Hi everyone, Camille here. I’ve been your Students’ Union President over the last academic year and I am delighted to have been re-elected for a second term for 2024-2025!
As we head into a new academic year, I want to let you know about an exciting project that we’re kicking off this summer to make your students’ union better at representing you and your views - our Democracy Review!
Let me tell you about what this means and why it’s important. Our current democratic structure has been developed over the last 110 years. This review means we have the opportunity to take a holistic look at whether our current ways for you to contribute to the Union are effective, impactful and accessible to all Imperial students. It’s all about trying to improve your Union so we ensure we’re representing students; it should change some of the ways we do things, enabling a more inclusive and representative students' union in the future.
Imperial College Union has reviewed its democratic structure internally in the past, but this time, we want to do a larger, broader job, making sure that we’ve spoken to as many students as possible. That’s why we’ve engaged an external sector consultancy that’s independent from ICU – CounterCulture LLP – to help us with focus groups, interviews and data gathering, as well as their knowledge of other structures in students’ unions, so that we can ensure our structures best serve our students as well as taking on board best practice from what’s happening in other SUs.
This is where you come in. We will be running consultations and surveys with all students in the Autumn Term – whether you are a volunteer, a society member or simply an interested student, we want to hear what you think. Watch this space for more information soon on how you can contribute and feed into this.
Once all this is together, we will present a proposal for how our new structure(s) will look. Hopefully, then, for the start of the 2025–2026 academic year, we will have a democratic structure that best represents students effectively and efficiently. If you have any questions, please get in touch – we’d love to hear from you!
Yours,
Camille
Camille Boutrolle
Union President