Club leaders raise concerns over working with KSA and former president

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Editor’s note: The headline and deck of this article have been updated for accuracy. 

Student-led clubs are a core part of student life at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. They provide an opportunity to connect with like-minded communities, find peer support, and make new friends.

Despite these ambitions, club leaders say they are facing hurdles dealing with the Kwantlen Student Association — the governing body responsible for approving new club applications, funding, and event requests. 

Five club leaders — Navpreet Toor from the Kwantlen Sikh Student Association (KSSA), Lotanna Uzomah from the African and Caribbean Students Association (SOCA), Liam Ruel from the KPU Pride Society, Maimoona Rahman from the Muslim Students Association (MSA), and Bobby Gardner from the KPU Model United Nations (MUN) Club — spoke with The Runner to share their experiences with the KSA’s administration and management of clubs.

All say they have faced issues with KSA’s communication and administration, with some alleging their general approach has been unprofessional and demonstrated incompetance. This includes weeks-long delays for email responses and funding requests allegedly being unnecessarily delayed or rejected. 

Some leaders have also flagged alleged harassment and extortion from former KSA president Abdullah Randhawa, who left office this past spring. 

One of these clubs, the KPU MUN Club, has seen success in their competitive entries and has put KPU on the map at an international level, being the only Canadian team to win awards at a Washington, D.C. conference in November last year and a Portland, Ore. conference this past February.

The trip to Washington, D.C. was funded by KPU, but two trips to Portland in 2023 and this year were funded by the KSA. Gardner says securing funding for the 2023 trip went smoothly, but this year’s conference was different. 

Then-KSA president Randhawa repeatedly delayed and withheld funding with conflicting messaging and implying they needed to “do personal things for him” before they could get the funds, Gardner says. 

“We had to go through hell to get that funding. We had weekly meetings with … Randhawa. He would literally tell us in a meeting that we are getting the funding and we weren’t getting the funding, in the same meeting,” Gardner says.

“He would basically try to get us to do things that he wanted us to do in exchange for the funding … He didn’t outright say that, but that was implied.”

These include being asked to throw events or parties at KPU, says Gardner. He adds Randhawa would tell him he took issue with some club members and used it as a reason to withhold funding.

Randhawa says he never asked the club to do anything for trip funding, and explains any delay in getting funding approval was due to him trying to make sure eligibility criteria and parameters for selected club members were transparent and fair. 

“We just wanted to make sure it is done in a proper way and each and every club member gets a chance over there, and a good team is going out,” Randhawa says. 

Gardner says a club member who is a friend of Randhawa’s was chosen for the Washington, D.C. trip, but was not selected again for the 2024 Portland trip, and the club’s selection process is “fair and transparent.” The Runner has agreed to keep this club member anonymous. 

Randhawa says he did not have any one particular person in mind when he said he wanted to make sure every club member gets a chance, adding he had “zero involvement” in the whole process.  

Under the KSA’s Regulations, the president is a part of the executive committee and is responsible for putting together meeting agendas. During executive committee meetings, the agenda has a section for submissions, in which funding requests for KSA club activities are discussed and approved by the executive committee. 

Randhawa acknowledges he was responsible for funding approval, but says delays in reimbursement were a result of the accounting department. 

Eventually, the club got a guarantee from the KSA that they would receive funding for the conference in February, resulting in Gardner taking out a personal loan of about $6,000 to pay for the trip. 

“I have no idea how we even got the money, to be honest. It was insanely ridiculous. It was incompetence beyond belief. I can’t believe we had a student president that behaved in such a manner, it was insanely unprofessional. It was inappropriate,” Gardner says. 

Gardner also says Randhawa attempted to plan club events without club members’ approval. 

Randhawa says he never tried to plan events, just suggested them. 

The KPU Pride Society also faced challenges with Randhawa while he was KSA president, with the vice-president of the society, Ruel, claiming he would harass them at their centre in Birch 240 at the KPU Surrey campus, and not leave when asked. 

“There were several times where he would come by late at night, so I had the door closed and the lights might have still been on,” Ruel says. 

“He’d come up and grab the door handle and just shake it for five-plus minutes and … make a lot of noise and would refuse to leave. Or he frequently comes by and just stares in the space … and won’t really leave when he’s asked to.” 

Randhawa says he would stop by the door to say hello or chat with a friend and was never asked to leave by any member of the society, adding that he had a key to access the room but never tried to enter while the door was locked nor ever tried to get in. 

