New SU president, Eva Crosson Jory. Pic: Goldsmiths Student Union
Goldsmiths incoming Students’ Union president has told how she thinks the organisation can do better in the wake of her successful election earlier this month.
The President-elect, Eva Crosson Jory says she has very clear ideas on how she wants it to be run.
The Students’ Union elections were held between February 27 and March 3. 1,211 people voted for next year’s President, meaning the quota to be elected was only 606.
During a live stream via Facebook on the results night, Eva Crosson Jory was announced SU President with 809 votes. The crowd chanted her name as she headed to the stage to thank her voters through tears. Her acceptance speech was a simple: “Thank you to everyone who helped me, you’re all amazing…I can’t really talk.”
As this year’s Campaigns and Activities Officer, Crosson Jory has achieved a lot for the students at Goldsmiths, from working with Cut the Rent and winning £650,000 for strikers, to creating the successful ‘This Girl Can’ campaign, which resulted in all of the nominees for Sports Officer this year being female.
However, she is not finished yet. She told EastLondonlines: “I felt that a year wasn’t a very long time and I had done quite a lot of stuff as Campaigns and Activities Officer, but there was a lot that I still wanted to finish.
“Our SU has been building itself back up this year and we haven’t had the opportunity to do a lot of the things that I wanted to do last year. I thought that if I ran again, I could finish those things, but also be in a place where I could start new projects a lot easier. This year, it had been really difficult to even find out basic information about the SU because it was a really confusing place.”
Crosson Jory plans on tackling the confusion that surrounds the SU by making it a more inclusive and accessible place for Goldsmiths students. To do so, she wants to ensure that students are aware of the Student Union, as she has found many do not know it exists, and she would like to make it a less intimidating place.
“I want to make it a less scary place to engage with. Not feeling like you have to engage with everything, just being able to choose what strand you want to go down and which bit you want to be involved in,” she added.
Goldsmiths’ students are a priority to the new President, particularly their involvement in the Student Union as she strives to make part-time officer roles more appealing.
She continued: “Another thing that I’m hopefully going to do next year is paying our part-time officers. Obviously, it being voluntary means a lot of students can’t apply for it because they have part-time jobs elsewhere and we can’t just expect to work off student labour. We need to pay them so hopefully more people can apply for those roles and be a bit more involved.”
Her biggest aim for her term, however, is to resolve one of the most common issues that students have approached her with; housing.
Crosson Jory said to Eastlondonlines: “One of the things that I would really want to do is have a housing advice service and an estate agent in our Student Union. Landlords treat students so badly that we do need to have something in place to help them. Having an estate agent in the SU would mean we could accredit the landlords and have less of those situations.”
