This meeting was held in the town hall and was quite well attended given the horrible wet and cold weather.  It was good to have people from OUSU and from the Oxford Hub student volunteering centre.

The meeting was chaired by Councillor Mark Mills and we fairly quickly broke into two groups – one to discuss student volunteering and one to discuss student community engagement.  It became apparent quite quickly that there are large overlaps between the two.  We talked about how students and more permanent residents can coexist constructively in the community and I was interested to hear about the work student voulunteers have been doing with elderly folk who live in the City Centre and often don’t feel able to go out.  Quite a lot of these people are in my ward, Carfax, so this was of particular interest to me.

One thing that was picked up was that students are still having problems with Houses of Multiple Occupation, particularly around landlords and letting agents being slow to do repairs.  I said I would post instructions about how to check if a property is registered as an HMO and see who is the licence holder so have done so in a separate blog post.

The meeting finished about 9pm and was a useful exchange of contacts, ideas and views and hopefully will enable more student engagement and volunteering.