By Jon Roe
All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey and the Students’ Union executive will no longer need to be California dreamin’. The SU executive–four vice-presidents and the president as well as two SU staff members will be traveling to Anaheim, California for the National Conference on Student Leadership Oct. 20-23. The NCSL conference is budgeted to cost the SU $7,897.
The SU chose to go to the NCSL in place of going to the Canadian national student leadership conference the Edge, Jul. 14-18 in Halifax. According to SU president Julie Bogle, the Edge conference would have cost $9,180.
“Part of the reason we didn’t go to the Edge conference is because the past two executives have recommended that we don’t attend the Canadian national conference because of our size,” Bogle said. “U of C’s SU is very successful and has a large operating budget and because of that we are on a different scale than some of the other schools that attend this conference.”
The SU’s revenue was $13,405,320 for the year ending Jun. 30, 2006 and $12,792,303 for the year ending Jun. 30, 2005, according to their website. The SU’s conference budget is approximately $38,000 this year. The year’s conference budget is approved through the Student Legislative Council, while individual conference budgets are approved through executive cabinet, Bogle explained. The voting members of the executive cabinet are the four vice-presidents, the president and two commissioners appointed by the SLC.
“There’s schools like UBC, U of A [and], Western that are very much on the same playing field as us and we can learn from them and they can learn a lot from us,” said Bogle. “But because there was also the smaller schools [at Edge] that perhaps weren’t dealing with the same kind of issues that we were that’s why we thought we would try something different.”
The NCSL will include keynote speakers and workshops each day. Keynote speeches will include “Getting Outside the Jar: Strategies for Discovering and Activating Your Unique Strengths” by Carol Carter; “Making Your Mark: Leadership Principles to Meet the Challenge” by youth speaker and leadership trainer Ed Gerety, “Rachel’s Challenge” about the first victim of the shooting at Columbine, Rachel Scott, by Scott’s father and uncle, and “Playfair” by Megan Dolan. Workshops include various leadership, motivation, and career-success sessions.
“From my understanding, we should get a good cross-section of small schools [and] big schools [at the NCLS conference], but more that are on our scale,” said Bogle.
Bogle also noted if this NCLS conference is worth its value, they might attend a second NCLS conference in Mar. as a transition for the next executive.
“Perhaps that would be something that would be looked into,” said Bogle. “That way the incoming executive can take the information that they learn and use that as a base to build from and develop their plans from that.”
The March NCSL conference will be held in Atlanta, Georgia from Mar. 29 to Apr. 1.
“We’ve been attending the Canadian conferences and haven’t been getting a lot of value out of them,” said Bogle. “We would like to try something new. Why continue to going to something that isn’t worth its value? It’s important to share information with schools and to learn from these student leadership conferences because we’re executives for one year; we don’t come in knowing how to run the show. Any kind of experience or any exposure we can get to student leadership skills [and] practices done at other schools that are really successful will enhance our ability to lead the Students’ Union.”