The Journal provides free space in our print edition and online for parties on the referendum ballot. All statements are unedited.
CFRC:
CFRC is Queen’s voice in the media. Since 1922 CFRC has been broadcasting the diversity of student voices on the airwaves, and now online at CFRC.ca, through our iPhone and Android apps, and through podcasts. Over 75% of the people on-air at CFRC are either Queen’s students or alumni, benefiting from not only the ability to be heard around the world but also getting hands-on training in audio production and techniques.
Since 2013, we’ve made significant technical and programming advances at the station. Our studio is now fully digital, and CFRC is now connected to the Canada-wide emergency broadcast system.
100% of student fees go directly to the maintenance and operation of the station: maintaining the space, keeping equipment functional, and paying staff salaries (our staff are also almost all Queen’s students or recent Queen’s alumni). All students, via their fee, are members of the station, eligible for volunteer training and to get involved both on and off the air.
Queen’s students and staff form the majority of our board of directors; ultimately, we’re accountable to Queen’s, and we’re proud of the service we provide the Queen’s community. Through programs like Campus Connections, Club Sandwich, Grad Chat and Varsity Wrap Up (just to name a few), the station helps to promote students and their research, resources available to students, as well as student athletes, teams, and clubs. CFRC staff and volunteers work year-round to support other student groups, events, and initiatives through promotion and partnerships, DJ services and news coverage.
Culturally, we give the Queen’s and Kingston community the opportunity to hear programming they might not otherwise encounter, from Mandarin, Arabic, and French language (among others) shows, to culture, poetry, and Queen’s perspectives on local, national, and global issues.
Queen’s Concrete Canoe Team:
The Queen’s Concrete Canoe Team is a multi-disciplinary design team under the organization of the Engineering Society at Queen’s University. The team is entirely student-run by an executive group of ten individuals, and involves around twenty general members. The purpose of the team is to design, develop and construct a canoe made entirely of concrete. Each year the team competes in the Canadian National Concrete Canoe Competition with universities and colleges nationwide. Our key objective is to provide a unique learning environment for students of all years while promoting a creative, innovative, and fun activity that encourages leadership, teamwork, communication, project management, and problem solving skills.
Queen’s Concrete Toboggan Team:
The Queen’s Concrete Toboggan Design Team works throughout the year to design and construct a toboggan, which is then taken to compete in the Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race. The toboggan is built with a metal frame, brakes, a steering system, and a concrete running surface. Along with this, a theme and display is created for the technical exhibition portion of the competition. This where the Team members have the opportunity to network with judges, sponsors and other engineering students from across Canada. The organizing, designing, and manufacturing of the toboggan for this competition requires a wide variety of skill sets and a great devotion of time. The Design Team consists of innovative students from various years and across multiple disciplines of engineering. Queen’s Concrete Toboggan’s Participation in the competition gives students the opportunity to apply and expand on many of the theories that are learnt in school. The team constantly works towards being strong role models at not only the competition but around Queen’s Campus and Kingston. We are eager to share all the skills that we have acquired through being active members of this team. The Team will work hard to be innovative in our design and construction and hopefully use and grow our skillset to exceed at competition this year.
CUCOH:
The Canadian Undergraduate Conference on Healthcare (CUCOH) is a three-day conference that enables undergraduate students to engage in hands-on workshops, discussions, and seminars that showcase the multidisciplinary nature of healthcare. Not only is CUCOH the largest conference at Queen’s, but it is also the largest student-run healthcare conference in Canada. Last year, CUCOH was pleased to welcome over 375 delegates from 21 universities across Canada. This year, our 12th annual conference will be held from November 18th-20th.
Our optional student fee has helped to make our conference possible by providing the resources to plan hands-on workshops, attract national delegates, develop discussion-based case challenges, and promote undergraduate-level research with our research competition. This year, we have invited high caliber speakers from the National Speakers Bureau, Deakin University in Australia, and other distinguished health-care professionals from organizations across Canada. The funds from our student fee would go directly towards the speakers’ fees and travel fees necessary for these new speaking engagements. We are confident that these speakers will inspire the Queen’s community and the larger Canadian community at our conference.
