Dear Students,

I want to congratulate you on completing your year of study in 2018/19. For myself, this year was at times one of the most difficult of my life, but in the end was undoubtedly the most rewarding and was incredibly special. I had the immense privilege of serving you this year as your UMSU president, and for those that are graduating, I wish you all the best in your future. For those returning, I look forward to being able to serve you again, and I hope to connect with as many of you as I can this upcoming year.

This year I entered my term with three core commitments; Fight for affordable and accessible education, engage students in our decision making, and create a stronger community on our campus. While there is much room to grow, I want to outline some of the major accomplishments my team and I were able to achieve this year.

While we are in a difficult environment with cuts to operating funding and changes to tuition legislation, we have diligently fought for affordable and accessible education. After lobbying at all levels of government, we saw student loans remain interest free in Manitoba and the rate reduced at the federal level. We convinced the university to cover international health care this past year and are working towards a hardship fund for international health care going forward. We have also worked with the university to set up a strategy going forward reducing textbook costs through open educational resources.

Further, we have been at city hall constantly advocating for a summer UPass, something we’re confident we can bring in 2020, and we successfully lobbied Parking Services to implement flex parking to begin in fall 2019. Finally, we served our most ever students this year with 182 holiday hampers, increasing sponsorship for the program.

We’ve engaged our students in new ways this year with participatory budgeting, resulting in major increases in scholarships and bursaries for students. We’ve also begun efforts to give students more of a choice in their external advocacy by working towards a referendum on CFS membership and taking a lead role in formalizing UCRU – a lobbying organization for U15 research universities.

As well, we started three new working groups this year, including our sustainability group which hosted a successful campaign week and has worked to help implement a new sustainability strategy across campus including a composting plan.

To build our campus community we’ve engaged students in and out of the classroom. Academically, we launched our new peer tutoring program this January, and have been pressing the university to take a leadership role in addressing Indigenous students’ calls for increased Indigenous course content  and language offerings.

We’ve also increased our spaces for student clubs, and initiated more social programming and involvement for orientation on all campuses. At a larger scale, we held the most financially successful FROSH in years, and brought forward more inclusive programming with our Monique Hart drag show event and the start of our centennial speaker series with Ian Campeau and soon Laverne Cox.

In addition, we’ve partnered with Moods Disorders Association of Manitoba for a peer mental health support training project, and ran the students lets act campaign to increase funding for mental health supports. In terms of campus safety, we’ve been actively engaged in revising the sexual violence and RWLE policies and have been working towards a new sexual violence resource, support and education centre.

It has been my utmost privilege to serve you this year, and I look forward to nothing more than the opportunity to do so again.

Sincerely,

Thank you,

Miigwech,

Jakob Sanderson
President
UMSU