions Clubs International Lindsay King, Club Support Coordinator at Kin Canada, and some other members of the team shared some of their practices and struggles in starting and working with their existing clubs across Canada.
Q: How do you initiate relationships on campuses on which you don't already have a presence? What are the biggest barriers? What sort of practices have you found make things easier? A: Our clubs are not widely known at the moment and we are starting to work on evaluating the program. Some Districts (see map below) and most of the clubs actively use Facebook and sometimes Twitter to make themselves known. Currently, to start a club, a student would need to approach a local Kin Club, District leadership or National Headquarters for support in starting a new club on their campus. They would need to gather potential members to be part of the club and then start the chartering process. Other than this, if an established Kin Club in the community would like to initiate a Campus Club on a local campus they would need to work on contacting the school, setting up in a space where they are able to hold a membership drive, tell students about Kin Canada and work on gaining members through that avenue. The biggest barrier would probably be the time people have to commit to the start-up of a new club with the established Kin Club already having their own projects and the limited time that students have today. The easiest way to gain traction on a campus today is to have a “Kin Kid” (an established Kin Club member’s son or daughter) on the campus already who has been raised with Kin Canada, knows what it stands for and is inspired to start their own Club and gather members. Additionally, when the traditional Kin processes aren’t forced upon a club and they are left to make their own decisions on how a meeting should be run and set their own rules and guidelines they are more independent and can function better. Q: What, if any, strategies do you use to integrate club members into the operations and decision-making of your broader organization? A: All members have the opportunity to progress within the association when the opportunity presents itself. Members are given the opportunity to run for club president, and District leadership (i.e. as a Governor, Vice Governor). Beyond this, members are also able to join National committees and apply to the National Board when the opportunities come about. Campus Club members are also given the opportunity to be involved in the awards program and are invited to conventions around the District and nationally to make sure they have a say in the organization and provide them with full voting rights at these conventions. Additionally, if the Campus Club has a sponsor the sponsor is encouraged to work with the Campus Club and create synergy. Q: Is your programming consistent across your clubs, or do they have considerable autonomy in deciding what to do? If the latter, how do you balance this with the need to uphold organizational standards? A: We don’t program for our clubs, they are part of the larger service organization that is Kin Canada. We give our clubs autonomy and make them responsible for their own programming based on the needs of their campus and surrounding community in line with our mission, vision and values. Although, they can call on the help of their sponsoring Kin clubs in the community or District leadership. They are also able to call on other leadership whether it be at the District of National level for assistance from afar in programming/events/service/fundraising project ideas or any other member of the association across Canada. Isabel Deslauriers, Manager of Let’s Talk Science Outreach, was kind enough to share some of their practices in working with their clubs across Canada.
Let’s Talk Science Outreach sites can be found at over 40 university and colleges across Canada. Available free of charge, more than 3,500 post-secondary student volunteers and a growing number of industry partners engage youth in hands-on/minds-on STEM learning experiences in both school and community settings. Q: Is your programming consistent across your clubs, or do they have considerable autonomy in deciding what to do? If the latter, how do you balance this with the need to uphold organizational standards? A: We provide two big guidelines for the program: it’s volunteer-driven, and it emphasizes hands-on experiences. Within that, the volunteers and local coordinators have tremendous leeway to create their own initiatives that fit in well within their community. For example, volunteers have developed workshops related to their own interests and in response to local teacher requests - everything from a DNA whodunit workshop to rocket launching and robotics. Volunteers have also created a series of on-campus symposia based on the research specialties of their university: StemCellTalks started at the University of Toronto, and Let’s Talk Nanotechnology at the University of Alberta. Our philosophy is to support our volunteers’ passions. Q: What, if any, strategies do you use to integrate club members into the operations and decision-making of your broader organization? A: For a volunteer-driven program in particular, it’s important for the participants to shape the program around their passions and their needs, so we put a high priority providing a voice to our members. As an example, every year local coordinators