Today our adventure ends. Having together led Sweden's largest student organization over the past two years has been an unforgettable journey and challenge. How successful we have been, others will judge, not least SFS 52 memberships.
Being involved in civil society or politics, one does not always have time to see or experience the change one is fighting for. In striving to achieve our goals, we must value every little victory and success. It is therefore both with joy and not without pride that we want to look back on our two years and take this last opportunity to highlight some things that we believe are important successes for SFS and things that we have accomplished or contributed to.
The expectations of SFS are and should be high, but the biggest expectations are probably the ones we both set for ourselves. When we both ran, it was with the explicit ambition to, among other things;
- increase the visibility of the organization,
- increase collaboration with other important organizations within the student movement,
- greatly strengthen the student perspective on quality of education in all contexts,
- put students' right to part-time sick leave on the political agenda,
- work for a more socio-economically decent life for students and counteract increased indebtedness
- highlight how the student housing shortage is not just a metropolitan issue,
- demand coherent political responsibility for higher education and research;
- strengthen the position of doctoral students both within SFS and in academia and society,
- increase SFS's international involvement,
- implement several important measures to develop SFS as a political grassroots organization
In all these areas and more, we want to say that we have also seen important steps in the direction we are convinced is the right one.
- SFS's media presence has been high, in the number of plays, press clippings and different types of media. We have also in a completely new way started to make SFS's daily activities visible to both members and the public through social media and outreach activities.
- SFS has established a close and good dialogue with, above all, the student political student unions. Collaboration within the student movement has led to several joint initiatives with unions on both sides of the parliamentary blocs. In addition, it can be mentioned as an example how Center students and S-students, partly with the support of SFS, successfully pushed through positions on tuition fees during their parties' meetings / congresses despite the opposition of the party boards.
- SFS's message about the usefulness of education as the overriding purpose of higher education has strongly marginalized the instrumental view of students' employability. Perhaps even more important has been that SFS focused on the crucial importance of higher education pedagogy for quality of education in a way that has created attention in Europe and Canada.
- Together with the Swedish Association of Universities and University Colleges (SUHF), SFS has been absolutely decisive for the new approach that is now being taken around Sweden's quality evaluation system. In the new system that will be implemented in 2016, students are promised a clearer and more central role and that a great deal of focus will be placed on the usefulness of the programs.
- Through persistent work on the part of SFS, the students' position in the social insurance system and especially in health insurance has become something that far more than the student movement raises as a serious problem. A wide range of actors, from organizations for the chronically ill to LO and the country's principals, now demand that students be allowed to take part-time sick leave. Not least through the campaign #heltsjukt, SFS has made visible how today's system affects people in practice and created a broad insight that the social insurance inquiry can not be expected to have time to carry out its entire mission in the barely six months that remain today.
- SFS played the decisive role in stopping the government's proposal to reduce the study grant. Even though the increased loan means an increase in indebtedness, politicians are now heard to admit that the level of the study grant has so far not corresponded to students' expenses, which SFS has pointed out in several years of student budgets.
- SFS housing reports have received more attention than ever before and national politicians have been seriously forced to broaden their focus from Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö to all 28 places where the housing shortage for students today is crying out.
- More actors than SFS today speak loudly about the need for a broad political agreement on the basic conditions for the country's colleges and universities to create long-term, predictability and stability for the academy.
- Not least through SFS's advocacy work, the migration rules have been changed and incoming doctoral students have been given far better opportunities for residence permits and to bring relatives. Within SFS, the doctoral students' opportunities for influence and influence have also been significantly improved by radically strengthening the SFS doctoral student committee.
- SFS's involvement in the Nordic Conference of Presidents (NOM) and, above all, the European Students' Union (ESU) has generated a significantly higher degree of trust and influence within both ESU and NOM. In this, our main success is that Elisabeth Gehrke (former Vice-President of SFS) was first elected Vice-President of ESU, followed by having recently been elected President.
- A number of comprehensive organizational changes, through completely new governing documents and working methods, constitute the first and largest steps in a completely new way of working with policy development within SFS. Through this, SFS will both become much clearer in its political analysis of important issues and its members will be given greater influence over, and the basis for, internal student policy idea debate.
The enumeration of what we believe to be successes could be made longer, but for us this is the most important proof of the full-time political work that we have now devoted two years to on behalf of Sweden's university and college students. It has been an unforgettable journey that has meant experiences we will carry with us for the rest of our lives. Of course, the road has been lined with difficulties and the assignment has been really hard for both of us at times, but above all it has been fantastic fun.
We would like to extend a warm and sincere thank you to all of you who have given us these two years. None of what we can be considered to have accomplished for the country's students would have been possible without you. Of course, the most important thing is all the country's student unions through the invaluable work you do and the trust you have given us. In a nearly 100-year-old organization, all success is also based on the work of previous leaders and we therefore want to thank our predecessors Camilla Georgsson and Sabine Pettersson for the good conditions they gave us.
It is with as confident and high expectations that we now hand over to Rebecka Stenkvist and Johan Alvfors, who starting tomorrow will take over the leadership of the broad national student voice and largest student organization in the country - the Swedish National Union of Students.
Until we see and hear again, thank you and hello!
Eric Arroy
Chairman, 2012-2014
Eric Pedersen
Vice Chairman, 2012-2014