Attendance: Victoria, Yehyun, Emma, Thea, Yasmin, Oliver, Jorja, Grant, Kabir, Tim
Agenda:
1. Intros
2. Community Comment
3. Structure of Exec Board
4. What we’ve been up to/will be up to
5. Future Meetings
Introductions
Victoria: Hi, this is our first exec board meeting, welcome. Our agenda for today, intros, community comment, structure of exec board, what we’ve been up to/will be up to, and scheduling future meetings. Let’s do our basic intros again. My name is Victoria, I am a junior, bio major, co-pres, they/them pronouns, I look forward to plenary.
Yasmin: I am Yasmin, she / her pronouns, econ math double major, junior, StuCo librarian. I am looking forward to the history of StuCo project.
Yehyun: I am Yehyun, senior, poli sci major, co-president, he/him pronouns
Oliver: I am Oliver, junior, astrophysics major, co-treasurer, he/him pronouns. I am looking forward to talking more about student wages and student workers.
Grant: I am Grant, I am a junior, physics major, co-vice president, he/him pronouns, I am looking forward to working on the constitution.
Kabir: I am Kabir, he/him, junior, hopefully computer science and independent double major. I am the other co-vice president and am looking forward to appointment committee
Emma: I am Emma, she/her pronouns, senior, bio major, co-secretary. I am looking forward to the facilities fund.
Thea: I am Thea, senior, she/her pronouns, math major, co-secretary. I am also looking forward to the facilities fund.
Jorja: I am Jorja, sophomore, prospective computer science major, I am a co-treasurer, they/she pronouns. I am looking forward to finding a project to work on.
Victoria: Now, we are going to hear updates on the ford form.
Thea: The ford form is a place where students can leave anonymous comments, but can also leave their name if they want to be contacted by StuCo.
Ford Form: I’m sure you guys receive plenty of complaints about the food here, but there is one glaring problem that is extremely easily rectified: fix the goddamn rice. The jasmine and basmati rice provided in the dining hall with Chinese or Indian food is perfectly fine, but the generic Uncle Ben’s type generic slightly browning white rice is genuinely atrocious. And fixing it is as easy as just buying the correct type of short grain white rice which can be acquired basically anywhere. Tons of perfectly fine meals, like the teriyaki steak tonight, are completely ruined by this garbage rice, and I’ve even resorted to occasionally bringing my own microwavable white rice to the dc. Please just buy an edible brand of rice. I am losing my mind.
Thea: They asked for us to reach out to them. Do you know if the DC committee needs any new members? We are thinking of recommending them to apply.
Kabir: We will let you know, if/when the DC Committee reopens. If a committee spot is not open, we will put them in contact with their reps on that committee.
Yehyun: I would also recommend using the napkin notes that the DC provides. That will give them an official record of the complaint in the DC database.
Kabir: We also need to get takeout boxes back in for breakfast/dinner.
Victoria: Next, we will discuss the structure for the rest of our exec board meetings. We want to cover the purpose of our meetings this year. We also want to consider if we want to maintain Robert’s Rules of order. The big questions we want to ask are what happened last year that was effective, and what could be improved? What is the purpose of exec board?
Thea: The main purpose is a space where admin and council can meet on the record. We invited guests, either admin or student groups to meetings almost every week. I think we did a good job inviting admin to come, we had a good array of guests.
Oliver: I would say in terms of purpose, it is important for budgeting because we discuss large budget requests and appeals as a group.
Yehyun: What is the threshold for large requests?
Oliver: Around $5,000.
Emma: Normally we don’t do budgeting during the set exec board time during the day; we leave that for admin. We usually do budgeting at night and for a longer chunk of time.
Oliver: We will get in touch about that.
Grant: I think exec board meetings are a way to have a very structured official StuCo meeting so admin can see that StuCo is an official body that has agendas and follows rules. One of the things I liked was the regular posting of agendas, like on the StuCo board in the DC. We fell behind on the bulletin board, but we want to make sure we are keeping up with that this year. We want students to see that StuCo is a thing and that we are having meetings. Robert’s Rules also adds to the structure. I know a lot about it.
Victoria: Is there anyone who wants to share more about Robert’s Rules of order?
Thea: I think it was good because sometimes if we were having an informal conversation we could make a motion and have a clear goal moving forward from a conversation.
Kabir: I agree, it provided structure and direction. I’m pretty sure the intent of community comment is not to actually comment on it, I didn’t like that aspect. For other Exec Board, I think transparency was really important. If we are working with an admin, it is time for us to bring us what we have done, and do a little work, and it is highlighting the work with the admin. It helps bring things into the spotlight. I think this is more of a general StuCo thing, but we want to make a committee to rewrite the constitution. We want to bring more action oriented bodies but we aren’t sure exactly what that would look like.
