Manifesto Analysis: Luke Adams

Director of Events and Services (DoES) candidate Mr Luke Adams has written a thorough and thoughtful manifesto, with an emphasis on union events, student societies, and student safety. He emphasises his accountability in these goals, for example by holding a biweekly open forum to address student concerns, in addition to a biweekly ‘office hour’’ for students to meet with him in private. This will come alongside a weekly report of his activity during the week and his thought processes.

Union and Events:

Mr Adams seeks to improve union nights out, with a focus on music. He wishes to improve the ‘club music’ in 601 on Friday nights, increasing the number of non-themed nights to keep the bops fresh. Alternatively, he will consider more music themed, genre nights such as the 70s bop. He has a focus on meeting the criteria for themed nights, playing the music advertised. He will also set up the chance for students to submit music to a public playlist in Main Bar so that students can influence the music played. Mr Adams highlights the success of live music events such as Jazz night, and wishes to increase live music events in different areas of the Students Association building such as Sandys and Beacon Bar. The recognition of what events work well and his desire to hold more of them is appealing. In addition to increasing spaces available for Union events, Mr Adams highlights his desire to improve student study space. He wishes to advertise Beacon bar more widely as a study space. This is an interesting idea but lacks recognition that Beacon Bar is a study space for commuting students. He also wishes to improve the number of outdoor spaces for example in the back of the union.

Student Safety

Mr Adams puts being open with safety as a high priority because he understands students have minimal trust in systems due to lack of transparency. He lines out that ‘living with the virus’ needs to be an open conversation that continues to be revisited. Along with reviewing how the Union currently sets-up overcrowding in areas like the queue and bar.Mr Adams also plans to give lots of attention to spiking issues, although he doesn’t have much else to add to the current system. He is open to having conversations and addressing any measures that need to be put in place. Staging more sit-ins to reflect support for ending this issue will be implemented. In his manifesto, there is a lack of details and solutions, but this plays into his main point. Mr Adams is open in saying he doesn’t have solutions to everything but wants to support and encourage conversations to find them.

Sub-Committee Relationships and Catering:

Mr Adams cites his experience with sub-committees as a motivator for wanting to make the Union in general and his role more transparent. Crucially, he wants to increase transparency surrounding any price changes in the Union, considering it is a student space. He also aims to create a master timetable of every society event. This is a logistically ambitious goal but one that would be extremely helpful. He also aims to improve the booking system for spaces. That said, there is no mention of his goals regarding any specific affiliated societies, such as Mermaids.

He advocates for an increase in the use of outdoor space surrounding the Union, such as the creation of a beer garden. However, he lacks clear details of how this could be achieved