Freshers Fair: Student Safety Zone
The Freshers Village was my first opportunity to introduce all the new and current students to the environment of safety that we foster both on and off campus. We had managed to pull together a number of organisations to support this message and create a dedicated area in the main marquee of Freshers Fair - unofficially named the Student Safety Zone.
- 1625 Outreach
- Street Pastors
- NHS Sexual Health
- British Transport Police
- Allestree and Darley Safer Neighbourhood Team (Police officers/PCSO's)
- Derby City Council
- Advice Service
The response received from both the partners and students was massively positive. The partners have noted that the engagement with students has been great especially when considering the number of freebies that were taken by students. Students were actively getting engaged in conversations around safety and understanding what all of the amazing partners do to maintain safety in the city centre. In addition to all of this, Amanda Solloway, MP Derby North, attended specifically to see all of the messaging on student safety.
1625 Outreach has recently been approved 4 years of funding to operate in Derby City Centre, and with this comes a lot of opportunities that we are already exploring. From initial conversations, we are looking to take on some of their training surrounding drug and alcohol abuse but with a focus on providing harm reduction information and advice. Our Advice team will be taking on most of this training and allowing 1625 Outreach the opportunity to train our direct student communities like sports, societies and student led services.
Stonegate
Our Stonegate partners (Popworld, Hideout, Fever, and The Friary) have been a big driving force when it comes to safer nights out for students. The Union is fortunate enough to have such a good working relationship with Stonegate as we are able to push any messaging and safety initiatives through them and vice versa.
Derby City Council are also very keen to work with the Union and our Stonegate partners to ensure venues like theirs can set standards of safety that should be expected across all other venues. 1625 Outreach have also expressed interest to work with Stonegate to deliver similar training to the one mentioned above.
One thing that we worked with them on during Freshers was to promote safety initiatives such as the anti-spiking material such as the bottle stoppers and Drinksafe covers. During the Freshers period, we gave out 20,000 Drinksafe covers at the Freshers Fair and at the venues in the city centre. They have also implemented Welfare Officers in their venues who are trained and intended to be less intimidating than bouncers and offer support students on nights.
There is still a lot more to do and I am constantly looking to develop these initiatives with Stonegate to make them bigger and better, this includes re-evaluating some of the safety initiatives implemented last year from my time as Vice President (Welfare).