April Member of the month: Leeds University Union Student Advice
What geographical area do you serve? All current and prospective University of Leeds students and their families.
Agency CV
When was your organisation founded? 1877.
How many staff/volunteers do you have? Eight full-time, five part-time, and at various points of the year teams of up to 20 volunteers.
Who are you funded by? The Union as a whole receives a block grant from the University, and all commercial revenue is recycled into services that enable students to make the most of being at University. We also receive grant money for various projects.
What’s the average number of clients you help each year? In the region of 10,000, ranging from detailed case-work to one-off queries.
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Can you tell us about an accomplishment your organisation has achieved in the past?
There have been several private landlords that have caused problems en masse for their student tenants in the past couple of years, particularly in relation to withholding deposits. Through big campaigns and constant pressure, including being featured on BBC Watchdog and in the local press, we managed to resolve many cases, reaping back over £35,000 of students’ deposit money in the process. Some landlords also now approach us in order to improve their practice rather than waiting for complaints to come in.
Why is your organisation a member of AdviceUK, and why is being a member important for your centre?
As staff we benefit from the information, advice and support offered by AdviceUK, and we are beginning to reap the rewards from regional networking. The ability for us to better contribute to national debates is also of huge value to our clients, as well as keeping up to date with important projects like BOLD.
We have also benefitted from the Advice Pro project, which is part of a wider plan to get nationally comparable statistics between Student Unions.
What are your experiences with funding over time, and has anything changed in that regard lately?
Within the current economic climate, it is obviously more difficult to find and secure funding, particularly for extra projects. Advice agencies will be required to work with other organisations to secure funding contracts, and this means that partnership working becomes even more crucial.
As a student service we are fortunate to have a good relationship with our University who provide the majority of our funding. However, we are always looking at new funding streams and looking at best practice around the sector.
What would be your top tip for other advice agencies looking to improve their service or sustainability?
There are obvious things like constantly keeping in touch with what your clients need and want, not only in terms of the information, advice and quality of the service, but also in terms of how they want to use and access the service. However, at the moment, trying to maximise funding opportunities externally and also looking at alternative ways of working (we’ve recently switched to an online casework system using Advice Pro, which means we save masses of paper each month) are worth investigating.
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