Proposal to cancel charity week being brought to Class Reps Council tonight.

OneMoreThing!

Charity Week to be Cancelled?

I think you all should see this.

Polar Ice

Merge with other thread?

OneMoreThing!

Yeah everyone should go there I suppose.

brucechan

It's worth considering at least. Charity Week raises very little money anyway and does more harm than good around the estates. It's also worth considering that if there's just an Open Week of some kind where things arent controlled that things could go totally mad like in NUIG in previous years.

Fishooks12

Wouldn't bother me in the slightest. I think it's an unspoken truth that a lot of students don't enjoy charity week that much anyway

Ave Sodalis

Really really hoping they don't cancel it, it was probably the best week of the year for me last year!

wnolan1992

Although I wouldn't miss it myself (usually bogged down with projects during Week 6 and having to listen to drunken idiots all the time irritates me at the best of times) I have major concerns about the implications of cancelling it. They're concerns that have been voiced here numerous times before, by myself and others, and argued against by others the last time we had a thread like this.

I would worry that without a structured set of events provided by the SU, we could so easily end up with a repeat of the incidents at NUIG.

I also believe that the idea of RAG Week is, rightly or wrongly, ingrained in the psyche of most, if not all, of students in UL. I believe that regardless of whether it is an SU sanctioned event or not, people will use Week 6 of the Spring Semester as an excuse for a week long piss up. It would take the bones of ten years to fully eradicate this culture, and in that time a lot of damage could be done to the reputation of our student body.

As it is, Charity Week at least has some benefits. Money raised for charities, brilliant atmosphere around campus (even though I only passed through once or twice last year, the SU Courtyard had an amazing buzz around it), not to mention the knock on effect of pumping money into The Stables, Javas, Spar, the Paddock and other restaurants, all because of a concentration of students congregating to take part in the various activities.

Take Charity week away, and you have people hanging around their houses, throwing unofficial RAG Week parties, and more than likely causing more trouble around estates than normally would happen during Charity Week.


TL;DR -> I don't think this is a good idea.

Jester252

I kinda hate the Galway argument.
Its a moot point and should not be used as an argument for. It cost the university €50,000 last year and it barely raised a fifth of that. Guess who paid for that? Could that money not have been spend on student services instead?
Charity week is a waste of money and should be scraped.
As for the Galway fans
No charity week student get pissed
Charity week student get pissed.

MiamiMortimer

http://issuu.com/ulsu/docs/af_xxi_2 Discussion about it on page 27 of the latest An Focal...

eoins23456

A rag week would happen regardless of whether they cancel it or not!

reunion

MiamiMortimer wrote: »

http://issuu.com/ulsu/docs/af_xxi_2 Discussion about it on page 27 of the latest An Focal...

Here is a link to a more updated and relevant new source

The figures are wrong in that article; not to mention last years an focal says they raised over €12,000*
*note: the next anfocal article didn't know the exact figure either

Going onto the Ents facebook page and you can find charity week raised €43,430 not the €10,000 claimed in the latest an focal.

I agree with the removal of charity/RAG week (for this year anyway), bars and nightclubs will probably still promote week 6 for a mad session but I do think Paul McCutcheon is right when UL (particularly this year) wouldn't be to blame and shouldn't make any bad headlines.

Charity/RAG week is a good laugh though...

MiamiMortimer

reunion wrote: »

Here is a link to a more updated and relevant new source

The figures are wrong in that article; not to mention last years an focal says they raised over €12,000*
*note: the next anfocal article didn't know the exact figure either

Going onto the Ents facebook page and you can find charity week raised €43,430 not the €10,000 claimed in the latest an focal.

I agree with the removal of charity/RAG week (for this year anyway), bars and nightclubs will probably still promote week 6 for a mad session but I do think Paul McCutcheon is right when UL (particularly this year) wouldn't be to blame and shouldn't make any bad headlines.

Charity/RAG week is a good laugh though...