have the opportunity to participate in a regional and a national conference, which are two of the key events where coordinators have a voice in shaping the national program. Sessions where we raise current issues and problem-solve them together feed directly into national planning and resource allocation. Another big part of the conference is about meeting representatives from other locations to discuss challenges and share ideas. This is how many of the key initiatives on the national level started to spread. For example, the Let’s Talk Science Challenge was originally presented by McMaster University at the national conference, where three other universities adopted the idea. As the event continued to spread, the national office put more financial and logistical support behind it, and helped it grow to 24 locations. Q: What are some of the frustrations of coordinating campus clubs? What practices have you used to overcome these? A: The most difficult aspect is the fact that as students, coordinators and volunteers are only around for a few years. This can make it challenging for a local program to maintain continuity, but being a part of a national organization can help overcome this. Our regional coordinators (who are staff members) have a huge role in helping with continuity. We make sure that the program keeps going after even after a key coordinator finishes their term – preserving and building on their legacy. Once the graduating coordinator has left, the regional coordinator acts as a mentor to the new coordinator, and they help transfer local relationships and understand long term projects and challenges. The first few universities that joined the program have now had groups operating for more than 25 years! When I began my role as the Vice-President Services of the Nipissing University Student Union (NUSU), I immediately struggled with how to properly manage my institution’s Clubs program. On one hand, I could take a hands-off approach – occasionally checking in on the campus clubs, and hoping they govern themselves well. On the other, I could inject more structure into the program, build and create resources, and put in place a guideline and policy under which the clubs would govern themselves; thus ensuring the under NUSU operate well and continue to thrive year after year. With a desire for structure, the staff of the Nipissing University Student Union began laying the groundwork work to implement a Clubs policy.
Our approved Clubs policy has not only made a world of difference for our staff, but it has made the day-to-day operations and governing of our Clubs easier for those students who choose to participate in and lead them. The policy covers the rights, responsibilities and expectations of a campus club, the channels to go through to access NUSU and Nipissing University resources, funding grants, and proper financial management and bookkeeping. This helps both the Clubs program and myself stay accountable and on track throughout the year. I often consider myself lucky, for a couple of reasons; the first that NUSU had a blank slate to work with when we molded the Clubs program over the course of several months. The second, that we have amazing and dedicated staff, all of whom provided feedback, and whose thoughts and effort went into this project - their efforts are incorporated not solely in the Clubs policy, but in the resources that we created alongside it. Although I do have dedicated (and sometimes flexible) weekly office hours, there is no way to make sure that I am available to meet with every single one of the club presidents or executives one-on-one. Between their schedules as students, and mine as a student executive, nothing ever lines up exactly the way we want it to. Instead, we decided to institute a Clubs summit – a yearly meeting with all of the club executives in early September. The summit allowed for discussion with our clubs, familiarization with the new policy, and an introduction to the resources allocated to the Clubs program on campus. Though it seemed to be a big undertaking at first, instituting a summit is a project I would recommend for others in my position. Also, offer food and snacks when you plan a long meeting or event – students love food, and it’s almost always guaranteed to boost attendance. Finally, NUSU runs our Club Days/Clubs Week once or twice a year. We gauge this based on the popularity of our first run during the second week of classes in September, and if it is successful, we run another week during the second week of classes in January. This promotes not just the NUSU clubs program, but also allows for the clubs to get the word out, recruit students, and advertise the events that they have over the coming weeks and months. While we do help our clubs with resources, we encourage them to run events independently, and sign-up for those that we facilitate, including Club Days/Clubs Week. This is a practice that allows us to step in and help when need be, but really lends independence to the executive of all of our Clubs. It is extremely important to note that not only do Clubs provide an outlet for students, they help provide avenues for expanded social circles and extracurricular activities; as well as promoting ties with one’s chosen post-secondary institution. David Ratcliffe, Vice-President Services, Nipissing University Student Union |
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