FreshSight Queen’s:
FreshSight Queen’s provides pro-bono consulting services to local charities and national non-profit organizations. While helping deserving non-profits, we provide students an opportunity to develop their professional skillset in a rewarding environment. Our team members are driven by a passion to create a lasting difference in their communities and reward themselves through their pursuit to again practical experience outside the classroom.
We pride ourselves on bringing bright and motivated students from multi-disciplinary backgrounds to bring quality work for our clients. Our teams are partnered with leading consulting firms in Canada to ensure the quality of work and provide our consultants with an entry point to the industry.
Each semester we work with 4 non-profit organizations and offer them services ranging from branding and marketing, to feasibility and market-entry studies. Some of our clients have included (but are not limited to) the Heart and Stroke Foundation, Kingston Food Bank, and World Wildlife Fund. In support of these projects we have also partnered with KPMG, Level 5, BCG, DIG Insights, and SATOV Consultants.
Good Times Diner:
Good Times Diner is a student-run soup kitchen located in St. Paul’s Anglican Church. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening at 5:30PM for fifty out of fifty-two weeks a year, nutritious, hot, free meals are provided for many less fortunate members of the Kingston community. This is a valuable service that creates a safe and welcoming environment for its patrons while addressing their social and economic challenges.The food is prepared by Queen’s University student volunteers who are interested in expanding their understanding of community issues, particularly poverty, in a fun, hands-on learning environment. Volunteers have the opportunity to learn valuable cooking skills and make new friends while working as a team to give back to the community they call home. Good Times Diner is a non-judgemental, anonymous, free service for all patrons of the Queen’s and Kingston community.
Helping Haiti:
Queen’s Helping Haiti was established in 2014 to support the larger Kingston-based organization, Helping Haiti. Helping Haiti was founded by Tammy Aristilde, and aims to raise funds and awareness to support Cite Soleil. Tammy works with local members of the community to carry out projects, such as the building of a water tower and medical clinic, as well as run programs such as first aid training and self-defence. Helping Haiti is particularly focused on reducing the amount of gang violence that is so prevalent in that region. It does so by bringing members of the community together in safe environments to build healthy relationships.
Queen’s Helping Haiti has teamed up with Tammy and her organization to help support the ongoing costs of running the Helping Haiti medical clinic, which include the wages of three local hired nurses and two nursing assistants. A quarter of the patients seen each week are infants, while about a third seek emergency first aid. The clinic is one of the only free health care facilities in the region which is run by local staff members, and is able to remain open during times of political unrest. In addition to the medical clinic, Queen’s Helping Haiti is also working to support the building of a newly designed community centre, which will feature sheltered playing surfaces for community members. In addition, we are hoping to install a community library where community members may come to learn and practice reading. The centre will be surrounded by security walls so as to ensure the safety of the individuals inside.
Queen’s Helping Haiti hopes to run events on campus to raise awareness about the violence and poverty in Cite Soleil, as well as raise funds to help its mother organization carry out projects for the betterment of the community.
Kingston Canadian Film Festival:
The Kingston Canadian Film Festival is the globe’s largest standalone showcase of Canadian film and media and is in its 17th season, with festival dates set for March 2-5, 2017. Founded in 2001 by a Queen’s film student, KCFF now showcases over 70 films, including dedicated programs for students, youth and emerging artists. The festival presents the stories of Francophone and Aboriginal directors, plus work by filmmakers living coast-to-coast. Additionally, KCFF hosts workshops, career and networking events, outreach to under-served members of the community, and festival awards. KCFF is a registered charity with the goal of celebrating and promoting Canadian film and film production.
KCFF offers the Queen’s community access to festival programming that both challenges and inspires. Students actively engage in screenings and Q&A sessions, free workshops and panels, a free career event featuring big name guests from the film and media industry, plus one-on-one sessions and networking events.
