Carleton’s student-run service centres want campus space to become more available, accessible, and better equipped to serve the student population.
According to Carleton media relations co-ordinator Chris Cline, the university currently provides 13 rooms for student clubs and societies to rent.
The Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) also provides space, allowing clubs and societies to book Roosters, Olivers, 10 tables in the Atrium, and room 513 in the Unicentre, according to CUSA front desk assistant Jenn Murley.
CUSA rents its rooms and equipment to student groups free of charge. This semester, the student union negotiated a deal with the university for CUSA clubs and societies to use university rooms and projectors free of charge, according to CUSA president Alexander Golovko.
Some CUSA service centre co-ordinators hope more space will become available.
“It’s difficult to accommodate everyone who wants to talk,” said GLBTQ centre programming co-ordinator Erica Butler about the organization’s half-class-sized room in the Unicentre.
She said Carleton needs to make more general-purpose rooms available for clubs to meet in.
“There are a lot of clubs competing for the same space,” she said.
There are currently 129 clubs listed on CUSA’s Clubs and Societies list.
Butler said rooms like 513 in the Unicentre — which has couches and a TV but seats only around 20 people — should be more plentiful on campus.
“A room like that, that would have the capacity to seat more people, would be better,” she said. “There definitely aren’t many options when you’re running mid-sized activities, and you don’t necessarily need a full size theatre that seats hundreds of people.”
Samantha Odion, programming co-ordinator at the Race, Ethnicity, and Culture Hall, said rooms available for booking could be better suited to student gatherings.
“If you’re having [an event] in a classroom, it’s more of a lecture style, whereas you might want to come out and lounge around,” she said.
More rooms should have moveable chairs to allow students to create a circular, relaxed environment, she said.
She said that, most importantly, rooms need to be wheelchair accessible and to accommodate all disabilities.
“A lot of the students who come to our events are in wheelchairs or have some sort of disability,” she said.
Tabitha McDonald, administrative co-ordinator at the Food Centre, said accessibility on campus needs to be extended to students’ receiving food.
“Because food banks have such a large stigma attached to them, there’s a base assumption that students are affluent in some sense,” she said. “But if we can create a community around it, people would be more ready to access [the Food Centre].
To do this, she said Carleton needs to consider granting the Food Centre what she has been working for and what the University of Ottawa Food Centre already has: a kitchen.
“If we were to have a kitchen, we would be able to teach students, students would be able to teach students, and it would create a better sense of community amongst Food Centre users,” she said.
Until then, the Food Centre will be focused on distributing to its growing membership. According to McDonald, Food Centre use has increased from 87 individual uses in September to 167 in November, and had 75 uses in December when it was open for half the month.
With this continued demand in usage, the Food Centre, too, will require additional space.
“With the large increase we’ve seen in our user-ship, we have to increase the amount of food we get every week,” she said.
“It’s getting harder and harder to be able to contain that amount of food.”
