I attended the NUS LGBT Officer Residential at the University of Sheffield last Thursday and Friday.  The purpose of this event is to provide training for new LGBT(Q) officers, presidents, chairman and general welfare officers at HE and FE institutions across the country.  This is the first such event run by the NUS and it was - by any definition - a huge success.

As many of you know, I have little in the way of political experience and my direct involvement in the LGBT(Q) community is still relatively limited.  So, this event was an excellent opportunity to develop certain skills, meet other officers, develop new contacts and remain in sync with the goings-on of the community.  Some of the people - particularly Lucy and Daf, NUS LGBT chairpersons - I'd met before and it was good to make their acquaintance once again.

The training

The agenda over both days was organised thusly:

Identifying issues for LGBT students - obviously these vary between institutions (particularly between FE/HE) but delegates were encouraged to provide input.  Several interesting - often shocking - research statistics regarding the experiences of LGBT students were provided; I'll be making good use of these in the coming weeks.

Representing LGBT students - this ran over two interactive sessions and covered several areas.  First, a rundown on the basic concepts of accountability and represetation and their ramnifications.  Next, we pooled and discussed various communications methods with the students we represent.  Then, typical motions procedures for Union/Guild council and NUS conferences were discussed and demonstrated. Finally, each delegate took part in a mock speech-giving exercise on an LGBT-relevant issue.  Each prepared and presented a one-minute speech and received constructive feedback from the rest.  Mine was noted as being slightly too fast (hardly a surprise :P), but also for being quite authoritative and assertive, which I suppose was appropriate in context.

Planning and running effective campaigns - distinguishing between awareness-raising and direct-action campaigns; tactics on running successful campaigns and a number of familiar campaign-planning tools.  Most notably, the Apathy Staircase and S.M.A.R.T.  This culminated in a "Dragon's Den" exercise (Google it! :P) where teams of 5/6 each planned an awareness and direct action campaign and presented their plan to the others

Sexual Health and Trans Awareness workshops; both informative, creative and interactive.  The sexual health - being run by a sexual health professional from the Terrance Higgins Trust - provided some useful information regarding resources Birmingham LGBTQ can order en masse before freshers.

What was learned

Well, thanks to Kitten, I now know that it's much easier to get reimbursed by the Guild for public transport than it would have been had i driven up.  And taking public transport is a far more environmentally friendly alternative in any case, if you place such concerns above excessive ticket costs.

In terms of the training, my biggest gains were the systematic techniques that can be used in speechwriting and campaign planning.  With only 30 delegates, plus 4/5 NUS LGBT committee members, the event was quite intimate.  Everyone came away knowing everyone else, and a large network of contacts is quickly developing on Facebook.  More than that, we became close friends (awwwww!) and intend on meeting up again in the near future.

I've also learned that - after staying in Sheffield Uni's equivalent of Mason - that I certainly wouldn't have paid an extra £3K per year to live somewhere like that rather than a grotty old hall :)

Start, Stop, Continue

I've resolved to continue making useful contacts in local community, government...and wherever I can find allies to be frank.  Furthermore, I'm going to start using the systematic techniques I've developed for the purpose of scheduling, campaign-planning and collecting the views of our students to identify key areas of focus.