SFS members meeting in February

The Swedish National Union of Students (Swedish: Sveriges förenade studentkårer - SFS) is an umbrella organization which manages national student questions. In early February Eric Gustafsson, Sophia Fröberg Liljenberg and Jenný Jensdóttír visited the SFS Members meeting at The Royal College of Music in Stockholm.

Focus questions

One of the biggest proposals is the Plan of Operations which contains the next focus question. SFS works with focus questions to determin what to prioritise durring a year. Each focus question is three years, one starting each year, every second being organisational and every second being political. This mean that there is one introduction year, one focus year, and one finalising year to this process.

First year:

The first year allows the SFS Board to prepare all the work needed the coming year when they will be trying to work through the focus question. A certain level of negotiation and implementation may also happen here, but it is minimal. Most of the SFS Boards resources will have to go into the current focus year question and planning for next year, as well as following up last year.

Second year (focus year):

This is when the SFS Presidium will try to carry out the work related to the focus question, for example doing investigations, lobbying towards the government departments and politicians. One of the biggest things SFS undertakes when lobbying politics is negotiating with the Swedish Department of Finance, because every other representative body and lobbyist body is doing the same. Making time and resource effectiveness very important.

Third year:

The third year the focus question is finalised. This includes follow-up and handling the result of the previous years' work. For example, this may include making sure that government resources are properly spent or taking part in government investigations that where negotiated the previous year.

The proposal:

SFS Board has proposed to have sustainability as a focus question. This has gained a lot of criticism since quite a few student unions regard this as a local question. The biggest impact that SFS can have here is in negotiating government research grants, a niche problem only impacting a very few students (all of which are doctoral students researching environmental questions). At the same time the SFS Board has dropped VFU from the Plan of Operations, something that effects very many students in a very direct way.

JSU has worked very hard to make VFU a prioritised question since we and a lot of other Student Unions represent plenty of students who have come into financial problems from their VFU. One typical problem is that students are forced to pay double rents, but do not get extra government grants to cover this extra cost. There are also problems with students being graded by professors who have not visited their VFU work place and therefore do not know how the student has actually preformed, leading the grade to be more based on the students relationship with the teacher then their actual performance. Both these questions require national negotiations and will have a major impact on a big portion of Swedish students.

More about the problems with the focus question can be found in the SFSFUM Preparatory report by Eric Gustafsson.

SFS 100 years old next year

SFS is also planning to hold a 100 years celebration next year to celebrate the founding of the organisation in 1921. This will probably entail a big banquet, which is very exciting, both form a political relations perspective, but also because it is an opportunity to learn from the organisation's successes and failures. We expect the organisation to renew itself as part of its next organisational focus question, voted on next year at SFSFUM 2021.

Letter of Opinion

There were no new major additions to the Letter of Opinion proposal. It is mainly just clean-up, something appreciated and needed, as the document has been revised by plenty of people through-out the organisations 99 years of existence.