Clubs Office: What have we been up to this year?

If you are interested in any of these projects, we are now hiring for the 2017-2018 school year! All job descriptions are available at www.myams.org/apply .

The clubs community at Queen’s has always played an integral role in enhancing student involvement while offering unique opportunities outside of the classroom. Students are able to develop professional skills, make lifetime friends and most importantly find a community that they feel at home with.

For the past eight months, the Clubs Office has been working hard to rebuild our relationship with clubs and revitalize the resources that are made available. By using LWT’s service driven clubs platform as our guide, we strived to make sure that the clubs community was consistently receiving support from their student government.

These were our promises to you, and we will continue to work hard till the end of our term to ensure that clubs are consistently given support and acknowledged for all the amazing initiatives and opportunities that they bring to campus.

Rebuilding trust

The main priority for the Clubs Office this year was to strengthen and rebuild a relationship with the clubs community that was built on support. To do this, we strived to increase consistent communication between clubs and supported club initiatives and events.

Clubs Caucus: This year we held bi-monthly meetings where all club executives were invited to attend and voice any ideas, questions or concerns that they may have. This encouraged conversation between club executives as well as the clubs office so that we were able to tackle any problems as they happened. We hope that this will continue to be used as a venue for discussion and collaboration within the clubs community.

Providing better resources

New Clubs Grant: A new grant was created this year to help support newly ratified clubs who were anticipating start-up costs. This allowed them to begin planning initiatives on campus without having as big of a financial burden.

Clubs Bursary Program: This program created last winter, has continued to benefit students looking to attend club-related events but face financial barriers. We’ve had over 40 successful applicants and will continue to promote this resource so that all students are able to take advantage of it.

Clubs Manual: A 30+ manual was created to centralize all important and relevant information pertaining to starting and/or running a club. This manual can be found under the Clubs section of the AMS website.

Space Upgrades: After consulting with clubs, we’ve added additional storage shelves, whiteboards and vacuums in each of our shared spaces in the Queen’s Centre. Moving forward, we hope to consult with clubs to ensure that all our spaces are equipped with the necessary resources.

Hiring Platform: We are currently working on a centralized job board that will allow clubs to post hiring applications and general member recruitment in one convenient location. This will be released in early March and will be open and available year round for both clubs and students to use.

Greater independence

Re-ratification and Space Allocation: We will be combining the two application processes into one this year so that they may be open longer and club executives will only have to submit one form.  

Event sanctioning: For the past four months, we have been working with the Campus Activities Commission to see how we can make the process of sanctioning events easier for clubs to use. We are in the process of reviewing the application form and looking into ways in which we can improve its functionality to make it more user friendly.