Andy Ainscough spoke to SCAN about his candidacy for the VP (Activities) position. Ainscough, who is President of Lancaster University Theatre Group, declared that he was “ running for this position to ensure that all students have the means and the support to enjoy and excel in what they feel passionate about.” He believes that he can achieve this by focusing on areas such as efficient communication between societies/clubs and LUSU: “ I think it is about faster responses, and that should gain sports teams more trust in LUSU [and] a bit more trust in the FTO.”
Visibility is also an aspect of the position Ainscough is keen to try and improve. He said he will be “working to ensure that all groups know what LUSU can do for them and support their goals,” including making societies and teams available of funding and schemes they can become involved in. “The sports development scheme, one of the points in my campaign, is to expand that, which is another way of a sports team getting support, getting funding, so there are schemes like that at work and I seek to expand those and further that fight.”
Ainscough also eagerly stated that fair representation was key to his aims for the role. He believes the current Activities Executive is successful and something he aims to pursue, having stated that “I think it is making sure that the immediate needs of every group are met and fairly assessing if they want to do anything bigger to expand and I think that body does work.” He still, however, was keen not to treat all societies the same, “I’ll approach it on a case by case basis which I think is fairer” and will be the best way in ensuring everyone’s needs are catered for as much as possible.
Ensuring that sports teams and non-sports societies were treated equally was also important according to Ainscough. “I think for non-sport societies it’s tricky, because there is that divide and it does feel among some people the stigma of ‘we’re not a sports team so LUSU don’t care’. I’ve never found it the case being the president of a society and I think it is just essentially a case of treating each case as it comes rather than thinking, ‘is it sports? Is it not sports?’”
His experience as President of LUTG is something that Ainscough believes makes him a good candidate. He told SCAN that it gave him valuable experience in events management: “ As the president of the theatre group, we do four shows a term, and these are big events for us, hundreds of people come to watch these.” He further stated, “Sweeney Todd was a massive, massive event. 450 people came and watched it I think, we made quite a lot of money on it as well and it involved around 60 active people in the actual running of the show itself.” Ainscough believes his management experience and proposals across all areas of Activities make him worthy of the position.
