The Strand sat down with Zoe Ritchie, candidate for Vice President of Student Organizations (VPSO) in the 2018 spring VUSAC elections. Ritchie’s platform focuses on support and advocacy, and the importance of open communication.
The Strand: What is the role of the VPSO, and what would your responsibilities be, if elected?
Zoe Ritchie: The VPSO has the responsibility to be the bridge between clubs and levies and VUSAC—to offer support, and also advocacy when needed. I feel like the position can definitely become paternalistic, and that’s not the take I want to take. I think the really incredible opportunity with VPSO is that you get to work with people who are experts in their kind of field, whether it be athletics or student journalism, and that’s really exciting. If elected, I’ll take all summer to learn everything I can, but in a supportive way. I want to cater to every individual club, because I don’t think a one-size-all approach fits when it comes to support and advocacy. I’d say the responsibility of a good VPSO is really to know the individual groups you’re working with.
What qualities and skills make you an ideal candidate for the position of VPSO?
Vic can be a very bureaucratic place, and when advocating for clubs and levies, knowing those channels, and how to get through them well, is really important. I think it’s a less sexy part of the role, but a really, really important one. [I was] on council for a year, and in a role as Academic and Professional Development Commissioner, where I did so much collaboration and so much channel-working.
I think I have a really collaborative approach to leadership that I think will really aid me in the role. I’m really passionate about all the groups here, I have friends in, I think, every little section of the Vic College, and I see how valuable their work is to them, how much work they do, and I want to be a part of helping that. I think you need someone who has a collaborative skill set, someone who is good at communications—most of what the VPSO does is a lot of emailing, a lot of meetings. It’s not the kind of role where you can check out for two weeks, so I think I’d be really effective at that.
This year, the positions of VUSAC Sustainability Commissioner and Equity Commissioner are once again uncontested. Considering the stigma around these roles, how do you plan on providing the necessary support for sustainability and equity projects to reach a larger audience at Vic?
That’s a great question. I think they’re huge portfolios—I think that’s part of the reason they’re not contested, because they take such a special skill set that some of the other roles don’t quite have. I think we really set a standard that you need a certain qualification—which in some ways is great, and in other ways, not so great. That being said, I think there’s a lot of ways to get involved with equity and sustainability at Vic that aren’t those positions—whether it be Caffiends, the Victoria College Equity Collective, there’s a lot of opportunities.
As VPSO, I would want to make sure people are really engaged in those opportunities as much as they are [engaged in] the two commissions. I think all of them are really different, and really important. It’s easy for us to say “oh, those aren’t contested, people don’t care about those issues as much, or they’re intimidated by it”—I don’t think that’s true at all. I think those are really important issues on a lot of people’s minds, and they actively pursue those issues in different ways.
How do you plan on managing your relationships with club and levy members at Vic?
I think the biggest thing is I want communication channels to be really open. It’s not [that] once a month I hold an office hour and you can come visit me. It’s if you want to email me every week for support, I will be responding to that email. I hear all the time, an unanswered email can stop an event from happening. It can stop someone from getting involved—and that’s not what I want. I think we really need two club fairs a year. I think [clubs and levies] should have the opportunity to engage students at the beginning of the year, and in the middle. We all know from first year that the beginning of the year is wild, and by second semester, you’re thinking, “what do I really want to do?” I think having more opportunities to engage students is really important. I’d like to help create those opportunities.
There’s a lot of money at Vic. It’s finding the right way to get it. And that’s where I think a VPSO can have some insider knowledge into—y’know, I’d hate for someone to say “we can’t do this.” I think there’s never a “we can’t do this,” it’s more like, “okay, we need to really think, is there any avenue we haven’t exhausted yet?” I want to take on some of that burden for people organizationally.
A thin spread of attendance at club and levy events across Vic campus has been an issue this year due to the fortunate abundance of club and levy projects. Could you explain a bit about the sort of system that you intend to use in accomplishing your platform goal of the “simple, easy-to-use” event-planning system for clubs and levies to collectively organize event dates?
So I think there’s two challenges here. We need a platform that’s easy to use, and that people need to engage with. As much as I can create a platform, if people won’t input the data, it’s not helpful for anyone. I’m really reluctant to say I have a system I know I’m going to use, without doing the consultation. I’ll be in Toronto this summer, and if elected VPSO, I really look forward to trying to have as many meetings as possible. We have over 30 clubs and levies at Vic, and I will have 30 meetings. I would love to do that. We need a system that’s not me handing it down, we need a system that people agree on, like, and know how to use.
I think definitely an online system would be effective, from what I’ve heard so far from clubs and levies, they don’t want it to be accessible to the public—an internal system they can use to do event booking. A system was implemented this year and for some I think it was helpful, I think the implementation of it in the middle of the year was hard for people to get on board with.
I know clubs and levies say all the time, “why are there six events today?,” and for students it’s like, “oh, I want to go to all of those!” We all take from the same pool of resources, so resource allocation is really important, and every event—all six events on that day—could have been really well planned. A lot of time got put into those events, and a lot of resources from Vic’s Students Funds, so I think it’s not fair to those students that we’re not doing a better job at organizing. [That task] is especially on the VPSO.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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