Safer Students Event welcomes local safety services and charities to the SU

This week in the SU Little Room, we held our Safer Students Event to bring together emergency services and wellbeing charities within the city. As your VP Wellbeing and Diversity, and as part of the Wellbeing Wednesday’s campaign, I wanted to host an event focused on staying safe in Plymouth.

We were joined by Devon and Cornwall Police, including Tracey Godfrey from our neighbourhood policing team and three fantastic officers from the Diverse Communities Policing Team. We even had Plymouth’s ‘top-cop’ Police Chief Commander, Matt Longman, come in to speak about student safety.

We had the fantastic National Neighbourhood Watch and the Local Neighbourhood Watch team, as well as the Safer Plymouth section of Plymouth City Council to talk about anti-social behaviour and safety at home. 

We had the Devon and Somerset Fire Service and RNLI on campus to talk about safety in or near water, including nights out on the Barbican! They did some interactive demonstrations on how to help people in water and handed out some free resources and waterproof phone cases (which are still available in the Hive!).

Safety for students isn’t just about the emergency services; we also had Plymouth NHS Talking Therapies, who shared resources on mental health, and Harbour to talk about Safe Sex. There was lots to learn about and free condoms on offer. If you missed out, you can still receive free protection from the SU. Find out more about this here.

The University Student Services Wellbeing Advisor, Jason Owens, also came in to talk about the support that is offer from the University Student Services, and as VP Wellbeing and Diversity, I hosted the SU stall which was filled with useful contacts, SU Advice, and resources from other externals in the city such as First Light, The Zone, Andy’s Man Club, Trevi, TogetherAll, and NHS Livewell. 

A massive thank you to everyone who was involved and came along!

For more information about student safety you can check out our Safer Students guide here.