SRC Officer Reports – Week 4, Sem 1, 2019

SRC President
Jacky He

You are not Alone!
As semester proceeds and increasing amounts of pressure from study kick in, students might find it increasingly difficult to keep up a healthy state of mind. Remember to engage in sporting activities, take plenty of short breaks so that you don’t become overly stressed and burn out before the end of the semester.

Climate Change Strike
On Friday 15th of March, hundreds of students, both international and domestic, took off on a strike to call for actions to stop global warming and raise a communal awareness towards climate change. The climate change march has landmark significance in showing how much the issue concerns our future generations. The council at SRC endorsed this progressive move so that companies and factories may understand how serious this issue is and begin implementing strategies to minimise carbon pollution. We sincerely hope that government and companies would hear our voice and take more progressive approaches to tackle climate change together.

Wom*ns Officers
Gabi Stricker-Phelps and Crystal Xu

International Women’s Day:
We volunteered with a group of USYD Women to the UN IWD workshop and breakfast #MorePowerfulTogether. Read more, donate or volunteer for UN Women via: http://www.unwomen.org/en.

In the afternoon we organised the screening of Period. End of Sentence. Cady Brown reflected, “The climax of the film- where the woman suggests the name of the sanitary product company will be “fly”- moved me significantly- as the movement is exactly what they wanted women to do- is to fly.”

Sanitary Item Project:
We have free sanitary products in the SRC office under the Wentworth Building for any student at USYD.

Meetings:
We met with Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence and Sophia Zeritis. It was a highly constructive meeting where we discussed our major project ideas, sexual assault and harassment policy and the ways in which the university can work with the SRC to deliver the best outcomes for USYD students.

We attended the Safer Communities Advisory Group Meeting. If you would like to attend (or have people attend) the Bystander Training Program which teaches about what to do when you witness assault or harassment and to safely intervene or Responding with Compassion, we can arrange this.

We met with the University Health Officer and The Breakfast Club where we discussed organising a Women’s Health Week in September. If you have ideas on health services that you would like advertised or provided during the week or about health projects on campus more broadly contact us.

Events:
Upcoming events include:
Vege-Table Mondays- Addison Road Community Centre Marrickville from 18th March
Shared Table Project for local homeless women: 28th March
#Feminist Conversation between Roxane Gay and Christina Hoff Sommers 29th March.

Female Journalism:
We met together with the following girls who responded to our call out including: Kate Scott, Holly McDonald, Amy Mifsud, Caroline Song, Angel Opie, Charlotte Plashik, Sonia Gao, Olivia-James Mckeown, Connie Zhang, Sarah Sekandar and Hannah Kingsmill. If you want to contribute towards an online publication aimed at promoting women’s issues and opinions contact us.

Autonomous Collective Against Racism
Swapnik Sanagavarapu,  Ellie Wilson, Himath Siriniwasa and Mahek Rawal

The Autonomous Collective Against Racism is receiving a total rebrand this year, as we hope to turn the traditionally inactive collective into a powerful force for student activism. This year, ACAR will have a specifically anti-colonial focus, as we will work to organise around issues of Aboriginal justice in collaboration with FIRE, ISJA and Anticolonial Asian Alliance. The anti-racist focus of the collective will still maintain primacy in our on-campus organising, especially in relation to fighting the scourge of fascism and Islamophobia.

In light of this rebrand, ACAR has been quite sucessful at rebooting the collective. During Welcome Week last month, we recruited over 40 new members of the collective. In coming weeks, many of these new recruits will feature alongside familiar faces in the autonomous edition of Honi. We also had our first meeting of the year, where we established our aims for the rest of 2019 and collectively agreed that anti colonial struggle should be the focus of our activism this year. Follow us on Instagram at @usydacar and like our Facebook page to keep up to date with what we are doing.