Why you should take my spot on GC

At the SCM summer celebration and AGM in a few weeks time I’ll be standing down from the Publications portfolio and wrapping up my two years on General Council (GC). It has been an absolutely amazing two years that has given me a ton of great opportunities and I thought I’d say a little bit about it here so anyone who is thinking about running can get an idea of what being on general council is like.

My first experience of GC was a meeting the afternoon after the summer gathering in 2009 had finished. Due to having stayed up fairly late the previous night I was slightly sleepy and also struggling a little to grasp what was going on. We’ve now changed how GC meets so you won’t have to go through the same half-awake introduction as I did. Instead the first experience of being a GC member anyone who joins now will get will be the visioning weekend.

I’ve been on two visioning weekends and they both have been massive amounts of fun. You wouldn’t think a whole weekend devoted to training you how to be a trustee would be fun but they were. It’s also a weekend for you to help to get to know the rest of GC and have a bit of a laugh. By the end of the weekend I knew pretty much exactly what was going in GC meetings and a fairly good idea of how the organisation as whole functioned. Absolutely no prior knowledge of anything was required, which was a good thing since I was just finishing first year and I don’t think I had any. So here's what I've experienced as a GC member and what you can do to:

Being a GC member
As a member of general council there are a few essential parts of the role but quite a lot of it is flexible to your interests and abilities. You have to turn up to GC meetings and read the papers beforehand, answer your emails and stay in touch with the rest of GC. The rest of your role as a GC member is pretty much up to you. You can choose to be on some of the committees or take a lead role in a task that is falls between portfolios (e.g. taking charge of merchandising). Or you can do help out with things that are part of other GC portfolios.

Because the tuition fees campaign interested me I got involved with SCM’s media work, helping out with press releases, writing a comment article for Christian Today, and wrote a letter that got in the Guardian. Also I’ve had the really interesting experience of helping to run two sets of interviews in my time being on GC. Not only were these really rewarding experiences in themselves but this stuff looks great on my CV. Being on GC can add a whole lot to your CV it provides you with a knowledge of finance, proves your team working skills, leadership skills, project management skills, and any additional skills that your choose to develop on GC. SCM also has a budget for training you in an area if it can be used to help the organisation. A large amount of being a GC member is done in your own time and organised by you so if you have essay deadlines most of your GC responsibilities can be shifted around that and the staff are really great at accommodating around your busy times.

Being the Publications person
I’m the first person to have the publications role on GC as it stands now because we created it a year ago. The first year I was on GC it was a part of the communications role which we split in two with the other part being filled by Charlotte in the Press and publicity role.

I’ve used this year to run a complete review of the publications that SCM puts out. That means I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the finance of the publications, reading through the history of how SCM has previously organised it’s publications and why it’s changed and looking at new ways of pursuing our publications. But this review has now finished which means if you take my role you won’t have to do that! The review has gotten approval from GC and we’re now moving ahead with a new combined Magazine which will have news and articles and be in full colour (it’s odd just how happy that sentence makes me). Aside from the review I’ve also been chairing the editorial meetings of Movement and tried to help steer the magazine through its last few issues in its current form.

The future for SCM publications
If you do become the GC member for publications you can help finalise the new look for Movement magazine. At the moment we’re researching designers and starting to work out the content of the first issue and deciding on the design will be one of the first things you’ll do as GC member. You’ll then have to help run the editorial group and recruits some new members for it. The editorial group will be responsible for choosing and commissioning the content of Movement. The plan as it stands now is that each issue will have one person from the editorial group assigned as the lead in that issue who takes central responsibility for it. This doesn’t have to be you. The other side of the portfolio that I haven’t really developed in my time in the role is creating new SCM resource publications. In your two years on publications you should have time to conceive of a new resource for SCM to put out and develop it, commission writers for it and publish it.

Run for GC
Seriously, just run for GC you won’t regret it (well maybe for a second when you first try and understand the budget). For me it has been an absolutely amazing experience. It’s taught me new skills and developed the ones I’ve already had and just been a really fun time. The rest of the GC if you haven't already met them are an amazing group and you'll just have a laugh the whole time. So if you have two years where you know you can give the time, DO IT!