Star Meeting 13/03/13 – A Year in Review March 14, 2013

Posted by starglasgow in Meetings.
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This week’s meeting was sadly the last of this academic year!  We spent the meeting discussing and evaluating what activities, methods of education and campaigns we had taken on this year as well as thinking about what we hadn’t done that we may want to explore next year!  Here is a summary of our year in STAR.

STAR Seeking

Our first event of the semester, STAR Seeking was an interactive workshop aimed at introducing new members to the UK asylum system. At the start, participants would be given a ‘profile’ of a fictional person who they would represent on their journey through the asylum system were they were faced with cruel UKBA staff, poor housing and destitution. The workshop was received very well, and the participants said that it gave them a greater appreciation of the difficulties of the UK asylum system (which many knew nothing about before the meeting).

Bake Sale

We held two bakesales in our first semester, the first was to raise money for the Refugee Survival Trust and to try and get passers-by to sign the Stop Destitution Campaign postcards.  We made £69.28.  Our second bake-sale was on the day of the November Sleep Out to raise awareness of what we were doing, why we were doing it and to raise a bit more money for Positive Action in Housing who all of the Sleep Out funds were being donated to.

Sleep Out

Our annual November Sleep Out was a great success this year raising an astounding £920!  The weather stayed dry, and mostly mild for the whole night and as always there was plenty of food, signing, dancing and lots of chit-chat.  The Sleep Out is always a great event for getting to know other members and definitely an experience to be had!

Pub Quiz

We ran a pub quiz in November raising money for the UNHCR’s Syria Emergency Appeal.  Although the questions may have been a little hard, everyone enjoyed themselves!  On the night we also had a bakesale, and a raffle -with probably had the most raffle prizes I have ever seen.  We managed to raised £156.13 at the pubquiz!

Pop-Up Shop

In the week between the end of term and the start of the exam diet we ran a Pop-up Charity shop at the Queen Margaret Union.  We ran the shop from 10-4pm every day for a week selling donated clothes, jewelry  books and bric-a-brac.  The £116 raised went to the charity Unity who donated a lot of the stock from their charity shops.

Body Shop

This year ran our first ever “Feel Good, Do Good” night at the Bodyshop.  It was really fun, and I hope that we’ll do it again in the near future!  There were hand massages, eye and lip makeovers, cakes, drinks and a discounts on bodyshop products!  We raised £253.97 from this event and it was all donated to the UNHCR’s Syria Appeal.

STAR Trek

Another first for this year was the STAR Trek!  We took a symbolic distance of 400 miles (which works out to 20 miles walked by 20 people) between Glasgow and Croydon (the only place where an asylum seeker can begin their asylum claim once in the country) and raised money by doing a sponsored walk for the Refugee Survival Trust, who among many other things, offer grants to those who need to travel to Croydon but cannot afford to as the government gives no assistance.  It was a hard walk, but I think everyone who came felt like they had achieved something good at the end of the day!  We managed to raise an amazing  £539.79 from the STAR trek!

Medsin Workshop

This Saturday STAR Glasgow will be presenting a workshop on “What students can do” at the Medsin Global Health Conference 2013 in Glasgow.  This will be very exciting for us!  We are going to take as many Stop Destitution Campaign postcards as we can to get them signed by the event attendees and we will be showing the campaign’s video at the introduction to our workshop.  The aim of the workshop is to inspire students to use their strengths to create projects that will be benefit the asylum-seeking and refugee communities.

Ceilidh

Our last event of the year – and our STAR SOCIAL – is the annual GU Red Cross, GU Amnesty and STAR Glasgow ceilidh!  We are again raising for the amazing Red Cross International Tracing Service (RITS) which helps to reunite families who are separated due to conflicts and natural disasters.  The ceilidh is on 19th of March (Tuesday) – tickets are £3 before and £4 on the night!

This has been a great year for STAR and if you were involved with the group at any point this year, on behalf of the committee – Thanks! We hope to see you at our Ceilidh on Tuesday and next semester too!