Members of the Wageningen Chamber of Associations and other Wageningen organisations at a protest against the slow student fine in 2024. Photo WKvV For the first time since the 2021-2022 academic year, there is once again a (prospective) union for Wageningen students. In that year, the previous student union, Student Alliance Wageningen, was unable to find a new board.
Last January, then-chair Christel Konings announced her intention to join the national union for students LSVb wit the Wageningen Chamber of Associations (WKvV). ‘In recent years, we have been taking on more and more union tasks,’ she said at the time. Among other things, she pointed to the Chamber’s efforts to improve Wageningen’s accessibility by public transport, to create new nightlife venues in Wageningen and to provide social hubs on campus for small associations when the flat pubs close.
The Wageningen Chamber recently officially joined the national student union. For the time being, they are prospective members: they have three years to meet certain conditions, such as a minimum number of members. ‘We’ll have to see how that goes, since our members are student associations,’ says the new WKvV chair Ilene van Ginkel. ‘That means we either have ten members, namely the associations we represent, or around four thousand members, namely the students who are members of those ten associations.’
The idea is that the vice-chair of the Chamber will take the lead in exploring the feasibility of this. ‘If there is a lot of work involved, we may eventually consider establishing a union that is separate from the Wageningen Chamber of Associations’, says Van Ginkel. ‘Until then, it will fall under the umbrella of the WKvV.’
Translated with DeepL
