SU Semester Recap

It’s been a busy semester at Queen’s Students’ Union!

Here’s just a snapshot of what your Student Officers and SU Staff have worked on this semester to represent and support Queen’s students:

• We distributed over 4,800 free breakfasts to students where we learned that the main pressure points you were experiencing were the costs of: transport; accommodation; fuel; and food. We’re working on how we can support you in these areas in the New Year
• We successfully lobbied the University and recieved:
  • Cost-of-Living Payment for students, which will be distributed at the end of January
  • increase the amount of funding into student financial support funds of £600k
  • reduce disciplinary fines
  • remove graduation and library fees for the year
• We have been representing your interests at the Queen’s Cost-of-Living Group
• We are directly feeding into and championing the ‘Cost of Survival’ Campaign with NUS-USI.
• We have met with several politicians, including: the Minister for the Economy; the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland; and the US Ambassador to the UK, and have continuously raised concerns around Cost of Living, as well as how the lack of a functioning Executive is impacting students
• We also attended the Cost-of-Living Coalition demonstration to demand action on the crisis amidst the political deadlock at Stormont
• We have created a Cost-of-Living Web Section on our website, which has a host of useful information at this time

• Our new dedicated space for the SU Sexual Health Clinics opened in September, with the clinics running 2 days a week in partnership with the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust
• We have delivered nine Look After Your Mate peer support training sessions
• Several recent events were held to support student wellbeing including Hopewalk to raise awareness of suicide prevention and the Volunteering and Wellbeing fair

• RAG will be supporting Homeplus NI and Pure Mental for 22/23
• The RAG Chair and voluntary committee have been recruited and successfully delivered the first Freshers’ pub crawl since 2019
• This semester, RAG has raised £5,000 for it’s chosen charities

• We advised over 800 students on a total of 1,700 issues
• We helped students unlock over 40k of funding based on the advice we provided
• We have teamed up with financial education specialists, Blackbullion, to provide students free of charge access to their money skills online learning platform filled with videos, graphics, and quizzes covering areas such as:
  • 21-Day Money Bootcamp
  • Starting University
  • Savings
  • Budgeting
  • Debt
• So far, 440 students have registered to Blackbullion. If you haven’t registered yet you can do so here

• Our annual Freshers’ Fair took place in the new Mandela Hall, with 15,000 students attending
• We have recently launched a new podcast, “The SU Clubs Podcast” to profile the activities and achievements of the 55+ Sporting Clubs at Queen’s. Listen here
• We provided £40,000 of funding to Societies
• We helped allocate more than £100,000 of funding to Sporting Clubs
• SU Clubs and Societies memberships currently total 12,089 (Clubs: 2,491; Societies: 9,598)
• We have ratified 9 new SU Clubs and Societies:
  • Student Healthcare Audit Society
  • Tamil Society
  • Women in STEM Society
  • Animal Law Society
  • Arab Society
  • Belfast University Royal Navy Unit
  • Taylor Swift Society
  • We Are Donors Fionntan
  • Women in Engineering Society

• We have 30 students participating in our InnovateHer Programme
• We ran our What’s the Big Idea? Competition where 11 students were recipients of awards, find out more here
• Applications are now open for our QUB Dragons’ Den Competition, find out more here
• 8 student businesses progressed to the final of INVENT 2022, Northern Ireland’s largest Innovation Programme. 4 Students were award winners, winning a total of £35,000
• Held our first Makers’ Market which gave current and past Queen’s students the opportunity to sell their products and services at the SU

• We are working in partnership with 16 Homework Clubs. Applications for our Semester Two student volunteer intake are now open
• 16 community regeneration projects have been delivered in the wider university area as part of our Handy Helpers Programme
• Our Handy Helpers Programme has been recognised through a Mural by local artist Eoin McGinn for our work on sustaining Wildflower Alley and the impact the volunteering efforts have had on the local community
• 10 Jump In sessions and events have been planned for 2022/23 including training for Academic Reps, QUB RAG and SU Clubs and Societies Committee Members
• We held a Volunteering and Wellbeing Fair that was attended by 700+ students

• We managed the election/recruitment, training and support of 700+ Student Reps including:
  • Full-Time Student Officers
  • Part-Time Student Officers
  • Student Councillors
  • Faculty Reps
  • School Reps
  • Course Reps
• Supported the Full-Time and Part-Time Student Officer Teams with their lobbying efforts, campaigns and events throughout this semester
• We held 2 all-student votes
• We held 4 Student Council Meetings and 10 EMC meetings 

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We hope you have a peaceful break. See you next semester!