AMS Council met on July 24 to pass executive's goals and the 2024/25 budget and hear the 2024/25 services report.
Here’s what you might’ve missed.
Looking green
VP Finance Gavin Fung-Quon presented the final version of the 2024/25 AMS budget, which is predicting a surplus of $47,121. This comes after several years of large deficits.
Fung-Quon said the AMS also added $2,000 to the budget to reflect the expenses for the AMS special general meeting which happened over Zoom on June 4.
“Just because we're ahead on the targets doesn't mean we're not doing any action items. We're gonna continue on that ... and see what even more improvements we can make," said Fung-Quon.
Board of Governors representative and arts councillor Eshana Bhangu voiced concern around the reduced positions and hours for student staff.
“I understand that we're not in the best financial position … but nickeling and diming on something like student staff is probably hurtful to the organization in the long run,” said Bhangu.
Fung-Quon said there were conversations about this and would potentially be something to bring to the HR and executive committees for further discussion.
The budget was approved.
Student services usage on the rise
Kathleen Simpson, the senior student services manager, presented the 2023/24 AMS services report.
In total, there were 36,500 client interactions across the six services the AMS provides.
Simpson said the AMS Food Bank was the largest service by number of interactions and was about 69 per cent of the total interaction of services last year and distributed 76,367 pounds of food.
“Most of our students that we support are international students, a majority are also graduate students and around 13 per cent also support children,” said Simpson.
Safe Walk saw 3,516 interactions which is a 440 per cent increase from the previous year.
The Sexual Assault Support Centre saw 3,011 client interactions and distributed 16,688 safer sex supplies.
AMS Peer Support saw 799 interactions, and Simpson said naloxone training was a significant component of last years' usage.
"We noticed a marked decrease in the number of students who were reporting thoughts of suicide in sessions with us … overwhelmingly the reasons that they were coming to us were things like academic stress,” said Simpson about why students were attending peer support sessions.
Goal setting era
The five AMS executives presented their individual and executive team goals.
Some of the executive goals include building campus spirit, developing programs to support affordability, strengthening sports for clubs, increasing student outreach and furthering financial literacy engagement.
“We really want to move beyond the framing of an AMS that is five independent offices that happened to share the same office space … and really working as one team cohesively,” said AMS President Christian ‘CK’ Kyle.
All goals passed unanimously.
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