Last week I chatted with Syahadah Shahril, Campaigns Officer at UAL’s Student Union.
I reached out to Syahadah as she has experience with campaigning and is currently involved in Pause or Pay, an organization advocating for compensation to students in response to the pandemic. She also has various connections to other SUs and is knowledgeable of migration and student networks.
In our conversation, she gave me various tips for getting a campaign up and running and gave me some examples of other organizations that would be helpful to contact for my project. Among these are Migrants in Culture, Unis Resist Border Control, WONKHE, and United Voices of the World. She also mentioned that Made in Arts London has raised the issue of international students not being able to freelance as with Brexit, many EU student artists won’t be able to sell their works through Made in Arts London, and the store highly depends on them.
Through our chat, Syahadah also suggested a few action plans, which I’m looking forward to implementing in my campaign. The actions I’ll take after our conversation are the following:
- Create an email account for Inter.work
- Draft an open letter
- Send open letter to APPGs, MPs and media outlets
- Ask people to join the Inter.work team
- Create more campaign assets
The meeting with Syahadah was really encouraging and helpful in taking my campaign to the next step, and we’re looking forward to staying in touch and working together in the future.