Newsletter004
Newsletter 004
Dear Ant, how good to see you here. And welcome for everyone that is a first-time recipent of our newsletter. We have officially woken up from our summer sleep, so there is a lot to discuss. Strap in.
What am i doing here?
For those that are new here: this is the offical newsletter of the very official HKU Student Union of the HKU. We are a group of students that together created the Union about a year ago. We oppose the very undemocratic nature of the HKU, where we felt a fully independent union was missing.
We are organized as a flat structure, everyone is equal and welcome to help with organizing. We have general meetings every thursday 16:30 at the HKU Oudenoord atrium. Anyone is welcome to help, even from the sidelines, we are always looking for more designers, writers, hummus and animators and anything else that you can think of, so feel free to pop by one day.
You can find more about us, our mission and values, on our website, hkustudentunion.nl
Where we also post other documents like our meeting notes, our calendar and other logs.
Big Rollout Update
For the past few weeks we have been working on our “Big Rollout”, which was just our name for distributing a lot of different types of merch in all buildings, a zine, stickers, posters and our first instagram post. We are happy to announce that the big rollout is now over and to celebrate we now have this newsletter.
Our main goal of the big rollout was to anounce our presence to students and teachers that didn’t know us yet, and hopefully gain some new members.
Today, we went around most of the HKU buildings and spread posters, stickers and some of our zines (more are coming), with a QR code to our website, where people can sign up for the Union. This is definetly not the last time that we will have a big poster action.
Vidius
We are very happy that The Union is now a member of VIDIUS, the Student Union for all of Utrecht.
They will be able to give us advice and support us in general as a (relatively) new Union. VIDIUS will also help us with our goal to solidify the Union, they can keep our (yet to be written) manuals and documents on our organizational structure. If the current members stop being involved, VIDIUS will be able to help and start the Union up again in the future. They also have many contacts within (student)unions/other activist networks within the Netherlands and are able to easily contact the media.
If you (a HKU-student) become a member of VIDIUS, you will pay them €12,50 per year. They will give all of this money to us, the HKU Student Union. Besides these membership fees, we will be able to ask VIDIUS for financial support if we have a specific project or action that we need money for.
You do not need to be a member of VIDIUS to be a member of the HKU Student Union, but it is a nice way to support us financially, if you are able and willing to do it.
There are monthly meeting with VIDIUS and the HKU Student Union, please contact one of our members or email us if you would like to come one of our joint meetings! Read more about VIDIUS, or become a VIDIUS-member on vidius.nl
Banner making event
During the Big Rollout we tried to push our upcoming event to people: we will be making the official HKU Student Union banner together! We will draw on a very big blanket and transform it into a beautifull banner that we can use during demonstrations or to have sweet dreams under. We will hopefully do this with good company too.
This event will take place in the atrium of HKU location Oudenoord at 17:30 on 16 October, after our general meeting. After the event we might head to park paardenveld and drink a drink together in the sun (hopefully). So bring your art supplies, your friends and some enthousiasm if you have it laying around somewhere.
Woonprotest
Our homies from Vidius are organising a demonstration in Utrecht against the housing crisis on 17 October. This definetly affects us all, so come by and shout the loudest for affordable housing. You can find more information on this event on our website
Box of grievences
To make it easier for anyone to express their worries, we made a digital box of grievences. This form can be filled in with something that someone might find troubling within the HKU. You can fill in the form on our website, or click here
We made this form to make it easier for people on the HKU to express their opnion, and by creating this digital form we also created an archive of all the different entries from all the schools of the HKU.
We will use the information from the box of grievances to set new goals for the Union, and to see what is worrying the people in the HKU currently.
Microsoft
One of our biggest goals for this year as the Union is to get the school to stop using microsoft, a very big techy evil company based in america, that supports the IDF with their cloud service, it is also on the BDS boycott list. So it is kind of condratdictary that the school is using a service that comes with so much blood.
We will be working together with other activist groups in the HKU, like HKU4Palestine, to get the school to boycott Microsoft as soon as possible.
What also is contradictary, the Union, an organisation that is heavily against the use of big tech now has an Instagram page, a service owned by also very evil big techy company Meta.
We noticed that it is very hard to reach the students and employees of the HKU without it. We tried our best, by creating a website and this newsletter and now also a second zine, but spreading awareness of the Union seemed harder than we thought. Combined with the fact that we need a lot of numbers for the whole concept of a union to work, we decided that it would be best for now to create an instagram page, and from there lead people to our own communication channels.
We will be assessing this choice constantly, and move away from Instagram when we can. But for now, drop us a follow here and share our page with your friends.
You’ve made it to the end, well done, you’re doing great.
We’ll see you soon.
The Ants of the Union
