Statement from VUWTC on the campaign against VUWSA

3 PM, 25 March 2026

There has recently been a group who call themselves “Save Our Clubs VUW” (referred to here as SOC) running a campaign against VUWSA (the VUW Students Association).

For context, VUWSA has recently put forward a proposal to take over the fiscal hosting (for small unincorporated clubs), promotion of, and support of non-sports clubs at Te Herenga Waka. Currently these services are provided by the University itself (under the sub-brand University Recreation). This is not a statement for or against that proposal.

Importantly, VUWTC is fine. We are an independent incorporated society, and are not materially affected by this proposal either way (despite what SOC claims). If your club is set up as an incorporated society, you are also largely unaffected. As we understand it, the proposal will just change who we send our grant applications to each year, and who organises the clubs expo.

If your club is not currently incorporated, take this as your sign to incorporate! Free yourselves from the whims of student politicians and university board members.

We are publishing a statement regarding this because at 8 PM last night we received an email from SOC claiming “Your club is about to lose its University backing …” and that they “... need Tramping Club to take a stand.”. We want to clarify to our members that this is nothing to worry about, and as the largest non-faculty club at the University we want to set an example for other clubs. The majority of our funding comes directly from our members - only a small portion of it is from a University grant. We understand that we will still be able to apply for similar funding if VUWSA’s proposal goes through.

Additionally, this campaign has little credibility. Despite designing a fancy website and emailing us about it, SOC are not willing to put their names to their work. Despite asking others to publicly sign a petition, SOC does not believe in their own project enough to take public ownership of it. No names are listed on their website or any other media - we don’t know who this is being organised by. At least have the decency to sign your work guys.

Finally, we are concerned about how SOC sourced our contact details. They contacted us on only two email addresses - our main public contact email, and our secretary’s personal email. The only place we know those two emails were listed together was on the University Recreation clubs expo register, where they were listed in confidence that they would be only used for legitimate club expo purposes. Regardless of how the sourced the email addresses, it seems inappropriate to contact our committee via their personal emails, when we have our official emails listed publicly on our website.

VUWTC is not in support of this campaign, and we are concerned by SOC’s methods.

Signed,
The VUWTC Committee
https://www.vuwtc.org.nz/contact/committee