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Our Plan

Our Mission

Sunderland SU’s mission is centred on shaping students’ lives for the future.

 

Our Vision

Building student communities by being brave in our advocacy, fun in our activities, and experts in students and their lives.

A queue of young people going into a University building that has 'Welcome to your space on campus' in text on the side

Enabler #1

New Union Values

We will think about activities through the lens of our new values of bravery and fun. We will be braver in how we champion students, including in how we engage students, work with and challenge the University, and in how staff critically support each other and their students to success. 

Brave aims to support the staff team to consider how we stretch and challenge each other, students, and their relationships with key partners across Sunderland. Being brave means fighting and advocating for students, having the courage to take risks, and being bold in asking for what is needed by the Union for the good of our members. 

Fun will be at the heart of our activity. Activities which are fun support students to learn and grow, support staff to be more ambitious in their design and development of activities, and bring lightness, curiosity and play to the world of SU policy and practice. Being a Union is about building structures, activities and systems which members feel they belong to and want to be a part of, and fun needs to be a key driver of this activity by staff and student leaders. 

Enabler #2

Embedding community organising

Our campuses in Sunderland and London need to be place-based to best meet the needs of the students in these spaces.

Our members have different needs in different places, and our aim is not to solve all their problems but to work with them where they can organise on things that matter to them.

Students on both campuses need to see the community organising model working in every facet of the work the Union does.

  1. Run a set number of community organising campaigns a year to ensure that students, Officers, student representatives and the University are working together to support the best possible outcomes for students.
  2. Empower student leaders, including Student Communities Officers (SCOs) and Student Voice Representatives (SVRs) with the training, authority and resources to engage senior leaders, work with Officer teams, and the Union to embed student representation and tackle persistent and challenging issues.
  3. Support student leaders to participate in the full range of our activities, including campaigns, representation and events. Students should feel able to take a greater role in designing, shaping and leading campaigns, and be supported through training, resourcing and engagement to make their views heard and seen. 
Enabler #3

Centring academic representation

We can continue to hold a positive relationship with key stakeholders at the University whilst deciding which campaigns to push, such as in areas relating to academic representation which most deeply impact student experience.

We will build a reputation with the University for working on issues where evidence illustrates their urgency and we have the ability to transform lives. The accumulation of seemingly small-scale issues that nonetheless have a cumulatively negative impacts on the lives of students will form a core part of our campaigning.

Academic representation will be one of the main priorities for the Union. We will:

  1. Continue to review our support for SVRs, how they use their SCOs, and what additional support these roles may need to succeed across both campuses.
  2. Monitor the effectiveness of SVRs and introduce processes which support them to continually develop.
  3. Commit to targets for academic representation, including stronger quantitative and qualitative data collection of successful and unsuccessful campaigns and using ‘Rep Roundtables’ to harness peer learning and development, build staff buy in and share case studies.
Enabler #4

Intentional student-facing provision 

The current Officer team, student representatives and staff team are successful because they are so predominantly student facing. We want to spend even more time directly with students to understand their issues, concerns and what they need from the Union.

Everything the Union does should be viewed through the lens of whether the activity will enable to us to make students’ lives better. We will

  1. Work with the University as partners in volunteering. We will wind down our volunteering activities and focus our efforts on supporting the universities, societies and self-organised groups of students.
  2. Be brave in stopping. Commercial expansion is not for us. Instead, we will prepare more detailed business cases for investment in key growth areas from the University.
  3. Step back where we are not experts and step forward where we are. We will focus on fewer higher quality events, reaching out beyond the communities we currently engage, and invest in growing our campaigns in London and our engagement with local communities in Sunderland. 
  4. Harness tried-and-tested expertise, experience and learning to fuel the Union’s portfolio of activities across both campuses to support students to organise and become better changemakers. 
Enabler #5

High support, high challenge 

The Union will foster an internal culture which supports our staff to stretch and challenge each other.

Staff will feel able to hold each other to high standards, set ambitious targets, and set development goals to ensure that activities remain high quality and are delivered as efficiently and effectively as possible.  In return, we will support them to succeed.

The aim is a high support and high challenge culture. We will:

  • Set clear goals and targets for the Union’s portfolio of student activity and challenging each other to be braver. 
  • Support the success of staff helping them know where their skills can be developed and what support is available.
  • Provide the necessary challenge and support to enable staff to thrive. 
Enabler #6

Building student capacity 

We need to get stronger in our ability to reflect, review and embed learning throughout the year. 

Capacity can only be built where we fully understand the strengths, gaps and weaknesses in our current provision, including the capacity and skills of student leaders. This means holding staff and reps accountable to collecting data and information in a timely way, dedicating shared learning spaces to reviewing information, and key plans of action and processes for mobilising on emerging issues and new campaigns. 

Student leaders can be further supported with the skills need to organise their community. We will:

  1. Provide high quality training, support and engagement to student leaders (whether reps or ad-hoc supporters of key campaigns) through Officers, student representatives and SU staff.
  2. Grow the numbers of students who actively participate in, and lead campaigns delivered by the Union across an academic year.
  3. Collect more data on outcomes demonstrated by students and student leaders participating in Union activities, events and campaigns to provide a better understanding of the Union’s impact, ability to make change, and create stronger changemakers and organisers. 
  4. Strengthen the participation in, and impact of, academic societies.