AMS President Chris Hakim’s emphasis on pushing student consultation faced an interesting roadblock this year: money.
In his year as president, Hakim’s major successes include prioritization of passing the Indigenous seat on AMS Council, the creation and implementation of the AMS Sexual Violence Prevention and Respectful Community and Workplace Policy and the beginnings of a comprehensive AMS Strategic Plan.
‘Money matters’
But Hakim’s consultation dialogue was slightly diluted in his conversation with The Ubyssey by his major takeaway from his year of president: “Money matters.”
“Money matters when it comes to the university in terms of how we ensure that we're meeting those large-scale priorities and asking what students want from the university,” Hakim said. “Mental health supports, food insecurity, supports for sexual violence, support to student affordability, this all matters and at the end of the day, it waters down to how much [it’s] going to cost people.”
Hakim placed emphasis on having a “thoughtful” budgeting process moving forward in the AMS and acknowledged his own naiveté in budgeting.
“One great example [is the] strategic plan. How much money did we put aside for it? Not enough, we only probably put like a thousand dollars,” Hakim said.
The Strategic Plan, intended to shape the AMS for the next five years, was presented to AMS Council last fall and at this point was supposed to be in the “Complete Strategic Actions” phase, to be sent to Council in April. But Hakim said that the project is “on hold,” due to the lack of funding.
“If you want to get this right, you need to put an important amount of investment into making sure that we're bringing in experts in strategic planning, who can make sure that the AMS when creating this monumental project ... [is doing it] right,” Hakim said. “That means that we're making sure that we're having strong consultation processes that involve students as well.”
Student engagement and consultation
Even with student consultation and engagement at top of mind all year, Hakim had some missteps.
The AMS’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) this year had low turnout, something that has been the case for most years of the AMS’s existence. It was also due to the lack of advertisement around the event, something Hakim said was a “failure on his part” at an October Council meeting.
“I believe a theme for the AMS in its future moving forward is, ‘How do you be more ambitious and how do you be more innovative?’ Because the old model of hosting just one big forum, in the lower level of the nest, with a few hundred seats and hoping that students would suddenly attend just does not work,” Hakim said.
A transition report has been written on the AGM, and Hakim hopes that the report and reflections that have occurred throughout the year will improve the issue.
Most recently, the process to sell two pieces of art from the AMS permanent art collection, saw opposition from Sale of Hatch Art Planning & Execution committee members and the Visual Arts Students’ Association when it was presented to Council in February.
Hakim has chalked it up to a misunderstanding and said since then, himself and VP Administration Cole Evans have re-evaluated the entire consultation process.
Policy successes
The creation of the Sexual Violence Prevention and Respectful Community and Workplace Policy is an accomplishment that matters “the most” to Hakim.
“The development process for these two policies have been some of the most comprehensive policy-making work that looked to be driven largely by feedback from our community stakeholders,” he said.
At Council on April 22, Hakim noted that there will be no data to measure the impact of this policy until the end of the fiscal year.
Hakim also emphasized the passage of the Indigenous seat in the recent referendum.
“This referendum is monumental in the sense that it's changing the fundamental structure of the AMS is to put Indigenous voices at the highest … governing body of the AMS,” Hakim said, calling the relationship between the AMS and the Indigenous Committee one of the society’s “top priorities.”
Looking forward, Hakim is hoping that more money will be budgeted to fund Indigenous initiatives.
“How do we look at supporting their work? How do we look at ensuring that we're allocating finances and money from our budget in a way that supports Indigenous student projects? And that's going to be really key in this budgeting process.”
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