This is the text of an email sent to subscribers of the #Grady4GS mailing list on 19 July 2019. To subscribe to our GDPR-compliant list, please fill out your details here!

19 July 2019

Dear Colleague,

As you will have heard by now, I officially take up my post as General Secretary of UCU on 1 August. But although the election is over, we will need to stay organised and keep working together if we are to achieve what we want, both inside and outside UCU. 

My campaign has built a new coalition of UCU members and the subscribers to this mailing list were the heart of that coalition. Many of you put a lot of time and effort into campaigning on my behalf. This mailing list grew to nearly four hundred subscribers over the course of the ballot period. By the start of the final week, we had at least one volunteer who had agreed to knock on doors and put up posters in every single one of the sixty largest branches in UCU. 

Those efforts translated into a record-breaking turnout for UCU GS elections and a record-breaking share of the vote. If we keep working together, both inside and outside UCU’s formal structures, we can get even more done.

I would therefore like to keep this movement and this mailing list alive once I start work at UCU HQ. I hope to use the list to create opportunities to meet and listen to supporters. For example, I will be touring branches in September and October as part of UCU’s joint USS and pay/equality/anti-casualisation campaigns, and you will hear more about that via official emails from UCU HQ. But as well as speaking and taking questions at branch meetings, I also want to take the time to meet informally with supporters of my campaign, to give you the inside track on what I’m doing for UCU and hear your thoughts on what we should be doing next. I’d love to hear from people who want to get more involved in UCU at a national level, perhaps by taking part in committees or the new ‘task groups’ which I pledged to set up in my manifesto. You don’t need to be very experienced in UCU or involved in your branch to consider doing this – I want to see a range of people with different backgrounds getting involved now that I’m General Secretary.

However, in order to do all these things, I need your consent. This mailing list was created for the specific purpose of my election campaign. To use it for any other purpose, I need to inform you what that purpose is and give you an opportunity to opt out. The list is not, nor will it become, an official UCU list. It will not be administered using UCU resources, but only in a personal capacity by me and the registered data controllers for my campaign. If you would like to leave the list, please follow the steps to unsubscribe at the bottom of this message. If not, you can look forward to hearing more from me in the coming months, and I encourage you to invite anyone else who might be interested to subscribe via my campaign website. But either way, thank you so much for your support.

Best wishes,

Jo.

Published by Jo Grady