Former President of Cartmel College, Salman Rukhsar, is looking to “continue the changes that have been seen in the last three years in Activities” by focusing on three key areas: “funding, communication and participation”.
Rukhsar believes that he is the best candidate for the role as he has the “experience needed” to be successful in “all parts of the role”. Rukhsar believed that he has this through his past experiences of “sit[ting] on University Council and University Exec” whilst also being involved in the University’s Handball and Korfball team, the latter for which he has served as Captain and Publicity Officer.
One of Ruhksar’s main ambitions were he to be elected into the position would be to ensure greater funding for “societies who compete but aren’t technically BUCS sports”, as well as providing more funding for non-sporting societies to “keep up their fantastic work”.
However, Rukhsar recognises that “it is very unlikely that we will see Activities’ budget increase… as [there are reports that LUSU] would be predicted to make another loss this year”. Because of this, he believes that we “have to look at other ways to fund our sports teams.” Rukshar plans on achieving this by what he calls “tiered sponsorship”. Whilst he believes that sponsorship from venues and establishments in town is fine, he also believes that it should be “secondary sponsorship” and “not everyone’s main source of income” – instead, “university based sponsorship” should be their primary source of income. To achieve this Rukhsar wants to encourage outside investment from “organisations such as graduate employers” who would relish the opportunity to “get their names out there” whilst also providing extra funding for University teams.
Concerning new societies, Rukhsar thought it was essential to inform them of existing “funding opportunities, because LUSU is fantastic when it comes to helping societies out.” He wants to do this by “send[ing] out newsletters to new society execs just to tell them what is going on at the university and what funding opportunities there are and when the deadlines are and just to make sure that everyone knows what is happening and that everyone is in the loop.”
Rukhsar also claims that he would be capable of organising larger scale events such as Grad Ball and Campus Fest because of his recent experience in event management: “I was privileged enough to sit on the Extrav Committee last year and I learnt a great deal from my presidency last year. I learnt to organise an event not just around the music but the whole event by learning how to publicise it and ensuring we had different types of acts going on at the same time to make sure that we catered for everyone.”
When asked about what he personally hoped to get out of the role, Rukhsar responded that he’d “like to be that person who goes out there and speaks to all of these teams and makes sure that all their needs are met”, he also added that he’d love to be the first VP (Activities) who “oversees our first ever York away win at Roses.”
