Committee Handover

Here are some general guidelines for handing over a committee.

• Similar to handing over within a society: If you’ve ever been on the committee for a student society, it’s quite similar, except we don’t have to submit any paperwork to York SU. 

• Community requires sustainability: The ultimate goal of initiatives like these is to build a disabled community within your department. Genuine community takes time, and history is a big part of that. 

  • A major focus of your hand-over should be ensuring that any on-going projects, values, aims, are relayed to the new committee, with an actionable plan for how they’re going to be done. 

  • Make sure any resources you have made and used are shared and accessible to the new committee.

  • Make sure to transfer ownership of any accounts you have, like email and social media.

  • If you have any google drive, groups or chats - make sure admin priviledges are changed over so others can add new people and make changes where needed.  

  • See also the 'Sharing Resources' section below.  

• Allow for change: each time you hand over your committee, the student group will have to change a little, to adapt to the needs and priorities of the new committee - while it’s nice to have continuity between committees, in terms of events that they run and projects they have, it might be the case that the new committee simply can’t commit to the same things, and that’s okay! 

  • These are volunteer student groups; people have other things they need to be doing and can commit varied amounts of time - don’t pressure your new committee to commit to things they can’t commit to, you will just end up creating a system set to fail. 

• Fanfare: it’s nice to have a bit of fanfare, honour the leaving members! 

  • In the previous handover the PDC had, the leaving members were given mugs with our logo on them; it was sweet. 

  • Ensure that leaving members are aware that they can keep getting involved, through the alumni network. 

Depending on your staff contact and their role, they'll likely be able to help manage the handover.  Even if there is no committee to hand over to, it's still worth doing many of these handover tasks.  It may be new students come along eventually and build on the work you've done - especially if there is a staff contact who can make efforts to recruit a new committee.

Looking for New Committee Members

You may find that once a couple of people are graduating, your committee is beginning to look a bit sparse. You can help recruit new members by reaching out to students, perhaps by asking a lecturer to promote the group (particularly during introductory lectures at the start of the year) or by sending an email to students in the department. If you have very few members, it may be worth holding an interest event, or asking past members if they know of anyone who may be interested in joining the group. 

If it's not looking like you can find enough people, consider which options you have. Is there another department that you can partner with to get some more interest? Can you leave your work and resources with a staff member? Perhaps there is an option for you to be involved as an alumni? 

Check out the Building a Committee page for more guidance around this!

During your time building a community, you'll have accumilated a lot of resources and accounts like emails and social media.  Considering how these are saved and shared is really important for sustainability and for committee handovers as they are invaluable resources for building on and growing from the work you have done.

Shared Online Spaces

If you haven't set up something already, consider creating a shared google folder or drive to collate all your committee resources in one place.  This can be shared with everyone on the committee, helping to make handovers a lot easier.  If you have a staff contact, make sure to share it with them as well.

If you have set up anything like a google group, google chat or other shared communication space - make sure permissions are updated.  So, if a leaving member is the owner/admin/moderator for that space and they are the only one that can add new members or make other changes - make sure you pass this role onto another member so you don't loose access to this space.  If you have a staff contact who is part of these groups, they are a good person to have as an administrator/moderator as they are likely to be around longer and can help with continuity here.  

See the following sections of the 'Building a Committee' page for guidance around this:

• Setting up how you want to work and communicate as a group.

• Setting up resources

Social Media and Promotion

These are key resources you've used to build your community and can include things like email, instagram, facebook, linked in, canva and websites.  So there are some important things to do to help ensure they can still be used:

• Create a brief how-to/handover for different accounts and programmes so the next person can access and use them.  This could be in the form of a handover document or video.  See the Template Gallery for examples.    

• Share the Canva or alternative post-making site so that they have exisiting template and posts.

• Update 'recovery contact' information or change it to a department number or email if possible.

• Update access/passwords to any social media and any shared email addresses/google drive accounts or similar.

• Share a copy of the logo if you have one, perhaps including fonts and hex codes if you want to look professional!

See the 'Promoting the Community' and 'Website' pages for more guidance around this.