Grant: We thought about this more last spring, I came from a college that had a ton of student committees, and sometimes it can be too much, but there are a couple that are important. I did a constitution committee on my last StuCo. Another one that is helpful is I know a lot of resolutions go through plenary, But there are certain situations on campus where StuCo wants to say something. We could have a resolution written by the committee and then approved by StuCo. And we could write statements on that and then release it.
Victoria: It’s important to keep exec board as that channel where we can keep in contact with admin and invite them into conversations, rather than them inviting us. That is incredibly important.
Kabir: Also last year, anyone could come to exec board and sit in and listen which was helpful.
Yehyun: Do we often set the agenda for the next Exec board, during the meeting?
Emma: Normally we had an exec board check-in a couple days before the exec board meeting and set the agenda then. We usually then send the agenda out with the StuCo Newsletter.
Grant: We do have an agenda template that you can fill in different agenda items.
Emma: One thing we did was we had a spreadsheet with all the topics we wanted to discuss at exec board for the semester. We added relevant admin and would keep track of when we reached out to admin, and who invited them.
Victoria: The other thing I want to highlight is that we are interested in Robert’s rules. Can you raise your hand if you want to continue?
*everyone raises their hand*
Victoria: Anything else we want to comment on the structure of Exec Board meetings?
Grant: We are going to have a workshop on Robert’s Rules of Order at the retreat so you can also learn more about it there.
What we’ve been up to
Victoria: We want to share what we have been doing in case you guys have any concerns or comments you want to bring up.
Yehyun: Today we met with Sayeeda Rasid from IDEA and talked about the NEST, how we can get the college to support the NEST, and addressing food insecurity on campus. We will be meeting with Sayeeda more often to work on policies and plans we can deliver to the board of managers. We want to create a base structure of how we can get closer to food security.
We also talked about meeting the moment, which Dean McKnight has emailed about. We are going to be in touch with them, as we believe that it would be crucial to talk about some of the heavier things looming across our campus.
We also met with Raquel about the COML position. Currently, we don’t have a COML because the election failed during the spring. One of the resolutions that passed said they would be trained in the summer. There have been a lot of structures that have dissolved the COML’s roles, like the restorative practice training. The question that Raquel has posed is what is the vision and place for COMLs. If no one nominated themselves and we have other structures.
Victoria: To clarify, COMLs are the community outreach multicultural liaisons. They are a third party that can help facilitate dialogue and confrontation between students or students and faculty.
Yehyun: We met with McKnight for our first weekly check-in. We got to know about his goals for this year. We brought up two minor but important issues, first is the lack of to go boxes. We also talked about the blue bus, specifically how the electric blue bus doesn’t have handles or rails. When we have a lot of students taking the bus, they are all packed onto it and have nowhere to hold on. They are also packed into the accessibility space so that students that need those spaces cannot access them.
Victoria: I wanted to add the purpose of us sharing this with you is in case you or any student reading has ideas regarding this. They can leave a community comment.
*Tim arrives*
Tim: I’m Tim, I’m a sophomore, prospective chem major, he/him, I am the treasurer librarian. I am looking forward to working on the social media. Also, working more on the google drive.
What we will be up to
Victoria: Our future meetings are: Sayeeda about the NEST. Cary Carr from Health Services to talk about the It’s On Us Grant to discuss access to reproductive health items and services. We will be having our part II with Dean McKnight. We will be meeting with Norm Jones, the interim chief diversity officer, and has a lot of institutional memory about food at Haverford. We will be meeting with Shayna Nickel about the retreat. I will be having a meeting with the implementation committee for 2023 (IC2030). Yehyun will meet with the Ad Hoc committee.
Yehyun: The name of the Ad Hoc committee refers to its temporary and time-delimited nature. Its goal will be to identify and strengthen ways in which open expression, critical inquiry, and curiosity can build a community founded upon mutual respect – and, in turn, enrich and reinforce inclusive learning that prepares students for lives of ethical inquiry and leadership.
Victoria: IC2030 is how we implement and proceed with the 2030 plan for the college. We will also be scheduling with the Haverford Corporation to talk about what they do. We will meet with the Health Reproductive Liaisons to discuss their roles and how we can support them. We will meet with the NEST co-heads and Julian, the manager to discuss how we can support them. We will meet with Maud Mclnerney, who is the faculty affairs committee (FAPC) liaison. She sent an email to me and Yehyun to see if we wanted to learn about what FAPC does.
Kabir: Last quarter of last year, we started a mini StuCo committee. FAPC decides the agenda for the faculty meetings. The committee met with them once a month, gave them StuCo updates, and they gave us FAPC updates. If we had something we had questions about, we would bring it there as sort of a bridge. We were going to bring this up in the all council meeting about deciding who we want to represent us to them.
Victoria: For planning general meetings, if you have agenda items you want to bring just let us know.
Future Meetings
Victoria: We need a new meeting time between 9-5pm to admin can come. Please schedule check-ins, please schedule them. We want to meet with exec board ASAP. Lastly, the Board of Managers Meeting is October 25-26. That is everything, thank you all!
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