XpressionFM
Fencing Club
Supported projects
Donations made to the Alumni Annual Fund support projects led by students and helping students. Donations of any amount directly impact the quality of the Exeter experience for our students, and the money is available across University departments, Sport, the Students’ Guild and Students' Union, and for all campuses. These donations are especially beneficial for students’ clubs and societies as well as study groups and student-led campaigns and projects. Read on to find out more about some of the diverse projects and initiatives that can go ahead because of regular donations from alumni and supporters.
Alumni Annual Fund, Summary 2018-19
Currently more than 200 projects are being supported by generous donations to the Alumni Annual Fund. All these projects improve the university experience for students and the majority of projects are led and organised by students themselves – improving living and studying at Exeter for each other and future generations of students.
£396,000 was raised for the Alumni Annual Fund last year, enabling 90 new student projects to get up and running. Many projects are students’ own initiatives
See below to find out more about some of the diverse and exciting projects and initiatives that are supported by donations from our alumni and supporters.
| University of Exeter Swimming Club - £2,000 Taking 200 members to train in the Mount Kelly Olympic standard swimming pool in Tavistock. |
| Hockey Club Kit Lockers - £1,500 New kit bag lockers for the hockey club, benefiting their c.275 members. |
| Electric Fencing for Beginners - £1,250 Purchasing new electric fencing kit for the Fencing Club (c.50 members) |
| Widening Participation through Benchrest and Pistol Shooting - £1,500 Purchasing new equipment for this scheme, benefiting 130 students. |
| Equipment Regenerate: Boat Club’s three year plan – £1,600 Purchasing new boats and blades for the Exeter University Boat Club |
| Equipment Regenerate: Boat Club’s three year plan – £4,000 - Refurbishing and purchasing new and second hand boats and blades to regenerate our fleet. |
| University of Exeter Sport – Exhibition Stand - £2,000 Exhibition stand to promote student sport and performance facilities at events. |
| Exeter University Water Polo Hat Purchase - £500 With four competing BUCS teams and only two sets of water polo hats, two more sets of water polo hats were required to benefit this large and thriving club and allow them to organise more fixtures. |
| University of Exeter Cycling Club (BUCS track cycling) - £1,250 Key pieces of equipment were bought and track sessions were subsided. This increased participation in the sport, and allowed the team to compete for more medals and earn more BUCS points. |
| Tumbling Coaching courses - £1,300 The cheerleading and gymnastics club has c.220 members. This money funds courses in tumbling from external coaches, to improve the technique and the safety of competitors, and diversifying their routines. |
| Warm-up facilities at Golf club’s home course and BUCS venue – tbc The current facilities are inadequate and their improvement will see reduced chance of injuries from being able to do a proper warm-up, more BUCS points and expanded participation, as the facilities will not just be enjoyed by c.130 members but also the local community. |
| Shotgun Theatre’s Bonnie and Clyde - £750 Student drama company Shotgun Theatre (c.58 members) used this money to hire Exeter Phoenix for their production of Bonnie and Clyde. Performing the production off-campus and in the city centre helped to build links between students and the wider Exeter community. |
| Bus to Bristol Community Choir Convention - £200 Funding for the University of Exeter World Music Choir (c.48 singers) to attend the Bristol Community Choir Convention, allowing them to attend workshops and showcase their talent nationally, as well as produce a CD. The World Music Choir regularly sings at charitable events around Exeter. |
| Increasing Female Participation in Strength Sports - £1,000 Funding for the University of Exeter Powerlifting Society to hire a private training area, equipment and coach, weekly throughout term, to encourage women to participate in the sport. This has not only improved confidence and fitness for these students, but also meant that the society can enter a woman’s team for BUCS Powerlifting competitions to represent the university. |
| Optimising Your Own Performance - £800 To fund twenty places for students struggling with their mental health to attend five all-day seminars on mental health fitness and resilience. |
| Widening Participation Graduation Celebration Package - £4,000 for three years Funding to cover graduation costs (gown hire, photographs, travel) for students who are unable to afford this (e.g. been in receipt of bursary, care leavers, refugees, estranged from family etc). This celebrate the achievements of such students and gives them the chance to graduate. |
| RAG Third Sector Careers Networking Event - £340 To fund a careers talk and networking opportunities for students hoping to work in the charity sector. |
| The Debating Society Competition Attendance, Excellence and Accessibility Initiative - £390 Funding for members to attend national debate competitions – improving student’s employability skills, confidence and enjoyment of university life, with a focus on widening participation by attending women’s only and English as a Second Language competitions. |
| Exeter University Theatre Company’s Lord of the Flies - £500 This funded the construction of an island set in the Northcott Theatre, to enable EUTCo to perform a new imagining of the classic play to students and locals alike. |