The KPU Pride Society has also faced challenges accessing funds and communicating with the KSA, saying they had gone between four to five months without funding. 

“I do feel like it’s unprofessional, not really like the words that they’re using, but just the amount of time that it takes to hear back from them,” Ruel says. 

“The actual content of their responses … is just a lot of empty responses, or being pushed around between different people without getting anywhere for months. They don’t really feel like a functional organization.” 

KSA Clubs Coordinator Vanshika Jain, who was hired in the spring, says she has tried to remedy relations with the society since being hired, but understands the club’s trust issues from their past experiences. 

“I have sent them emails a few times to meet in-person and clear things out and just set expectations [of] what they require from us and what I would require from them to keep our operations as smooth as possible,” she says. 

“But at the end, it goes both ways …. I can’t do it all alone at this, if the other person’s not that willing. And I understand their perspective, too. So I wouldn’t blame them, but I would just say … give some time and then have some faith and have some patience.” 

Ruel says the club provides essential products and services to KPU’s queer students like food, first aid, and safe-sex supplies. Jain says she suggested the society send students in need of food to the KSA Food Bank while they await funding, but Ruel says this was not a good solution because the society provides these services to queer students who have had uncomfortable experiences using campus and KSA services. 

Part of the funding delay was during a five-week period following April 1 when the 2024-25 KSA council started their term. The council failed to appoint an executive committee for two months, which is responsible for approving club funding. 

Jain says during this time, if requests were delayed further, it would have been because of administration backlogs or errors in the submission forms.

Also during that time, the KPU Pride Society and the Muslim Students Association both say communication was poor and they were not updated on when funding or events would be approved, nor how the delay in appointing an executive committee would affect clubs. This was also around the same time Jain was replacing a vacancy as clubs coordinator. 

“We actually have not been able to have an event since the start of March, because the committee [was] not formed. Unfortunately, that means no funding from KSA for club events,” Rahman said in an interview with The Runner in May. 

“Honestly, that’s been kind of a downer for our club members …. I think that it would be more helpful if we were updated about the changes in KSA or about how those would impact clubs.” 

Jain says she came into her role aware of the KSA’s issues with managing clubs. There have been backlogs with emails, administration, and inefficiencies in the processes that she says she is trying to change. 

“When I joined, they were in the transition … to the Microsoft platform. So there was a lot of technical issues, and we still are facing a lot of technical issues because we [are] still amidst that shift,” Jain says.  

“I understand where they’ve been coming from, and we do take the feedback, and we try to work on that and we are currently working on that. I assured them that they’re going to have a better experience and I apologize for any inconvenience or anything they’ve had to deal with before.”

Jain is also trying to bring in an online blog where she hopes to post regular updates on recent club events and how funds were allocated. 

Kwantlen Sikh Student Association President Navpreet Toor says she realizes Jain is trying to fix these systems, but is not confident she will have the support from the rest of the KSA to make it happen. 

“I believe they’ve been trying their best from their part, but the systems just aren’t there. I’m not sure if the rest of their team is on board as hard as they’re trying to put out there,” Toor says. 

The KSSA has recently been reinstated at KPU. Toor says the process to become a club was complex and difficult to navigate, with it taking a month and a half for her club to get approved.

The African and Caribbean Students Association says it took three semesters to get final approval for their club. 

“I had to fight. Not physically, but as in all the emails,” says Uzomah, president of SOCA.

He says he didn’t get an email update from the KSA until two semesters in, notifying him that the delay was due to a problem with the clubs coordinator. 

“I think that goes back to the root of the problem. I think it’s serious what needs to be done in the KSA, from the executives to the people who run the [organization].” 

Jain says she has not heard of club approval taking this long, and says often funding, event requests, or delays can come from leaders submitting forms incorrectly. She says any club leader having issues should email her at vanshika.jain@kusa.ca.  

In April, KPU put out an email statement to students saying the university is “deeply concerned” with allegations made against the KSA. The email goes on to say that, by law, students are required to put all concerns through the conflict resolution measures provided by the Societies Act, and that there are “regulatory limits on the university’s power to act.” 

“It’s gotten to the point where running a club at KPU is like a full-time job and it’s not worth it,” Gardner says. 

The Runner reached out to KSA Executive Director Timothii Ragavan, but he was unable to provide a comment addressing clubs’ concerns before publication. 

“The KSA is very proud of its level of professionalism as well its inclusion of all students,” he wrote to The Runner.