KCFF offers student filmmakers showcase opportunities, with major media and press attention. Our student film showcase guarantees artist fees, promotion and marketing for successful applicants, plus nomination for festival awards. Students from all disciplines submit films (there is no entry fee) and many continue to submit films beyond graduation.
KCFF also employs 20 students who receive an academic credit, work study, or contract position. The skills, experience and connections that student staff make during KCFF have a lasting impact: many go on to positions with TIFF, Bell Media, The Comedy Network, VICE, Vancouver International Film Festival, to name a few.
KCFF has partnered with many Queen’s clubs, and groups over the years, offering reciprocal marketing and promotion. Some groups include the Queen’s Film Production Club, The Queen’s Journal, CFRC 101.9, the Queen’s University Film Society, the Queen’s Commerce Film Committee, Vogue, and the Focus Film Festival.
Loving Spoonful:
Loving Spoonful is a local, non-profit charity dedicated to achieving a healthy, food-secure community in Kingston by facilitating fresh food access, skill development and community engagement in a collaborative, empowering and environmentally-sustainable manner.
Loving Spoonful reclaims (rescues) fresh, healthy surplus food from local grocery stores, restaurants, caterers, farmers and bakeries including food retailers across Queen’s campus. We deliver it directly to over 30 Kingston social service agencies including those that feed the homeless, women escaping abuse, youth and the hungry. This program meets people’s immediate needs, directly reduces agencies’ food costs and increases the healthy food available at meal programs and shelters.
Loving Spoonful also teaches healthy food skills including, School GROW garden programming at 7 local primary schools and community Kitchens – teaching basic, healthy cooking skills and sharing good meals together. Loving Spoonful operates innovative programming including:
- Preserve Reserves – preserving the harvest for donation throughout the winter
- Kingston Community Garden Network – supporting community gardens across Kingston
- Grow A Row program – distributing locally-grown produce
Loving Spoonful works at the broader policy level, as well, to create a food system that is more equitable, healthy and sustainable. Some of the food outlets that count on Loving Spoonful to distribute their surplus healthy food include: Queen’s Athletic & Recreation Centre (ARC) Food Outlets, Lazy Scholar, Location 21, Canadian Grilling Company, Donald Gordon Centre, Queen’s Cafeterias at the end of terms and/or during the summer
Many of Loving Spoonful’s volunteers are Queen’s students, staff and faculty. Loving Spoonful also collaborates with Soul Food, a Queen’s student group with similar goals and works with the Queen’s Sustainability Office. Loving Spoonful regularly employs Queen’s Work Study students and works with Queen’s classes to provide meaningful community-based projects for students to work through.
Queen’s First Aid:
Queen’s First Aid Campus Response Team is a student-run, volunteer 24/7 on-call campus response team that has served the Queen’s community since 1986. QFA provides emergency first aid services to those in need and is dispatched to incidents via the Queen’s Emergency Report Centre. QFA also attends university and student events by request and offers St. John Ambulance First Aid courses at discounted prices for students. The QFA student fee is the Unit’s only revenue source and is used to pay for training, equipment, and volunteer development. The Unit maintains a partnership with Queen’s Department of Campus Security & Emergency Services, participating in joint marketing campaigns promoting the Emergency Report Line.
QIAA:
The Queen’s International Affairs Association is one of the largest and oldest clubs at Queen’s (circa 1907). We run a number of fantastic initiatives in order to provide students with unique experiences in international affairs. We are an umbrella organization of eight different initiatives and serve as a hub for students, faculty and members of the Kingston community who are interested in engaging in debate and dialogue on current events, foreign affairs, global politics and international issues in general. We have been awarded the Best Club Events (2016) and Best Club (2013) by the AMS for our work on campus. We host a number of initiatives: a monthly Speaker Series featuring speakers such as Edward Snowden, Samantha Nutt and Romeo Dallaire; a quarterly international magazine, “ The Observer”; a bi-weekly radio show in CFRC and on Podomatic, “Right of Reply”; an international Model UN Conference, QMUNi; a crisis conference for Queen’s students, QICSim; a Community Outreach portfolio which works to build greater ties between students and professors and the Kingston Community; a top ranking Model UN team that travels and wins awards across North America and lastly, QIAA coordinates International Development Week, working with a diverse set of clubs on Queen’s campus. All of these initiatives are run 100% by Queen’s students for Queen’s students and all are provided free or at a heavily subsidized cost to any student that wishes to participate. Many of our events have reached international recognition, our Model UN team is ranked top fifty (and climbing!) in North America, and Right of Reply has been in the Top Ten lists for Politics and Organizations on Podomatic.
