T: What exactly does an Activities Officer do, anyway?
T: 2020 marks your second term as Activities Officer. What have you enjoyed most about undertaking this role so far?
J: The Activities Officer role ensures that the SSU is engaging students with our activities. So that includes ensuring our services like the free breakfast and Wednesday BBQs are being done in a way that helps students continuously engage with the union, ensuring students make use of their membership benefits, and understand how to access welfare services that can help them out.
J: Tangibly seeing the results of my work, actually being on the ground and helping students out. Even if it’s just doing the free breakfast every morning, or organising bigger events, and then also working on campus such as on Safer Communities (Swinburne’s on-campus support, intervention and risk-management service) to improve the student experience and safety on campus.
Then the other part is overseeing a lot of the social activities we’ve got on. Making sure they run safely and also ensuring people have the chance to make new friends, experience new things and basically have fun.
It’s also been great working with the volunteers over the last two years, and that’s been probably the highlight of my time at the union. It’s really inspiring to see so many people give so much time to help out other students. T: Earlier you mentioned Safer Community. How does your role feed into Safer Community at Swinburne? J: Pretty much any of the SSU executive reps, myself included, are involved in helping Swinburne be a safer place. But for my role it’s about making sure our queer 43