Felix Hawes
Daisy Forster (she/her) is running in the 2022 SU elections for the role of Community Officer. Impact’s Felix Hawes caught up with her to ask her a few questions.
Q1: Why do you think you are good fit for the Community Officer role?
Throughout my time at uni I have been very involved with the Student Union, through societies but also this year I started a campaign to close the gender health gap at the university. Initially… I’d been considering [running for] activities officer as it seemed to fit very well with being in lots of societies but essentially I realised that… I wanted to do something that improved the world to a greater extent which is where a lot of my manifesto comes from.
I am the type of person who gets things done
There is a lot of stuff in there about sustainability and rewilding, but there are also bits about refugees and asylum seekers and bits about accessibility and those are the sort of things that make me tick.
I’m a good fit because I am the type of person who gets things done. I don’t just wait around for someone else to do it. I take the bull by the horns and get things sorted out, and I am not afraid to say something when I am not happy about it. I am not going to sit back and let someone else deal with [something]. Many staff in the SU can contest to this about me complaining about stuff. I will always think this is not right, how can we change it?
It is extremely important to listen to the students
Q2: Concerning strikes, how would you position yourself in the SU between students and the Vice Chancellor?
Generally, I do support the strikes. I think that fair working conditions are important for the student experience. We can’t have happy students without happy staff which currently a lot of staff are not happy. It is extremely important to listen to the students. I am planning on having a google form open for the whole year so if a student wants to bring up anything with me they can do in a very accessible way.
Q3: On your manifesto, you say that you would like to get a free bus service from this campus [University Park] to Castle Meadow Campus, how are you going to go about doing that?
I think it is something that will hopefully happen quite naturally. Hopper buses already exist between all of our campuses, even to King’s Meadow which…. no one really gets it, but it still runs so I’m hoping the university will be very supportive of getting a bus service from Uni park to Castle Meadow. But the thing I would really like to emphasise from that manifesto point is that I would like the hopper bus service to be more than just a hopper bus that connects campuses. I’d love it to stop in Lenton and if it can have a couple of extra stops in town as well that would be absolutely ideal.
Q4: You are also proposing to have contraception education workshops. Where do you intend to host these? How regularly do you intend to have them? How would you market them? How many people do you expect to turn up?
That’s something that came up in my gender health gap campaign. Obviously, women know huge amounts about contraception but men not so much. A lot of men kind of think it’s the pill or condoms and that’s it. I realise that there is this big gap between women, and – if they are in heterosexual relationships – their partners so I wanted to try and stop that in a way.
How would I like to execute it? Definitely teaming up with Cripps is something I would love to do. They have got some really great contraceptive specialists at Cripps who know a lot about the different options and can provide great advice so I would love if we can get them to do some talks. I think advertising it, social media is the obvious one, but… [also] going into halls, maybe organising with the residual experience team and actually hosting them in halls would be good. Also posters and all these media outlets we are surrounded by!
Q5: And a fun question to conclude our interview today, George Green or Hallward?
George Green. I am an arts student, but I hate Hallward. I think it looks like a prison. When studying, I like the light that comes from George Green.
Voting for the SU 2022 elections closes at 1pm on Friday 25th March.
You can read Daisy’s manifesto here. The link to vote is here.
Felix Hawes
Featured image courtesy of Chiara Crompton. Permission to use granted to Impact. No changes were made to this image.
In-article image courtesy of Max Harries. Permission to use granted to Impact. No changes were made to this image.
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