Birch Building Renovations Offer New Student Space on Surrey Campus

Following several pushed completion dates, work is finally finished on space renovations
Joseph Keller, Web Editor

The Birch Space lounge will be used for for club events and as a general student gathering space. (Joseph Keller)

After more than a year of planning, and following several delays, the Kwantlen Student Association has finished work on renovations to a student space on the Surrey campus.

The newly renovated Birch building now features facilities to be used exclusively for student life. Construction barriers in the building have recently been taken down, allowing students to access to the space, and the KSA is expected to announce an opening party and open house soon.

“This is the first stand-alone student space on the Surrey campus, which we’re very excited about,” says KSA General Manager Jeremy McElroy. “There will be no classes organised in here, no university faculty or staff offices. It’s exclusively space for student use.”

The Birch Space common room will be used for KSA council meetings at well as student club meetings. It can also be used freely by students when not booked. (Joseph Keller)

The space, located on the north wing of the Birch building’s second floor, features dedicated accommodation for several student advocacy organizations, such as Pride Kwantlen and the Student Rights Centre, as well as multi-purpose rooms for various clubs and student-organized activities. A large multipurpose room is furnished with tables and chairs to be used as a conference room, or can be cleared out for more physical activities such as yoga or improv.

A student lounge featuring comfortable seating and wall-mounted televisions was designed with groups like the Kwantlen Gaming Guild in mind, but can be used for a variety of purposes. These multipurpose spaces can be booked four weeks in advance for planned functions and will otherwise remained unlocked, to be used on a first-come-first-serve basis. McElroy says that the process of booking space for events will be simple. A Google calendar will be available on the KSA website for students to submit requests for time slots.

“We’ve kept it pretty basic,” he says. “We made sure that there is comfortable, useable furniture in here and they have all the things that they’ll need. Once we move the groups in here they’ll be able to further design and customize the space to their liking.”

The renovations come at a time when available space on the Surrey campus is in high demand. Student groups have reported difficulty finding locations for various functions for quite some time, and it’s the hope of the KSA that this new space will alleviate some of that pressure. In addition, they hope the space will encourage students to plan more events on campus, leading to an improvement in student life.

“We know that right now the number one issue for our student groups is finding available space for their events, for meetings, for just hanging out,” says McElroy. “So our hope is that this will increase the visibility, number, and success of the types of events that will happen on campus.”

Currently, the rooms have a modern but simple feel to them, with clean white walls and lime green furniture, but that could very well change. Student groups like Pride Kwantlen who will be moving into their new homes are encouraged to customize and decorate their spaces to their liking, and the KSA is considering plans to seek the help of KPU’s graphic design program to create more interesting design work for the multipurpose student spaces.

“There’s definitely plans [for unique design work]. We don’t have anything drawn up yet. We kind of want to leave that up to students and to public feedback,” says McElroy.

Unfortunately, the KSA was not able to provide space in the new Birch building to every student organization that wanted it. The Kwantlen Public Interest Research Group had requested to be made a stakeholder early on in the process, but were denied.

KPIRG has been seeking office space on campus for years but have been unsuccessful, resulting in them being forced to rent space off-campus. Former KSA President Alex McGowan told The Runner in March that the KSA’s reasoning for the decision was that KPIRG’s funding allows them to rent space off campus, so the KSA opted to grant that space to organisations that receive less funding.

The process of making the new student space a reality was not without its challenges. The KSA had originally hoped to have the space ready by Sept. 1 of last year, in time for the fall semester. Due to issues with building permits, the KSA was forced to push back the tentative deadline to late October/early November. This new deadline had to be pushed back further due to logistical issues.

Throughout the process of planning and building the space, the KSA has simply referred to it as the Birch Space, but McElroy says this will most likely not be the final name, and that the KSA is in the process of coming up with something catchier for the university’s newest student space.

After a long process and several setbacks, McElroy says that everyone in the KSA involved with the project is pleased and relieved to have it completed.

“It feels really good [to have the project finished,]” he says. “It’ll feel better once we have the space full of people, but for right now it feels really good to be able to point to something that was sort of a student driven initiative from the beginning.”