Maritime Retreat Conference

Conference season is in full swing!

This past weekend I attended the Maritime Retreat Conference in Prince Edward Island.
I worked with other student union executives to create this conference. The conference was designed to bring together student union executives from throughout the maritime universities to give them the opportunity to gain a better understanding of our counterparts, networking, and to help us each advance our goals/plans for this year and the future.

Myself, Daniel Boyle (Vice President Internal), and Kris Osmond (Vice President Student Life) attended the conference on behalf of the Dalhousie Student Union. There were representatives from Saint Mary's University Student Union (SMUSA), Acadia Students' Union (ASU) and the University of Prince Edward Island Students' Union (UPEISU).

Throughout the three days the executives were able to learn more about what one another does, found ways to help each other, and were able to take some great things from others.

The President's focus group tackled a lot of different topics but the most interesting was creating the Council of Maritime University Students. It is going to be a group that is for all maritime university student union executives to come and work together, there are no fees associated with it, and it will be able to be a place for all executives (not just for lobbying).

One of the main issues that the President's will be tackling through this group is to gain media attention to the post secondary issues that are facing all of the maritime provinces (i.e. targeted funding).

Throughout this year we are planning on having several other conferences with the 4 schools that attending this past conference and hopefully many more as well.

Overall the conference was a great success and I am highly anticipating working with the other maritime executives throughout this year.