Antonian Fund Activities

The Oxford-Berlin Latin American Graduate Conference was awarded £189.19, which covered the travel expenses for one female Master’s student from the Free University in Berlin to come to Oxford to present her Master’s thesis project.

Six participants from Berlin were hosted at St Antony's for the conference, and a panel of five Master’s students from St Antony’s College shared their dissertation/ thesis findings with PhD and Master’s students from Oxford and Berlin.

Some of the best moments from the conference included presentations from PhD students about how to apply for a PhD in the UK and Germany. This was beneficial for the Antonians who are thinking of pursuing doctoral studies at St Antony’s College. The conference concluded with a wine reception with professionals and academics who work on Latin America based in both the UK and Germany.

The Foxes Women's Football Team were awarded £570.40 to purchase new team kit. Without funding, the Foxes would be unable to train and participate in the league, cup and tournaments.

The team has existed for years and is the only platform that provides women from graduate colleges the opportunity to play college football. They train at least once a week and have won both the Women’s First Division League and The Oxford Cuppers Tournament several times in the past few years, including this year.

The Foxes Team provides an open and inclusive environment for women to engage in sport, with a large number of LGBTQ+ players and women from across a range of religious and cultural backgrounds.

They provide a supportive atmosphere for women who have never played football and for those who play regularly. This inclusivity is a core Foxes value and something they are particularly proud of.

This year they have fostered a great relationship with the St Antony’s men’s team, with joint training sessions taking place once a week.

This year, the Foxes were Women’s Cuppers finalists, Women’s Futsal tournament finalists, and Women’s First Division winners.

As a team, they ran the Oxford Town and Gown 10k race and went to watch the Women’s Euros, as well as countless other social events.

St Antony’s International Review (STAIR) was awarded £500 to assist with the journal's transition to a digital-only format.

STAIR’s Editorial Board last year set a goal of becoming a digital-only journal by 2022, no longer offering printed issues in order be more mindful of the journal’s environmental impact and align STAIR with St Antony’s climate commitments. Support from the Antonian Fund helped us achieve this goal by covering part of the cost of paying for an online platform on which to host the journal.

Aside from their work moving to an online-only format and producing the latest issue on ‘The Rise of China’, they organised several high-profile events, including hosting the Prime Minister of Montenegro and organising a panel discussion on British-Chinese relations with Mr Yang Xiaoguang, First Minister of the Chinese Embassy in the UK, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP and Professor Todd Hall.

£320 was awarded to the Graduate Inequality Review for the creation of their website, and DOI registration fee.

These funds have enabled the Graduate Inequality Review to get established in its first year, giving them the opportunity to set up a website to attract submissions and interested students (the website can be seen at graduateinequalityreview.com) and the ability to register published articles for DOI numbers.

As a product of the success the Antonian Fund contributed to, the team were able to host an end-of-year conference at St. Antony’s celebrating their published authors and providing a venue for discussing research on inequality across the University. They were also able to compile their first edition of the Review with 10 published authors, many of whom are St. Antony’s students.

the end-of-year conference, hosted in the Hilda Besse, was a great success and allowed the editorial team to create a physical manifestation of the Review’s goal of fostering interdisciplinary dialogue on research around inequality at St. Antony’s and Oxford more broadly.

St Antony's Latin Salsa Association was awarded £500 to use to hire an instructor for weekly classes and to host a special event.

SALSA became a fun and social go-to for many in the St Antony’s community.  The salsa classes brought people together on a weekly basis to explore a new cultural movement style. At the end of the term, SALSA put on a community-wide open dance and social event with professional instructors which over 50 people attended. It provided a space for people to meet up and socialise in a wholesome way while also learning something new and getting a break from academic work

The open SALSA event at the end of Hilary Term was a great highlight. It involved over three hours including an hour-long beginner’s class, movement games, and social dancing in St. Antony’s own Buttery. There were over 50 people in attendance, and some of the games were brought back by popular demand at subsequent social events in college (i.e. after SABC dinner).

During Trinity Term, St Antony’s students were invited to participate in an exchange, participating in salsa classes with students from Teddy Hall and Lincoln. This opened space to meet students outside of the college in a new social capacity.

In Hilary Term, £100 was awarded in the 'Life at St Antony's' category for students to organise a foraging trip in Wytham Woods for Antonians.

A group of students were able to get out and enjoy the beautiful countryside and learn about foraging. They managed to find some edible goods!

St Antony's Football Club was awarded £507.71 to purchase a set of 5v5-sized goal posts, shorts and socks for the team kit, footballs (numerous), and 2x pitch bookings for their trials at the start of the term.

The funding has allowed members of the college to participate in a well-organised season of football training and matches.

