Living in both India and Ireland for sizeable portions of her life, Bhargavi Magadi aims to ensure students from all backgrounds have access to the welfare they need. Having worked with youth activism organisations such as SpunOut and Plan International, she has had experience engaging with many issues facing young people in Ireland today.
“It also exposed me to a lot of different types of experiences because everyone there are all from such different backgrounds,” she said talking about her time working for SpunOut.
Much of Magadi’s campaign revolves around highlighting the college’s welfare services in a way that makes them accessible to students who need them the most. She called out college management for not having the framework to help students who need support the most. “I feel like they can and should be doing a lot more around the student housing crisis and the cost of living crisis because it’s been going on for a long time now,” she remarked.
Magadi aims to focus greatly on making the college’s disability service more accessible and beneficial to all students. “I am registered with the disability service myself, which is why I am really passionate about this issue”. The disability service offers a wide range of support and accommodations for students ranging from exam accommodations to providing sensory spaces around campus.
“I genuinely could not have gotten through college without the accommodations that they’ve given me” Magadi said, but has equally found that the current framework is lacking, especially in terms of access to in-person services and communication on the types of accommodations disability services offer. In talking with other students she discovered that many registered with the disability services are unaware of all the accommodations offered by the disability service.
Magadi’s first step to remedy this is to improve the communication between the disability service and the student body. “There needs to be information provided to every single student,” she said. Beyond that, she hopes to improve upon the support given to students within the disability service to ensure “that the students who are registered with them are regularly updated on what support they will get” which would also allow for more flexibility for students to discover what accommodations work best for them.
When asked about College Health, Magadi prefaced her answer with the importance of College Health as an entity, but went on to say “I think the fact that it’s so important means that it must be improved”. The biggest issue with College Health in her eyes was around trans healthcare, stating it “is such a big issue these days, I would say the college health centre can do a lot more around harm reduction”.
Similarly, Magadi places a distinct emphasis on highlighting queer experiences in Trinity by bringing “more awareness and more representation for LGBTQ+ identities which don’t conform to a gender binary”. She called out College’s lack of support for these students, “I will not say that Trinity is an explicitly homophobic institution,but I think a lot of queer people and a lot of non-binary people have had experiences that make [them] feel like [they] don’t belong”.
Magadi hopes to change this. “It’s important that the college is proactive in making them feel like they are at home”, she said. One of the ways she suggested was through highlighting the work of Trinity Inclusive Curriculum (Trinity-INC), which among other things, offers free unconscious bias and gender sensitivity training to all students and staff. “Everyone has an implicit bias,” she said when mentioning the importance of these programs, “and being aware of those biases is something that can make life better for other people”
Within this same vein, she mentioned the importance of the gender-affirming closet launched by LGBTQ Soc (Q Soc) in October, which allows students to access makeup or equipment for binding and tucking. Maghadi suggested expanding the facility to make it accessible to all students “so that if somebody is in the closet and they don’t want to be out but they want to experience it they can go to the closet”.
Regarding issues faced by international students in particular Magadi hopes to find a “sustainable solution” to fee increases. “The students’ union has to fight for fee freezes for international students and then the next year Trinity goes all the way back again and the fight starts all over again” she said. Instead of taking the time and effort to fight for fee freezes on an annual basis, Magadi seeks to facilitate “a commitment from Trinity that says this is what we will agree to, and we’ll provide the support for international students”.
Another key issue that international students face is the hurdles that come with finding accommodation in Dublin. Magadi cites the accommodation advisory service as a useful service with the caveat “but again, you have to search for everything, if you don’t know where it is you lose out on something that could really really really have helped you”.
To combat this, Magadi would seek to introduce an initiative to the accommodation advisory panel to “provide information on common student accommodations around Trinity” in order for international students to have enough information to find suitable housing without having to travel to Dublin beforehand to vet locations. “It would be very practical to just offer them support on that front” Magadi concluded.
Most support and information for international students specifically come from the Global Room. When asked about the work that the Global Room does Magadi said “I think it’s doing its best”. But equally, she admitted, “the support isn’t enough” and it “needs to do better”. She acknowledged that a major obstacle for these services is “that they have to do the best with the funding that they’re given”. Yet there are other ways to improve these supports apart from funding increases.
One way she suggested improving the support that the Global Room offers is by streamlining the information given. Often students “get given an email with a bunch of links” on information covering a myriad of issues that international students deal with, without tailored support for the individual, causing students to have to “go back and contact them to be like there’s not enough help”. Once again, Magadi hopes a more personal and tailored approach can help to remedy this information obstacle.
The status quo causes “unnecessary stress that students have to take on” as well as the stress and difficulties that come from moving country, often living alone for the first time and facing a transition period that can be incredibly isolating.
In essence, Magadi’s campaign seeks to make existing welfare supports more accessible and well-known, improving and streamlining aspects of many of them in the hopes of helping those in need of their support to avail themselves of it.
Magadi will be running against Nina Crofts, John Garvey, and Deirdre Leahy for Welfare officer. SU elections will take place from February 25th to 27th after nearly two weeks of campaigning.
Editor’s note February 22: A previous version of this article mistakenly referred to gender-affirming classes run by Q Soc rather than the gender-affirming closet. Trinity News apologises for this error which has been amended.
