Throughout 2016, Imperial College Union has been working on its new strategy that will set its direction from the start of 2017 right through to August 2020, the end of the 2019/20 academic year. We have been consulting with students - our members - throughout this year to get their needs and wants firmly integrated into our strategy.
The story so far
We started with Ideas Days in March 2016 , bringing interactive stalls to the South Kensington campus, designed to get your feedback on a number of themes and topics to help kickstart our strategy. Your Officer Trustee teams, this year and last, took your feedback and used it to form a first draft of strategic themes for consideration. The next step was to test these with our members to see if we were on the right track of where our strategy should go, and this took place during Freshers’ Fair this year.
We asked you - broken down into first years, second-fourth year Undergraduates and Postgraduates - what matters to you the most out of the following:
- Fun events
- Accommodation / halls / landlord issues
- Club, Society & Project funding
- Mental health / wellbeing
- “Sort out my gripes”, e.g. air con in the library
- Challenging College, e.g. teaching and feedback, NSS response
These results have helped us shape what we see as future objectives - things that we will put into our strategy to work on and achieve over the next three years.
You can read strategy so far by clicking here - it's also posted below.
Now is the final consultation stage - this is where you come in.
Over the next few weeks we will be running an online survey open to all students. We want to know how you view the range of services and experiences that the Union and College offer, as well as your academic experience, your Constituent Unions and your experience on non South Kensington campuses. You can win one of three £25 Amazon vouchers for taking part. You can click here to take the survey. The survey will now be open until 23:59 Friday 2 December.
We will be also be running some sessions at various campuses in the next few weeks where you can talk to us about these topics and give us your feedback in person. These sessions will be run throughout the rest of November - look out for more information about these sessions in the next few days.
We will also be running targeted focus groups to look in greater depth at specific aspects of the strategy. If you want to be involved in these focus groups, especially if you don’t consider yourself involved with the Union, please get in touch at union@imperial.ac.uk as we would love to hear from you.
What’s next?
Your Officer Trustee team will work alongside Jarlath O’Hara, the Managing Director of the Union, to finish writing the strategy to be signed off by our Board of Trustees , the Union’s governing body, in early December. After that we’ll be launching the new strategy in January 2017, and then of course, putting it into action!
The new strategy is as much yours as it is ours.
Your feedback has and will continue to help set the direction and priorities of the Union in the years ahead. Take our survey and have your say, or attend one of our sessions in the next few weeks. This is your chance to shape the Union into what you want it to be.
