The Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) held their monthly council meeting on Nov. 15, in which CUSA president Zameer Masjedee addressed concerns surrounding CUSA’s plan to move the Mawandoseg Centre’s co-ordinator into the Ojigkwanong Centre.
Masjedee said the move was a result of CUSA’s former campaign promise to restructure student services in order to optimize space, as well as students’ money.
But, he stressed that the change was not a funding cut. He explained that the restructuring came about because the previous Mawandoseg co-ordinator regularly working out of Ojigkwanong.
“The co-ordinator had requested . . . that they would prefer to work half their hours out in the Ojigkwanong Centre,” Masjedee said.
However, Masjedee said CUSA made a mistake in deciding this issue on its own.
“What we absolutely did get wrong, and we apologize for, was the lack of consultation with [the Indigenous] community,” he said.
Masjedee said as part of CUSA’s effort to rectify the decision, they held a meeting on Nov. 14,with members of the Indigenous community. He added that in the meeting, they identified space to be more important than money for programming.
“Going forward, CUSA is going to look at reintroducing a new space on campus that Mawandoseg can sort of make home,” he said.
Also at the meeting, Masjedee said that the topic of CUSA’s upcoming Town Hall on Nov. 27 is service centres, and students are welcome to ask questions or raise concerns.
In addition, Masjedee announced that CUSA will be releasing a video later this week as part of its “CU Later CFS” initiative.
According to a previous Charlatan article, CUSA has been collecting signatures since September and they hope to hold a referendum to decertify from the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) by November 2018.
“When we really narrowed it down, the predominant [reason] is that we don’t make use of their services because we’re really self-sufficient in terms of everything that they offer us, and that’s what we want to highlight,” Masjedee said.
Photo by Aaron Hemens
