Making (all) student members meetings work

As in, all of the members can come. Not all meetings that have members at them.

A few weeks ago I posted a blog which has probably got more attention than any other.

In it I confessed my fears about the decline of democracy in unions based on what I’ve observed and heard over the Summer. It’s here.

I am all for innovation within a democratic framework and using information to inform decisions, though noting that we shouldn’t “insight” our way out of student decision making or reduce our future plannings to a “First past the post” of 6 ideas on a topic.

Unions have used representative councils and zones, jury systems, online first voting and demographically selected forums to give students a say and allow debate and nuance on the different areas.

Increasingly out of favour, unfairly in my view, is the all members meeting. Without wishing to make this blog a bibliography of past articles you can find this discussion in the archive too – but broadly I believe:

1. It’s good to have a more raw direct process once a year where members can just turn up rather than having to engage via a portal or an additional representative.
2. It’s good for officers and trustees to face direct accountability in the room on an annual basis.
3. Unions are good enough at communications to explain their finances and I’ve never met a student group committee member who doesn’t want to know why they don’t get more funding.
4. There’s not a union that doesn’t want students to understand their work and showcase their successes or communicate their challenges and a student members meeting can do this.
5. If a student members meeting is led by students rather than staff or officers then folks will come. As Jim often says, school plays sell out.

It’s unlikely folks will disagree with the above (though please do if you wish to) but I’m not naïve to the difficulties in doing things this way.

Students aren’t on campus as much, we’ve removed democratic opportunities so doing anything like attending a meeting of this nature becomes more unusual and scary – and of course students are time and economically poor.

Getting organised

When I was extolling the virtues of these forums recently one CEO did reflect that as an external consultant I wasn’t organising it. Fair challenge – and so as a result I’m working with Wonkhe SUs to offer the following free services to unions:

• A webinar for all with ideas to put students front and centre of the meetings, boost engagement and make the meeting a success.
• A selection of unions will get some guided support from myself or a member of the Wonkhe SUs team. This will include 1-2-1 zoom calls with your union before the event to help planning and helping troubleshoot issues. For this we are looking to get a diversity of unions involved, some smaller, some modern, some with more “activist” students – the only criteria to apply is that you’re a WonkheSUs subscriber.

We’ll discuss how to make the meeting meaningful, the finances friendly and put students in the driving seat rather than be confused passengers.

Queries about quorum and communications conundrums will be looked at and the legal requirements related to the ’94 Act and Companies House requirements.

Most importantly though, we want to ensure that these spaces are meaningfully democratic and have the ability to let students shape the union’s activities and hold officers and the board accountable.

If you are interested let us know. In return for the support from Wonkhe or myself unions will be expected to contribute some (simple) evaluation about the processes they went through so that a free resource to support unions can be created ready for the 2026/7 academic year.

The webinar will be on 19th November at 4pm – and if you want to sign up as one of the unions for support contact mack@wonkhe.com