| BioSmart – Enactus Exeter - £500 Funded a return flight to Kenya for 3 students on the BioSmart project which is aiming to transition a Kenyan village’s (Kadzinuni) fuel source to biofuel, with an aim to helping to eliminate fuel poverty. Twelve students work on this project. |
| Exeter University Opera Society’s Marriage of Figaro - £500 Funded the hire of St David’s Church for 31 students to rehearse and perform Marriage of Figaro to full audiences. EUOS was an entirely new society this year. |
| Xpression FM: Outside Broadcast Expansion - £1,000 Funding for new and improved equipment to allow the university radio station to continue to broadcast outside of their studio at sports and community events, and to improve their service in this regard. |
| Exeter Gourmet Mushrooms - £500 Supporting the set-up of a student-run, sustainable and environmentally friendly initiative growing quality local mushrooms from used coffee grounds and selling them to local Exeter cafes, restaurants and the Real Food Store, with the help of disadvantaged volunteers from St Sidwell’s Commmunity Centre. |
| Footlights’ Oklahoma! - £500 Set and equipment costs for 100 members of the Exeter Footlights society to perform Oklahoma! at the Northcott Theatre. |
| Social Enterprise Fast Stream – £1,000 Training students in social enterprise. Presenting Enactus projects at showcase giving students opportunity to discuss them with students at other universities and expert mentors. |
| Space:Exe TableTop Telescope – £200 The TableTop Telescope is designed and made by students. It is a project aimed for outreach, to show the public at different events how our radio telescope works in Cornwall without bringing the telescope itself. |
| First Aid Society Training Equipment - £538.43 Funding equipment to aid training of student First Aid volunteers, who do First Aid not only for university events, but also for local events such as rugby matches and national events such as the London Marathon. |
| What’s A Pound - £250 Funding for start-up costs and promotion. What's a Pound is a charity campaign to encourage university societies to add £1 to their ticket prices for formals and other events. This £1 then goes to a charity (often local). |
| Open Air Music Festival and Performance of The Sorcerer - £1,000 Organised by the Gilbert and Sullivan Society and with performances from other drama/dance/music student societies, this is a weekend festival in Northernhay Gardens for students and the local community. |
| Medics’ Football Team - £3,000 To fund kit and equipment, pitch bookings and travel for matches between Exeter university medical students, other medical schools and the doctors at the RD&E. |
| The Remarkables - £2,500 Funding to take The Remarkables, a student-written original musical, to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2019. |
| SafeTalk - £900 Funding for a training day for Exeter Student Nightline, to train student volunteers on how to answer calls from fellow students regarding suicide. |
| Academic Representation Leadership Conference - £3,000 Training and development days for student academic reps, with talks from alumni. |
| “eHeart” Multimedia App for Heart Attack Patients - £4,000 Funding to develop the UK’s first multimedia educational mobile app for heart attack patients. The completed mobile app will be trialled at the Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital’s cardiology patients. The content will be developed by involving current Medicine, Nursing and Medical Imaging students at Exeter. |
| Exeter Wilderness Medicine Society - £1,000 The society helps to train students about wilderness medicine in a healthy and exciting atmosphere. Funding for Dartmoor training weekends, competitions with Plymouth Wilderness Medicine Society, training days with RNLI. |
| ENIGMA - £600 To fund publishing costs and website for a journal to showcase the work of student creative writers. |
| Medics’ Hockey Team - £3,250 To fund transport and pitch hire for matches between Exeter university medical students and other medical schools nationally. |
| The Little Bean’ Enactus Food Poverty Project - £489 Funding for The Little Bean, which aims to establish a social food shop to combat 'hidden food poverty' within Exeter and fill the current gap in the market between food banks and supermarkets. It will sell ‘rescue’ food at a price far below normal retail value. Our overall objectives are: to provide a service that people want and need, supply cheap and nutritious food and reduce food waste. |
| The Kwa Murugi Project - £1,200 Funded travel to Kenya to set up the Kwa Murugi project, which aims to empower the people of a Kenyan slum by setting up a social enterprise: a business who reinvests all of its profits into developing the community, which employs locals and additionally has a direct positive impact in the area. |
| Summer Action Week – £358.96 In-depth training for members of the Enactus Society, who create and run social enterprise businesses on local, national and international levels. |
| Storage Solutions for FXU Orchestra – £1,100 Funding for flight case for music stands and drum kit, allowing them to be stored safely and protect them in travel to events and performances. |
| Connecting Cornwall - £289.50 CSM Lacrosse is the only club in Cornwall and has no facilities. Funding given for two pop-up creases, 2 pop-up arcs/fans and a second portable goal, allowing the team to play on a local ground, organise games and invite opposing teams, and increasing participation. |
| Voices Festival - £2,000 Voices has a mission to give a platform to students whose voices are lost in the noise. Building on that, the Voices Festival is a national conference open to all students in Cornwall and invites will be sent to universities and students' union staff from across the UK. The project has a renewed mission to come together to build modern cultures of belonging in higher education. |
