Public Meetings:
One of the easiest ways to build on campus and share information is to hold events.
Building a meeting: This is a quick guide to help organise a meeting within your university or college.
Contact Stop the War: First things first make sure to contact the STW student team on 020 7561 4830 or stwstudents@stopwar.org.uk to get assistance with organising and building the event.
Choose a topic: The actual topic of the meeting is incredibly important as it needs to be relevant and interesting. Ideally choosing a topic based around these areas would be best but Stop the War is happy to support other similar ideas.
- Imperialism and British intervention
- Trump, the Special Relationship and the Middle East
- Why we need an anti-war government
- Islamophobia and War
- Stop Arming Saudi – Stop Bombing Yemen
- NATO and the spread of War
Check out the uni’s policies: Checking out the SU policy on external speakers will make the event a lot easier to organise. There may be a period required to get a speaker booked or you may need a society to be created so this step is just making sure that we understand the system.
Get your speakers: We will be looking for two or three speakers that will be good on the topic and can bring in an audience. Our Student Team is happy to organise someone to speak at an event for you. We have also got some recommended groups to contact on a separate page.
Get your room: Get a room booked for the event itself and so it can go on all of the advertising.
Advertise: Get the event out to as many people as possible to fill up the room and learn about the movement. Use social media and leafleting to get the word spread as much as possible.
Building a society:
Once a society has been created it is important to continue to build it to spread the word to as many people as possible.
Here are a few ideas of events and things you can do:
- Campaigns and days of action: Having an active society will create a huge difference and people will be attracted to your campaigns. Days of public action will help to show other students what you stand for and have an impact.
- Public meetings: Public meetings are a way of getting celebrities, MPs and significant activists onto campus to speak about important subjects. Click on the Public Meeting document to find out more information.
- Regular events: These can be simple casual socials, cultural events with film and music that is linked with the anti-war movement or discussions about the anti-war climate as a whole. We suggest having fortnightly activist meetings where people can discuss the next steps, vote on campaigns and keep up to date with everything.
- Fresher’s fair and stalls: Having a stall at a fresher’s fair is a must to get new students interested and signed up. These will need to be booked in advance so make sure you watch out for the deadline. Hosting a stall every few weeks is a simple way of getting people’s attention, petitions signed and word spread about you.
- Creating links: There will be people within similar organisations and societies that will be interested in supporting the event and helping things out, working with these groups will be really mutually beneficial. Having a strong social media presence will help this out a lot
- Email list or group chat: Having a way to contact the students that are interested in supporting the society is incredibly important, creating an email list or group chat on social media will keep everyone up to date. The most important thing is having a presence on campus and making sure that people know what you stand for and that you are open and want them to join you.
