Advocacy
The most important duty of the Student Union of the University of Lapland is to protect the interests of the students. The members of the Student Union consist of the undergraduate and postgraduate students and all the exchange students and doctoral students who have chosen to join the union. LYY protects the students’ interests in both official contexts, such as working committees, and in more laid back contexts like e.g. coffee table conversations.
The aim of LYY’s advocacy is to improve the university students’ everyday life and offer every student the tools to take care of their own overall well-being. Additionally, LYY works in cooperation with the National Union of University Students in Finland to protect the interests of students on a national level, concerning issues such as income and health services of the students. To ensure the transparency of the work LYY attends to SYL’s meetings on protection of interests.
The protectors of interests in LYY are the people who work in positions of responsibility and the staff. Other valuable co-workers are the subject associations and the student representatives of the University Administration.
You can get more information on advocacy from LYY’s Adviser of Educational and Social Affairs edunvalvonta@lyy.fi
The harassment contact persons
If a student experiences bullying, harassment, discrimination, distasteful behavior or if they are in a troublesome conflict with someone they can contact LYY’s harassment contact persons. A student can also contact the harassment contact persons if they perceive so that the subject associations or other actors in the student community don’t follow the student union’s equality plan.
The harassment contact person’s work is confidential. That’s why the work never proceeds further than the person who informed about the case gives permission to. Without a permission, the harassment contact persons don’t even share details of the cases they work on with each other. The harassment contact persons work varies from being a reliable listener into being an active problem solver and a mediator between the conflicting parties. The work of the harassment contact persons isn’t documented in any way.