| FXU ‘Legends’ Platform - £2,000 Enhancement of the FXU 'Legends Platform' which offers student volunteers the opportunity to record their volunteering hours, receive recognition for volunteering commitments outside of their courses and connects them to new volunteering opportunities with external partners. This platform acts as a tool to collect important data relating to student volunteering, their impact locally, nationally and globally and allows external organisations to connect with our students and staff. |
| FXU Archery Club - £500 The FXU Archery Club is a student run society designed to get students off of campus and into the fresh air whilst enjoying a sport they may not have access to anywhere else. For all participating members, we guarantee one-on-one archery training and shooting on a regular basis where they will get insightful and personalised tips from our local instructors at Primal Pursuits. |
| FXU Cheerleading - £800 Funding the activities of the cheerleading society, who this year competed for the first time in a University national cheerleading competition and placed third. |
| Ghanaian Book Connection - £500 A book connection between schools in the United Kingdom and in Ghana. British schools provide us with their old and unused textbooks, which then get sent out to schools requiring textbooks in Ghana. In return, the children at the Ghanaian schools would write back to the corresponding British school about life in Ghana and what they are using the textbooks for. |
| Piggy Nose Theatre - £1,000 Funding for transport, venue hire, sets, costumes and promotions for “est” – a touring show raising awareness around the issues of trauma and recovery. |
| Holocaust Memorial Conference - £450 Funding for conference materials, travel and accommodation for speakers. Two hundred students from schools and sixth-forms across the South-West attended, as did over a hundred students and alumni, to learn from the lessons of history from a talk from a holocaust survivor and academic-led workshops. |
| Unknown - £1,850 Funding venue hire and production and promotion costs for “Unknown”, a student-created show which tells the true story of a student’s recovery from a place crash. The play investigates the role of trauma and memory in identity. Related charities and groups from the local area are invited to performances and will benefit from fundraising. |
| The Story Collective - £911.55 Ancient History and Classics students learned innovative story telling techniques from Giocherenda, an arts group from Sicily, and put them into practise doing outreach with a local school and in an interdisciplinary discussion panel with students and staff from across the university. |
| Postgrad Practice Working Group (PPWG) - £1,700 The PPWG was set up to share and grow the skills base of Practice as Research postgraduate students in the Drama Department. As part of this they ran 2- two day and 1-one day workshops within the Drama Department, led by professional practitioners. |
| CARTASVIVAS (Multimedia Translation Project by Students) - £2,363.45 This project seeks to engage students as translators in the professional team of Cartasvivas, led by renowned film director Paula Ortiz and Nuria Capdevila-Arguelles, Professor of Gender Studies at Exeter. Cartasvivas is a series of short film capsules featuring acclaimed women actresses from Spain. This is a unique opportunity for final year students to be part of a high-profile innovative venture and collaborate with archives and cultural institutions as well as the film industry. |
| Languages of the World - £175 This project highlighted the diversity of languages spoken within the Queens Building and at the university as a whole, by encouraging staff and students to mark on the map their country of origin as well as their competence and reasoning in being multingual. This underlined the importance of languages, intercultural communication and interconnectivity to students and staff alike. |
| Mannequin Mouth – £2,000 Mannequin Mouth is an independent theatre company formed by Exeter students focused on bridging the gap between film and theatre. Each of our productions will be filmed separately from the live shows to create edited, filmic versions of performances that stand as their own distinct experiences from the one audiences watch on the stage. Funding for production and promotion costs for new show “Armageddon, Baby!” |
| Exetera Magazine - £800 Exetera is an independent, student-led magazine. Funding for printing and online hosting of their new edition focused around creative responses to plastic and climate change. |
| The Witness - £938.30 Funding for a published journal for politics students to showcase their research. |
| The Diplomatic Hub – £1,000 Funding to organise events for an interdisciplinary platform set up by students for students to give information and inspire discussion about international affairs and diplomacy. This was awarded the Guild Award for Best Student Led Project of the Year. Women in Leadership: Balance for Better - £974 Funding for a Women in Leadership event and panel discussion to coincide with International Women's Day 2019. |
| Graduate School of Education Community Cultural Activity Programme – £1,954 The aim of this project is to develop a programme of cultural activities which will enhance the student experience and build community amongst staff and students in GSE. The activities would also be closely linked to core programme curriculums - to foster greater understanding of education topics and appreciation of the arts in education. |
