After years of requests from a variety of stakeholders, Western’s University Students’ Council is putting together an Ethnocultural Support Service.

Following a process started over a year ago with then-USC presidential candidate Emily Rowe’s platform proposing the service’s creation, the service became official at last week’s executive board meeting.

“I can confidently say that we have a structure in place to motivate commissioners and leaders,” Rowe said. “It’s important that the service comes from people who want and need it.”

THE FIRST STEPS

“My initial idea was more for a place where international students and cultural clubs could go and share resources, learn more about their own culture and other cultures and it all be in a safe space,” Rowe said.

To put the service into place, both her and fellow board member Will Bortolin quickly set into motion the process that would see a service created less than a year later. Most of these responsibilities fell in the lap of multicultural students commissioner Michela Gregory.

“I sent out surveys to all the cultural clubs over the summer so I could get a diverse range of views,” Gregory explained. She then sent out a second batch of surveys and held focus groups in first term — both of which provided much of the information that found its way into the new service’s mandate.

However, members of Western’s cultural community felt there could have been more consultation in the procedure, including Juan Diego, president of Students United in Representation of Latin America (SUR LA)

“I think the process and the way it was handled was to some degree unacceptable,” Diego said. “At least for the majority of clubs that represent minorities.

“I’m not saying we needed to be consulted, but it would have been nice to be able to provide an opinion,” he continued, but added he hopes the open-ended mandate of the service would provide an opportunity for cultural groups to recommend changes as needed.

SERVICE:  REDEFINED

Bortolin stressed the differences between this new service and the other services provided by the USC like Pride Western, or the Women’s Issues Network.

“Those services all have a history that originated partly as clubs so they have a lot of things similar to clubs,” he said. “They have people who are involved in a membership kind of capacity.

“ESS is very different in that it’s originating from a USC commissioner position,” he continued. “Those are positions that are less concerned with branding who they are and what they do […] They are more concerned with utilizing resources and finding volunteers to help them just address an issue.”

“[The ESS will be] a beneficial thing,” Gregory said. “There’s always a lot of the things you want to get done [with this portfolio] over the course of the year, but that’s difficult when it’s really just you.”

Both Bortolin and Gregory emphasized the need for such a service to fulfill a role the University currently does not.

“Right now, [Western’s] administration is completely oblivious to ethnocultural issues in what they do in services,” Bortolin said. “They have international student services but that is a very specific subset of ethnocultural issues.”

LOOKING FORWARD

Rowe expressed her wish that the service firmly establish its roots before tackling larger cultural issues: “I think in the start-up years [ESS] will be more for a learning and support resource and as it grows it can start to facilitate interclub dialogues and bring in outside resources.”

This sort of flexibility is something reflected in the service’s mandate, something seen as a bonus by Gregory.

“Issues are always changing,” she said. “We’re not going to get to a point where there’s a standardized view on any given cultural issue. What should be there is a service with a standardized process to deal with issues as they arise.”

Chelsea Cameron, current commissioner-at-large for the campus issues portfolio and candidate for next year’s vice-president campus issues position, saw the coming years as a place to hone the service to better serve students.

“As it stands right now, the service is just very vague,” Cameron said. Because the mandate of the service is to address issues as they arise, it will be important to clearly map out what issues should be addressed by the ESS.

“It’s going to have to be presented to students in a clear manner,” said Christina-Markie Mammoletti, another candidate for vice-president campus issues. “Right now, there’s a little bit of internal confusion about what [ESS] is supposed to do, so we need to make it very clear about what we’re doing while at the same time including as many voices as possible when creating a specific vision.”