The trials allowed them to gauge who would fit well into the main squad for the league games, which was crucial for getting the team up and running. Having trials early on, as well as proper training sessions, allowed the team to improve quickly.

Given that they train at University Parks and do not have close to 22 players for each session, the goalposts made training more attractive and enjoyable and gave anyone at college who wanted to play a chance to play with actual goals which boosted everyone’s spirits. This meant regular turnouts for training, despite the very unfavourable time slot we were given on Tuesday and Thursday mornings! Having footballs replaced as they were popped/lost made it possible to play and train properly each week, as many training sessions required multiple balls to be used at once.

St Antony's Gardening Society was awarded £1,470 to purchase new benches and a garden table for the garden at 21 Winchester Road to enhance seating availability.

The new benches and table encourage more college members to come into the garden and make the most out of this green space. The Gardening Society has been successfully running multiple events open to all college members, such as Christmas wreath making, egg painting, flower crown making, and a Jubilee picnic. The purchase of the new benches and table will be helpful in making these events easier in the future.

The Gardening Society are committed to sustainability and a more ethical economy, and therefore carefully selected the provider for the benches and garden table. They chose a local social enterprise called RAW Oxford. The generosity of the Antonian Fund in financing this project not only benefits our college community directly by providing greater seating access to the garden at 21 Winchester Road but also indirectly as an expression of the commitment of our college to sustainability and ethics. The benefits further extend to supporting the local economy and awarding businesses that offer alternative models of production, in helping out disadvantaged groups.

Uncomfortable Oxford Walking Tours was awarded £330 to organise three walking tours.

The tours were educational and helped students critically engage with the history of the city, which focused on uncomfortable historical facts about the University of Oxford and the experiences of various minority groups (BAME, women, and LGBTQ+) in the past.

A survey was conducted after each tour and 91.7% of respondents rated the experience 5 out of 5.

£700 was awarded to cover the cost of seven tutors for a series of Science Communication Workshops in Trinity Term 2022.

Science/Academic communication is a critical skill for young researchers and academics, but it is rare to receive training on such skills. These workshops provided Antonians with a formal way to learn these skills.

The workshops were on:
1. Turning your academic work into an illustration/collage
2. How to talk about your work via an engaging story and engaging presentation
3. Sharing your academic work via podcasting
4. A crash course on comedic public speaking, writing and performance skills for academic communication
5. Communicating your academic work via your own board game
6. Expressing your academic work in a poem (poetry workshop)
7. How to do academic engagement as an introvert

St Antony's Boat Club was awarded £3,000 to cover coaching, maintenance and boat club alumni development costs.

The Antonian Fund supported the Boat Club for the first time since 2017-18, giving the Club support to rebuild after two years decimated by COVID. The Boat Club used the funding for four main purposes.

1 - They hired two new coaches, doubling the number of coached outings they were able to offer. This led to far improved results later in the year – the O1 crew improved substantially throughout the year, the W1 crew won blades at Torpids, and the W2 & W3 crews far outperformed their places on the river, especially as the year progressed. The coaching also allowed the club to continually recruit – without Antonian Funding, they would not have been able to support as many members throughout the year

2. The funding allowed them to continue maintenance and servicing equipment for the first time in five years. They were able to renovate their rowing machines, which were posing existing safety concerns, and continue to patch up their first women’s boat, whose age has required substantial repairs to maintain its seaworthiness. It also enabled them to purchase new first aid and river safety equipment such as lights, communications equipment and speakers for boats.

3. The funding allowed them to run an Ergathon, to fundraise for a new first women’s boat. The fund gave them the financial and strategic stability to raise over £20k for a new vessel. While this is by no means the final step in repairing the equipment of the club – they still require another similar fundraising effort to purchase new training vessels and small boats - it was an important first step.

4. Finally, the Fund’s support provided the club with substantive liquidity, allowing them to support their members, offering more social events, the ability to run a training camp, and working capital to support kit and clothing orders.

The Oxford Middle East Review is proud to have launched the sixth edition of its journal, with the theme of "Borders and Boundaries." Individuals from around the world, from Iraqi Kurdistan to France, submitted their research papers and policy briefs for consideration. After a rigorous editorial and peer review process, three research articles and three policy articles were chosen on a variety of thought-provoking topics. The journal was published in an online edition on 15th June, the same day that we launched the print issue at a launch party in the Middle East Centre, St Antony's College.

With the grant funds from the Antonian Fund, the editorial team were able to substantially redesign the format of the online edition, laying out the articles in a more intuitive, easy-to-read format and creating a flipbook that facilitates online reading. By halving the number of physical copies of the journal that they printed, and promoting the online edition, they aim to increase OMER's sustainability and lay a solid foundation for more sustainable growth in the future.