| Exeter BAME Law – tbc A new society established to promote culture harmonisation through social events and peer support, and provide access to equal career opportunities for social groups that are underrepresented in the legal sector. Funding needed for events and promotion |
| Econometric Game 2019 - £2,000 Funding students to attend a competition at the University of Amsterdam for PG students working on a case regarding a topical economic problem. |
| Volcube Derivatives Trading Platform - £5,000 Funding for 600 student subscriptions to the Volcube Trading Platform, which is a valuable tool for students in bridging the gap between theory and practice. Student satisfactions scores have soared since this implementation. |
| Medical Humanities Conference - £1,000 Funding for international speakers to attend this year’s conference, as well as the performance of a concert about medical students’ research into the impacts of the arts on patients wellbeing. |
| Doctors as Teachers and Medical Humanities SSU Conferences - £1,000 Conference and exhibition of fourth year medical students’ projects. |
| Talk Cancer: Using Art to share patient stories - £1,800 Medical students have collaborated with cancer patients to produce a book based around their stories through the medium of art, poetry, quotes and cartoons. We funded the publication of this book so it can be read internationally to improve the training of medical students. |
| Making the Test Club more accessible and user-friendly for students - £1,500 The Test Club is a specialist forum which discusses the results of medical test research. Currently attended by mainly researchers and clinicians, need funding to make it more accessible to undergraduates so that they can also benefit from this. |
| Medical Leadership and Management Conference - £2,200 A conference and workshops for medical students giving information about various health related career roles. |
| National South West Plastic Surgery Conference 2019 – £800 A specialist course for 90 medical students wishing to understand the processes of plastic surgery and insight into the sector. |
| Applying for Postgraduate Careers in CLES - £500 Talks from alumni making current undergraduates aware of postgraduate study and career opportunities. |
| WildTeam Summer Workshop - £2,000 Allowing 30 students to attend a training workshop about conservation, helping their current study and employability. |
| Sport and Health Sciences Conference 2019 - £1,120.80 A conference for undergraduate and postgraduate students. This aids networking with each other and academics, and gives experience in presenting and disseminating research. |
| Project Coral Exeter - £4,634 Teaching students how to grow and cross pollinise corals and zoanthids to enhance their ability of working in laboratories. This will enhance student learning experience regarding tropical reef systems, make them more eligible for internships and employments, and also help save the planet. |
| X-Racing Formula Student Racing Team - £5,000 Enter Formula Student competition – students design and build racing car and enter a competition at Silverstone. Last year Exeter came 47th in the world. |
| The Hiscox University Challenge - £750 The Hiscox University Challenge is a national competition for students to develop creative solutions for tackling the challenges the insurance industry faces every day. |
| IONS Exeter Conference - £5,000 IONS Exeter is a PhD conference for students doing research in the field of Optics and Photonics. Around 100 students from Europe attended this conference in July 2019, with keynote speakers from the US and esteemed speakers from the UK. |
| Solar Sport One – £3,500 The Renewable Energy Group have a high performance solar powered hydrofoil boat which has been, and continues to be, the focus of numerous student projects and extracurricular activities. This boat was taken to the Netherlands with a team of dedicated students to compete in the Solar Sport One World Cup for Solar Boats. Funding was needed for the competition entry and for a new set of solar panels. |
| St Luke’s Volunteer Garden - £1,930 Create a quiet garden space on St Luke's Campus, with a volunteer team that includes staff and students. Garden has areas for wildflowers, herbs, vegetables, fruit and bees. This garden fosters relationships between the volunteers and provides a place for quiet reflection on campus, boosting wellbeing by being around nature and improving the natural habitat. |
| Student Engagement in the Education Incubator (Talking Heads) - £3,000 This project aims to collect student experiences of internship in the University by means of talking head videos. These will then be disseminated to inform best practice and to share knowledge and understanding from students to students, improving their employability and relations with the local business community. |
| LGBTQ+ and Law Initiative - £1,000 This initiative aims to give support to those who are a part of the LGBTQ+ community and are interested in a career in law. It will host events which promote diversity and enable LGBTQ+ students to meet LGBTQ+ barristers and solicitors. Like ethnic minorities and women, LGBTQ+ members are underrepresented at law firms and especially at the bar. |
| Youth Empowerment Project – tbc With the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals as a guideline, we aim to engage teenagers by creating video documentaries of European teenagers confronting issues such as poverty in their own countries. We will then use our videos in workshops e.g. at Exeter College; aiming to inspire and support students to take an active role in their futures and become aware of the impact they can have while learning valuable skills. |
| The Exeter Undergraduate Science Journal - £1,600 Funding for a published journal and online blog which showcases the research of undergraduate students in the sciences. |