How to survive the student rep apocalypse

Woody Harrison in Zombieland said that the two things that would survive the apocalypse are cockroaches and the American packaged cake - Twinkies.

Covid-19 as well as many other factors have brought on what I have coined “The Death of the Volunteer/Rep” - where traditional student voluntary roles have seen significant difficulty in recruitment and retention.

The one volunteering area where I have seen engagement thrive is academic/course based societies.

On average, they are filling their committees, running more events, and seeing their memberships grow.

Why is this? And how can faculties and SUs utilise them in a wider capacity.

Death of the volunteer

It is no secret that the sector has faced significant difficulty with volunteering engagement. Work that Martha Roberts led on with myself at UoNSU showed that Part-Time Officer roles are left empty - and the ones who take it up are incredibly unhappy with their experiences.

While working on the mass audit of representation systems I spoke to countless colleagues across HE who were begging for a solution to their lack of rep engagement.

This was from all types of systems - elected, selected, and open sign-ups. The solutions we have seen around micro volunteering and converting unpaid roles to paid roles suggest a theory of change - that to solve this engagement problem, these are the root issues:

• Students are deciding between work and voluntary roles and would prefer to take paid work even if it is not mentally stimulating
• Students are time poor - more students are working, more students are commuting, more students coming through to HE have a range of other commitments to survive

I do not disagree that these are some of the root causes of the Death of The Volunteer and we need to solve them to not just increase engagement generally but to also increase engagement from students who are affected more by these issues to to their backgrounds and identities.

But when we have seen roles converted to paid opportunities, there is an initial increase in engagement but then it drops back off again after a few years.

Why academic societies work

So why are we seeing an increase in engagement with academic societies whilst we are in this volunteering apocalypse?

On the face of it, academic societies should be facing the same issues. The amount of work it takes for a student volunteer to run a society is significantly more than a Course Rep or a local volunteer. The answer is self-determination.

When I conducted my research into student change making and activism in HE through my masters thesis as well as into trans and non-binary student belonging - these have endured because students created and maintained the structures of their voice, their community building, and their experiences.

Academic societies develop systems on how students want to learn and revise based on what students want; create events and decide on speakers based on student voice; bring in employability opportunities and companies based on what students are interested in.

Course reps, volunteering opportunities, part-time officer campaigns and all the other volunteering opportunities that are struggling at the moment may have been co-created by students back in the day but they are rigid structures that we force engagement through.

Utilising academic societies correctly

So, how do we utilise them without losing the essence that makes them work? From my wide ranging experience of supporting academic societies within the sector, here are the key successes I have developed:

• Bulk membership purchasing - having a school/faculty purchase membership for every 1st year student no matter what study level. This creates a consistent funding pot for the society to utilise, create the culture of membership engagement for students, and lets the society focus on returning student engagement and running activities.
• Utilising them in recruitment and onboarding - Invite your societies to do something at your open days or applicant visit days but let them have the freedom to develop what that activity/purpose is. Work with them to create their space for Welcome engagement within the faculty. Whatever you use them for, make sure they are leading the activity and you are compensating them for their time as it shows the value and respect the faculty have for the students.
• Creating true co-creative spaces for community development - integrating academic society leaders into traditional committee structures does not work but creating relationships between course leaders and societies with expert training and support does work well. When wanting to do this at a faculty level with senior staff and multiple academic societies, expert co-creative facilitation on a quarterly basis helps the effective learning and integration whilst ensuring society independent decision making and activity building.

What is the future?

All these tips are focused on the traditional roles of Academic Societies as community building and peer academic support but with the difficulties around rep and voice engagement - are they the solution to that problem?

There are significant considerations around how to ensure representativeness, diversity and effective engagement.

If there is a way to integrate academic societies effectively by converting our representative democracy of reps to a participatory democracy with these groups as a vehicle of communication and promotion?

And even if that sounds hard - aren’t ideas like this a useful first step?

These questions are something that is being tested within the sector (including myself) - so watch this space in the coming academic years.