Posted by Nikki Scott
Mon, 30 Apr 2012
As promised, here is SKIP’s account of our General Assembly, which took place up in the wonderful city of Glasgow on the 14th and 15th of April. The keen-eyed amongst you will have noticed that this was the same weekend as the Medsin Global Health Conference, which was a bit of a timetabling error and is a date-clash that we promise will be avoided next year.
So, the quickest of overviews as to what happened:
The biggest achievement was the passing of bylaws governing a travel fund. This is something that SKIP has been talking about for years without any real action. Much like medsin, SKIP requires its members to travel all around the country to attend really important training and governance events. We try to keep these events to a minimum (which is why they tend to be so jam-packed with stuff when they do happen), but, being a charity with a lot of responsibilities they do have to happen to some degree. Unfortunately, nigh-on 100% of our members are students and so don’t have much money to travel to these events. Therefore, we have decided that up to 10% of fundraised money can legitimately be spent on things that ensure our projects run safely and effectively i.e. contributing to member’s travel if they are travelling to receive vital training such as child protection. It won’t ever be the full cost of travel, but it will certainly help the already overstretched student budget. Happy days.
The other major achievement of the weekend was to finally pass some SKIP-centred policy statements. This finally means that SKIP can start doing advocacy (hooray!), but also means that we could really do with some help from medsin regarding how we can actually get involved (double hooray for medsin/activity collaboration). If you think you’d like to help us out on this one, please do get in touch.
Other things? We elected a new national committee for next year (we’ll introduce you to everyone after the summer), we had some really great discussions on overseas accountancy and NC/branch level collaboration, and we had a pretty amazing social – but that was always going to happen because the Glasgow Branch Committee have shown time and time again that they’re up for a good shindig(!)
This year has already seen some fantastic collaboration between medsin and its activities, and everyone at SKIP is very much hoping for some more! Medsin and all the activities are fabulous in their own right, and working together we could be absolutely dazzling.
Here’s to the future!
Much love,
SKIP
(You have been reading mostly James – national volunteer coordinator, and a bit of Nikki, national publicity coordinator. But still a WHOLE lot of love from all of SKIP!)
Students for Global Health 