Queen’s Musical Theatre:
Queen’s Musical Theatre has been annually producing professional-quality musicals since 1969. The clubs origins date to 1883 with the formation of the original Queen’s Glee Club. The club strives to provide an educational environment for Queen’s students to put on full-length musicals with positive learning experiences. Some of the most recent of the 68 musicals staged by QMT include Next to Normal, Company, Dogfight, Legally Blonde, Monty Python’s Spamalot, and Assasins. In January 2017, QMT is proud to present Avenue Q, a hilarious musical featuring puppets teaching valuable life lessons for adults. Students involved with QMT have the opportunity to take part in shows through roles in the cast, orchestra, crews, and production team. In addition to our productions, we hold musical theatre related social events such as cabarets, alumni galas, trips to see shows, and workshops. Money collected from our $0.50 fee (subject to individual opt-out) helps us to provide valuable opportunities for students, not only through our productions, but also through workshops, trips, cabaret evenings, and other events. QMT provides students with meaningful experience that has allowed many of our alumni to go on to develop their own musicals, attend prestigious theatre schools, and work in the Toronto and Broadway theatre scenes. With your support, we will be able to continue to provide Queen’s students with these exciting opportunities and to bring professional-quality musical theatre to the Queen’s and Kingston communities.
Room to Read:
Queen’s is an official chapter of the award-winning non-profit organization Room to Read. We envision a world whereby all children can pursue a quality education, reach their full potential and have the ability to contribute to their community and world at large. Live-in for Literacy is the flagship event of the year for our club, whereby 2 members are to live, sleep and eat in Stauffer library for seven consecutive days to raise awareness and funds for our cause. In the past this event has raised money to build a computer lab in
Cambodia, three schools in Nepal and rural India. In addition to serving as a fundraising event, Live-in brings the Queen’s student body together in reflection of the value of education and the importance of literacy as a global issue. Funds collected from student fees have continually helped our club launch successful campaigns in Stauffer library by subsidizing our construction costs, and daily-events planned for the week of Live-in as well as other marketing expenses, and contributes towards other operational costs for our smaller events throughout the year. Since 2005, numerous other schools have joined in on this event such as McMaster, UBC, SFU, Ottawa U and U of T and the event continues to grow and spread across the country. By supporting our cause during this referendum you would be not only helping our club reach its goals, but also supporting literacy across the world to those in need.
QMAST:
Do you like sailing? How about robotics? Then we are the team for you! The Queen’s Mostly Autonomous Sailboat Team (QMAST) is a student run design team that builds autonomous sailboats to compete at the International Robotic Sailing Regatta (IRSR), which was founded at Queen’s over a decadse ago. Each year the team builds a new boat from the ground up, splitting the work between three specialized sub-teams. The mechanical sub-team is responsible for designing and manufacturing the boat itself, while the software sub-team’s job is to program the onboard computer to autonomously sail the boat using information from the GPS and wind sensors. Finally, the electrical sub-team links the mechanical side to the software side through the design and installation of sensors, power sources and other electrical components necessary to control the boat. The IRSR is a competition, typically held in June, where schools from across the world convene to compete in several events including a payload carrying challenge, station keeping challenge, and a navigation challenge where the boat must maneuver around obstacles without any guidance from its team. With second place finishes at IRSR 2015 and 2016, QMAST is excited to challenge for first place at this year’s competition, hosted by the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. Additionally, QMAST hosts various workshops throughout the year on skills such as soldering, fiber-glassing and Arduino programming. These workshops are open to all students – check out our Facebook page (facebook.com/qmast) for more details! So whether you are a sailing enthusiast, love robotics, or just find the idea of creating an autonomous sailboat interesting, please come find us! We are located in Beamish Munro Hall Room 121, or send us an email at sailboat@engsoc.queensu.ca.
