£20 for a stall, £20,000 for Societies and £2,000,000 for Energy... all in a days work.

Just putting the final touches to the Activities Fair Plan, its looking like its gonna be a pretty awesome fair this year, even if I do say so myself! It has surprised me over this week just how much it costs to put the Fair on, get this, for just one table and board in the Octagon it costs £20.00 and we have over 200 societies to cater for (though I guess when the booking fee for the Octagon is £150 in total - you can't really complain!) If you haven't already - check out the event on facebook;

http://shef.facebook.com/event.php?eid=2443336496

The other thing I have been doing over the past few weeks is the Societies' Annual Grant, its a much bigger job than I had imagined, made especially difficult when there's just not enough money to give out to all our societies for all the fantastic events they want to put on! This, bearing in mind in total we've given out well over £20,000 in Annual Grant - it's a good job there's so many other groups out there such as the Alumni who can grant more money to those worthy causes.

Over the past few weeks, I have found that another big chunk of my time has been taken up with looking at environmental issues, at the moment I'm working on a draft for the Union's Environmental Policy, loosely based on the University's own Policy. It's actually really interesting, for example, did you know that as a general rule of thumb, for every one million pounds spent on energy/utilities in any big organisation such as ours it is generally accepted that you have an Energy Co-ordinator. Just having one of these people to 'power watch' can reduce energy consumption by over 10%.

Considering the University spends well over £2million on energy and utilities every year it's definately cause for concern that as of the end of this month they will be scrapping this position from the Accomodation dept leaving only one person responsible over the entire University campus. It's been really difficult to chase this issue with the University whilst there has been so much else for me to do over the summer. Its interesting to note that these are really important issues that I have had to drop to make sure I keep a hold of the work I need to do as Activities Officer, and make sure we run a sucessful Activities Fair, I guess it does go to show that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.*

Maybe this also demonstartes that this kind of lobbying could and should be done by an Ethical & Environmental Officer - definitely food for thought!

But, until my next blog,
Stay Classy, Sheffield
Matt

* unless it is a pigeon, because they are full of disease and in that circumstance you are better off leaving the two of them in the bush

* also if it starts to get agitated and can't control its bowels then your probably better off letting it go then as well

* though I guess for the sake of the analogy it might actually be better not to try and think of a specific bird but more of a generic bird that doesn't poo or carry disease, or maybe even some sort of beautiful white dove or something...