Where’s time gone……
Attempting to study while having a disability or disabilities can be tough. Don’t get me wrong; your natural reaction while reading this shouldn’t be to feel pity or upset at the difficulties and challenges that I and others face on a daily basis, instead I would like you to feel ANGER! The reason for this is that society isn’t designed to accommodate disabled people, and this is particularly true for when we are trying to study and better ourselves.
This is where we can recognise that Universities have the potential to be one of the best institutions to help reduce these barriers in both work and study and this is where Cardiff Met has shown me that we can and with the help of others around us we certainly have the potential to shape and build a more accessible society. I have found over the last six months in this role that there are people and teams who are advocating for these changes and doing tremendous work to help move it forward, but unless it’s a collective fight with everyone involved, it will take much longer than necessary to achieve what we’re setting out to do and my role within the SU has certainly made people look up and take account.
Over the past three months, my role has been incredibly busy, February was LGBT+ Month with a number of events taking place. I was invited to the Stonewall Conference in February titled “People can perform better when they can be themselves” and I was lucky enough to meet the Board of Stonewall and Munroe Bergdorf, the seminars that took place in the morning were extremely interesting and made me think a lot more about changes that we can make as a University and SU.
I was also fortunate enough to be able to help Martin Smith organise the football event “Football v Homphobia” and it was great fun on a very cold Tuesday evening watching the CardiffMetStaffFC playing against the Cardiff Dragons FC with a special guest appearance from Neville Southall.
March saw “International Women’s Day” and the SU got involved by inviviting all s
tudents to write about things that make themselves feel empowered by women and we had a great number of students that took part within SU Centro on the Thursday. A big thank you to all the wonderful ladies that took part and I hope you all felt empowered by the day and that you will continue to be strong women in everything that you do!
Now comes the time to remind all of you that my role of Equality and Diversity Part-time officer is sadly coming to an end and its time to advertise and see if anyone would like to take on this exciting role. Its been a privilage to have been involved with the SU on this level and I can promise that whoever takes it up will indeed have the “time of their life!”. Friendships made both within the SU and the University have certainly allowed me to grow as a person and I have learnt so much that will almost certainly help me for the future.
One last thing, don’t forget the reason that I took this role in the first place and the reason why the next three months are going to be spectacular with lots of interesting events taking place, so watch this space…..
Don’t forget #RemovingtheBarriers