Disabled Students' Officer

Welcome to my first blog post here as your Disabled Students’ Officer. I’m not going to be updating this weekly over the summer, because that would seem a little futile (also I’ll be spending the summer reading for final year and working on my dissertation in order to free me up to spend more of the actual year working on issues affecting disabled students).

My name's Matt, and I'm in my third year of studying English and Spanish. I’ve been abroad for nearly a year now, doing an Erasmus year, and it’s amazing to see the changes in Holloway in my absence. When we passed the motion for liberation officers as individual roles it seemed uncertain whether we’d be able to fill the places, we certainly couldn’t fill them on the Inclusion and Representation Senate during my six month period as Equality and Liberation Officer, when I took over after the previous one had to step down. However, we have, and as you’ll see, we’ll be facing the next year with a full complement.

This isn’t to suggest that other reps on the former I&R senate won’t still have their voices heard, only that disabled, LGBT+, women and marginalised genders, and BME students will now be represented with a seat on the executive committee, meaning we can have more input into how the university will be run, and how students from our respective groups will be supported, recognised, and empowered to take on their own challenges.

Since winning my election on Saturday night, I’ve been quite busy, going through my manifesto and tidying up my plan of action for the year. I now know how I intend to tackle and complete each of my manifesto points, what steps I need to take to do that, and who I need to contact and work with for each of them. I’ve got a long list of people and departments that I intend to meet with, and plan to get quite a bit done over the summer.

I’m starting from a slightly different point to the other liberation officers – until Sid’s exemplary work last year, very little had been done on campus about issues facing disabled students. LGBT+ soc has existed for a long while as a space for students who self-identify into any of those terms, there are several different societies that represent different groups of BME students (though I don’t know whether all BME students are represented by a society), and feminism society is there to look at issues facing women (and in my experience has been very positive in tackling issues facing marginalised genders as well). Although the societies may not be exactly on point with the roles of the officers, and although they may not be as representative as we could wish, they exist.

For disabled students, there is an occasional staff-student forum with the Educational Support Office and others, but there isn’t much beyond that. Therefore one of the big things I want to do this year is reach out to disabled students in setting up a fortnightly Disabled Student Network. This would provide us with a place to discuss the impact of our disabilities on our engagement in and relationship with the Union, our studies, and the activism people want to do / see done, and the changes they want to make. I intend to prioritise this, because although my manifesto is extensive, in the end my priorities will also be those that students raise in that forum, and supporting students in doing what we feel needs doing.

Other goals this summer include starting to work out where safe campaign-free routes across campus could go, to propose to the Demoks at the start of next year, looking into the costings of adapted vehicles, large and small, with relation to the Sshh bus and transport home for wheelchair using students, finding out how much it would cost to train a mental-health first aider, and looking into how we’d fundraise for that, doing some research into Disabled Students Allowance and hopefully preparing the leaflet on it to circulate to students, making contact with the local Save Our Services group so that we can be aware of cuts that might affect the provision of health, and especially mental health, services locally, researching local community groups that we could engage with, making contact with The Village about adapted shower usage, and linking them up with the SU and Educational Support Office if possible so that students can be aware of its availability, researching local adapted sports teams, finding out the state of affairs with wheelchair / adapted sports and BUCS, writing a motion on general meetings and access breaks, finding out what other universities do about lecture notes and how that benefits disabled students at those universities, catching up with the access to Founders’ Library campaign, get started on the pack regarding benefits available to disabled students, and setting up the facebook groups (one open to anyone who wants to work on or be involved with disabled students related issues at Holloway, and the other for disabled students at Holloway only).

I know that sounds like a lot, and I don’t think I’ll manage to get it all done this summer, but even making a start would be great!

I’ll be sure to update you when there’s something to update you with!

Meanwhile, if there’s anything you want to be involved with, or anything you want to see done, feel free to contact me on facebook (Matthew Reuben), twitter (PublicMatt) and soon I’ll be able to give you my exec email address for you to email me on. Be aware that I will have very limited internet until the beginning of August so don’t expect a fast response.

Best

Matt