Calling all PG students!

Are you a current PG student at the University or will you be a PG student in September?

If so, on June 29th we will be holding a focus group at 11am in the Mandela Room in the Guild in order to gauge opinions on what the new PG space will look like. In 12 months time a new PG space will be opened in a more accessible place and we want to hear from PG's what they want from a new space.

It doesn't matter if you are a research or taught student, or if you are leaving soon - all opinions are welcome.

Email h.lazell@guild.bham.ac.uk - refreshments will be provided!

Uni Cash

At the May Guild Council I was asked whether the Guild would be able to incorporate the UniCash system that is currently used in halls and other university outlets to pay for food.

I discussed this with staff who had already met with the university and it turns out that the UniCash trials have not been succesful and the scheme will be discontinued apart from the meal plans in halls.

Therefore we won't be introducing it into the new Guild cafe! Sorry!

Name your new bar!

As you should have heard by now, the Guild is going under a significant redevelopment over the next 12 months.
One aspect of this sees the bar moving from its current location over to the other side of the building where STA travel, print and post and UB clothing are currently located. And because the bar will be moving to a new location and will be serving food for the first time in many years (and possibly ever), its probably fitting to see if Joe's is still the name that people want for the bar.

So we've set up a competition to name the new bar - which can be entered here http://www.guildofstudents.com/guildbuild/content/131425/_name_your_new_bar/
Just enter the name you think the new bar should be called and a few details, and then we will be in touch. The winner will get £100 in cash and the entries will be judged by a panel in July.

A quick update...

Hello avid readers,

Apologies for not blogging for a while - I took a weeks annual leave and went to France and Spain with some friends - it was very hot and the food was good.

But back to reality, and since I got back to the Guild on Wednesday I have been flat out doing all sorts of things.

I had lots of incident reports to deal with after Fab, which took up a lot of time! Althought I cannot talk about talk about them in detail, its amazing how just a few people being stupid when they are drunk can take over most of your day!

Attended Culture Fest which was organised by Hollie and Rich, well done to them both. I attended a talk given by Action for Southern Africa, went to the Farmers Market, listened to the funky music and got some free starbucks stuff....

Went to the usual meetings and 121's, including Student Groups Committee.

I have some more updates but I shall dedicate individual posts to them!

Improving environmental performance...

One of the things I am doing at the moment is improving our environmental performance, off the back of our Silver Award for Sound Impact. Obviously, this has to be maintained, and there are always we can improve.

At the moment I am looking at operational things - such as making sure that useable crockery and cutlery are used in the new cafe, along with free range ingredients where possible, as these are just as important as anything massively visual that we may choose to do.

When I was at the NUSSL dinner other unions won awards or were highly commended for being innovative in their work. Reading won an award for doing a "Reading in Bloom" competition - students were encouraged to plant flowers in their gardens to make their environment nicer, and Loughborough won an award for the E+E section of their website, found at http://www.lufbra.net/eande/. And UEA got commended for their food labelling scheme - where they labelled food based on food miles.

Although I'm getting on with the operation stuff, do you have any ideas on innovative things we can do to raise awareness about the environment? This can be about the local environment or the wider world.

If you do, let me know on h.lazell@guild.bham.ac.uk

Guild Council Review

This is a really hard blog post for me to write as it is something that I have been trying to achieve for the last year - but sadly Guild Council will not be changing in the new academic year.
There are several reasons for this but it is mainly because not enough time has been given to the project as the scale of the work was not understood by the organisation when it was undertaken. It became apparent last night at the meeting of the Guild Council review group that the models produced as a result of the review day required far more than the straightforward discussion that was anticipated.
I feel as though this is a real failure for students because the current system is woefully inadequate and outdated - in fact Guild Council has not been chnaged since 1975.
I will be handing this over to my successor, Tom Guise, who I hope will have far more support and success than I did.

One last gem...

...from the alternative prospectus....

"The university have 2,000 computers and the vast majority of them have word processing software"

What did the rest of them have on them then?!