Friends of MSF:
The Friends of MSF: Queen’s Club is dedicated to raising awareness about Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF or Doctors Without Boarders) and the issues that this organization promotes. MSF was founded in 1971 by a group of French Doctors in order to respond effectively and rapidly to medical emergencies. It has since become the largest emergency relief organization worldwide. MSF operates independently from political, economic and religious influences in many countries where there is little or no medical infrastructure. For more information on MSF please visit: www.msf.ca
The primary goal of the MSF club is to promote MSF to the Queen’s and larger Kingston community. We plan to do this through avenues such as posters, announcements and enlightening public displays. A secondary goal of the MSF club is to raise funds for MSF to support its emergency missions and provide medical supplies to those in need.
This club will provide individuals with information about the nature of overseas volunteer work in the hopes that they will consider volunteering with MSF later in their professional careers.
The purpose and goals of the MSF club fall in line with Queen’s values of internationalism and social responsibility. The MSF club informs the Queen’s community of volunteer opportunities and this can assist with students’ plans for the future. In addition, the MSF club hopes to strengthen the relationships between the various faculties at Queen’s. MSF is an organization that involves individuals from many different professions including doctors, nurses, mental health professionals, laboratory specialists, nutritionists, administrators and project coordinators. The executive committee and members of the Friends of MSF club include individuals from various faculties including medicine, nursing, commerce and engineering.
Excersize is Medicine Canada @ QueensU:
Exercise is Medicine Canada @ Queen’s University aims to develop and encourage physical activity prescription with primary care physicians when designing treatment plans for patients. As the first University to head an Exercise is Medicine – Canada on campus club, we are invested in providing seminars and workshops to medical students, local physicians, and health care networks around the benefits of physical activity. We also run events to encourage students at Queen’s to become more physically active to benefit their physical AND mental well-being. We plan to use this student fee of $0.25 towards running physical activity programming on campus and in the Kingston community, including several of our yearly events and training opportunities: “Move with Your Docs”, “Lifestyle Expo”, “Exercise Prescription @ Queen’s”, “Physical Activity Hour”, medical student training programming, among others. We look forward to the hopeful support of the Queen’s community in seeking out this student fee and coming out to our events and programming!
Queen’s Love 146:
Queen’s Love146 is a local task force for the larger charitable organization, Love146. Love146 is a Texas-based charity in support of child trafficking survivors in the US, the UK and Southeast Asia. The organization focuses their efforts on survivor care and prevention, building and operating rehabilitation centers to help the children reintegrate and thrive in their local communities. As a task force, we share the vision of Love146: “The abolition of child trafficking and exploitation. Nothing Less.”
Locally, our organization continues to educate the community through fundraising events and awareness campaigns. Queen’s Love146 aims to empower a growing movement, and shed light on the issue of child trafficking and exploitation. By partnering with other on-and-off campus organizations, our goal is to effect change. This goal can be achieved through further establishment of our organization at Queen’s. The student fee will allow us to grow the scale of our fundraising and reach a wider audience. This money will help us host larger events, offer greater resources and ultimately further our mission to end child trafficking and exploitation.
Queen’s Bands:
Using the student fees provided to us by the AMS Bands has served as a pillar of Queen’s school spirit for over 110 years. Bands has stayed true to its origin by accompanying the varsity football team to every game, home and away, for as far back as our records go (well back to the 1940s). This incurs significant travel costs for busses and hotels. Our student fee has also helped pay for the purchase and maintenance of our iconic uniforms, which upholds the Scottish and Royal traditions of the University. We proudly wear tartan while giving back to the community by performing at events hosted by a wide range of groups, including many hosted by the Office of Advancement. We also use our student fee money to travel to other communities to represent Queen’s, marching in Santa Claus and St. Patrick’s day parades, both locally, across Canada, and even internationally.
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