Amelia looks back on her "best and most challenging year"

Monday 27-07-2020 - 11:50

Amelia holding an orange board the says "I am Durham because I am a Durham student". Bubbles float round her.Putting liberation at the heart of welfare

Amelia McLoughlan reflects on her year as your Welfare and Liberation Officer

It’s hard to know how to condense this year into words… Having the privilege of being your Welfare and Liberation Officer has truly meant everything to me personally, it’s been the best and most challenging year of my life. I came into this year no stranger to student leadership, and have always had a strong belief in and vision for welfare and liberation – essentially for me they are the same thing. I don’t believe you can fully engage with concepts of welfare and student wellbeing without considering how an individual’s status in society affects that, and by incorporating liberation. The one thing I have seen is that liberation is still underestimated, little understood and generally pushed aside as a problematic and activist activity. This will never cease to baffle me. I don’t know how, for example, you can talk about student mental health without acknowledging that students of colour, those from the LGBT+ community or disabled students are at a higher risk of developing difficulties and face a variety of specific structural and social barriers in accessing support.  

This ethos is why I have spent the majority of this year working on the liberation strategy – a students’ union internal policy that sets out key benchmarks for us as an organisation, and ensures that we consider liberation issues in all of our projects as well as in our day-to-day activities. This has been a huge endeavour, not only highlighting liberation, but committing to centring the voices of student leaders from these marginalised communities. It is vitally important, but only the first step as this will be developed and co-produced with the consultation of the liberation associations that represent these communities. I’ve been hugely proud of how these leaders have continued to achieve so much great work, in a frankly harrowing year.  Amelia points at new baby changing facilities in the toilets

I have been committed to supporting and empowering welfare and liberation, especially in those areas which are not usually classed as “welfare”, including societies that promote mental health, the excellent work of DiaSoc (Diabetes Society) this year, coordinating the student-led fight against sexual violence with groups like #It’sNOTOK and #NotOnMyCampus, improving my own intersectional feminism, and highlighting all the students supporting their peers in their day-to-day activity, without a title and without any recognition. 

Beyond the job description...

While some of this work, such as my involvement in the Respect Commission report, is very much embedded in the job description, the work I have been most proud of this year has come not from myself but in response to the students that contacted me. The opportunity to raise up the voices of students with children was the greatest part of my year – not only setting up a task and finish group in order for the University to address specific issues, but also requesting facilities be installed into our own building and make a material difference immediately. The feedback I received this year also greatly shaped my work fighting for hardship funds, an issue that instantly emerged as having a significant impact on students wellbeing (well before the pandemic), and especially on the often-forgotten postgraduate students.  

At times this year has been frustrating, with many important projects being delayed, essential reviews being pushed into the long grass and the long, slow arms of the University often resisting change. Then of course, a pandemic happened! Ironically, the pandemic of all things I believe, actually aided myself and the rest of the team get certain stuff done. However, these successes were balanced by the sudden change in environment, and the imperative to protect student interests in the most difficult of circumstances. I have learnt that a big part of this job is not just to have a vision and ideas for a better Durham, but to be able to navigate the unexpected crises and issues that you never planned for. This is not less than any previous priority, it is important work that impacts the lives of students, even when students don’t always get to see it. 

Amelia sits in a wheelchair blowing bubbles outside Durham Students' UnionBarriers, challenges, but also pride

This year has had a great impact on me personally, and my discovery that I absolutely and utterly love policy as a driver for social change. I was a postgraduate student, and still am (proudly) a complete nerd! I have had the joy of training Welfare Officers at our Welfare Retreat, supporting some truly inspiring individuals, and going to Parliament arguing the case that a focus on ‘resilience’ rather than actual mental health support is absolute rubbish… This is not to say there have not been barriers, challenges and some personally dark times. This time last summer, I would have never thought that disabled students would have found the strength to call out the University for institutional disablism. I have never been so proud as to see some of these conversations finally start, but at the same time, as someone who is physically disabled themselves, I would never have believed the level of sometimes hostile defensiveness I faced in carrying forward the student voice. 

Looking forward

I hope that in my time I have made Durham a bit more aware, made the students’ union more confident in facing the hard discussions, and improved support for those students who are the most excluded from our community. Today, at the start of handover week I am super excited for my successor – Ewan Swift – to start his own journey and make this role his own.  

Categories:

Welfare and Liberation Officer

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2019-20, Amelia McLoughlan, Farewell, Reflections, Welfare and Liberation Officer,

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