Hi reunion,

Just wanted to clarify a few points from your last post with regard to the figures published by An Focal, which have been used as evidence that the newspaper is not competent on this subject -

Charity Week student fundraising in 2012 actually only raised around the €10,000 mark, as mentioned by the ENTs officer in Issue 11. This was nothing out of the ordinary and resembled the fundraising done in previous years, as mentioned in the UL media archives. I don't know where the rest of the money on the cheque in your linked picture came from, but it didn't come from student fundraising, which is the approximate figure that An Focal correctly identifies then and now. In all cases, it refers to student fundraising for the week - clearly the money that makes up the rest of the total on the cheque comes from elsewhere. You have to admit that would be a little strange for it to have risen from 12,000 in 2011 to over 40,000 in 2012 - I doubt they'd be discussing getting rid of it with that kind of massive growth! TST and An Focal both agree on the cost of Charity Week being €50,000.

I read both news sources, and am not biased towards one or the other; but I had to respond when I saw how much the figures were misrepresented (accidentally or not) in your last post.

P.S. - another update! Feel free to link TST's take on it too - I just haven't seen their latest article yet

kragmite

I heard that the figure of €43,430 includes the money that the stables raised from Christmas Daze and any other charity events that were collected for throughout the first and second semester. They included it all in one big donation as seen in the picture that reunion linked. The real figure raised on Charity week was closer to €10,000.

reunion

Ah ok.
It's actually quite difficult to find an actual figure, the an focal article only says €9,500 was raised via nearly naked mile and the shave or dye. Keep in mind the article before that said it was over €12,000 and still counting.

Only figure I could find was on the ents page.

Anyway, if the college pumps €50k into Charity/RAG week, what are they offering if we scrapped it? Do we get the €50k to do what the SU likes?

MiamiMortimer

reunion wrote: »

Ah ok.
Keep in mind the article before that said it was over €12,000 and still counting.

Only figure I could find was on the ents page.

Anyway, if the college pumps €50k into Charity/RAG week, what are they offering if we scrapped it? Do we get the €50k to do what the SU likes?

There's a big difference between saying that 'though the count was still underway at time of print, it seems the ULSU has exceeded this figure for 2012' (an early estimate of funds raised, as quoted from An Focal 10) and saying that 'over €12,000 and still counting' has been raised (your interpretation of the article sentence I have just quoted). This rather optimistic early estimate covered itself by clarifying that the count was still going on (and, thus, that this figure was by no means guaranteed). Your point surrounding An Focal's competencies (or lack thereof) with regard to these Charity Week figures is quite simply invalid, full stop, reunion.

Having looked into the question of figures myself, I agree that it is difficult to find a final figure for the money raised. Neither a rough estimate or final figure can be found on TST, which was the other UL media source that I checked. It's not on the ENTS page or on the UL news archives. It apparently wasn't reported anywhere online; rough estimates are the most that we can find right now.

n the second half of your comment, I agree that it would be interesting if the money spent on Charity Week could be diverted elsewhere...now there's something uncertain that's worthy of debate!

sceptre

Was there no final figure announced in regard to the money raised specifically through Rag Week last year then? If the big cheque includes other events, then that's not all that useful when deciding on the financial worth of Rag Week (ignoring for a moment any other advantages or disadvantages of the week) and if the only figure publicly available is an in-progress estimate of bucket money or whatever it was, that's only slightly more useful. We're not talking Live Aid, where money kept flowing and dribbling in for years. Somewhere there exists a figure of €X and it would be helpful for people if they knew that figure of €X when discussing it.

highlydebased

I reckon the difference between the figure quoted last year and the figure quoted now could well be that there were still bills to paid out for the week when they released the 12k figure. I think this is why they were so slow to release a figure in the first place

MiamiMortimer

highlydebased wrote: »

I reckon the difference between the figure quoted last year and the figure quoted now could well be that there were still bills to paid out for the week when they released the 12k figure. I think this is why they were so slow to release a figure in the first place

That makes sense...when I started looking into it I thought it was a bit nuts that no final figure was publicly released at any point!