Attendance: Victoria, Emma, Thea, Yasmin, Adam, Ben, Jack, Aaron, Keyla, Grant, Kabir, Oliver, Luke, Tristan, Julie, Coco, Yehyun, Bukky, Bailey, Kelly, Grace Yuriko, Caroline
Agenda:
1. Intros
2. Non-Plenary Committees
3. Plenary
Intros
Victoria: Welcome everyone. I sent an email with the agenda. These are the times we will be having our general meetings. If you cannot make it, message both of us and we can accommodate. Do we have any questions about meetings? We have a few people who couldn’t make it last week but are here now, we will do brief intros, name, position, and what you have been up to. Should we start with the zoom first?
Bailey: I am Bailey, a junior, I am the officer of athletics. I have been working on my project. I want to tackle the non athlete / athlete barrier through posters and discussing language.
Kelly: I am Kelly, student life officer. SECS is going through a hiring process. We built our general events for the fall semester. We have started discussing haverfest and committees for that. This Friday there is Hav-a-friend for first years.
Caroline: I am Caroline, interim honor council co-chair. I have been going into the city a lot. We have been preparing for training for the council.
Claire: I am Claire, one of the librarians, she/her pronouns. This week I have been doing a lot of updating the website.
Bukky: I am a senior and the officer of multiculturalism. I have been getting started on getting my schedule finalized and working more.
Yuriko: Senior, she/her pronouns. I am the senior representative to the board of managers. I have been getting into the groove of senior year. We have also been discussing boba for plenary.
Grace: I am Grace, she/her pronouns the officer of access and accessibility. I have started my thesis and have also been reforming the student event accessibility committee. We need a SECS representative for the committee who can inform us about the accessibility of places on campus.
Oliver: I am Oliver: he/him pronouns, I am a junior and this week I have been doing early budgeting and new club interviews.
Kabir: I am Kabir, he/him pronouns, one of the co-vice presidents. I have been waking up very early.
Grant: I am Grant, I am the other co-vice president. I have been getting futsal up and running
Tristan: I am Tristan, JSAAPP co-head, I have been working on my schedule.
Keyla: I am Keyla, JSAAPP co-head. I am still getting situated.
Aaron: I am the sophomore class rep, I have been working on the musical this week as we had auditions.
Jack: I am Jack, he/him, officer of academics. I have just been working on getting on top of my reading for class.
Ben: I’m Ben, he/him, I am the junior representative to the board, I have been reading a lot this week.
Luke: I am Luke, honor council co-chair. I have been doing background reading for my senior thesis this week.
Julie: I am the officer of the arts, she/her pronouns. I have been looking at merch budgeting for plenary and budgeting for the arts festival this fall.
Coco: I am Coco, she/her pronouns, international student representative. I am trying to make a set of guidelines for the international student lounge.
Adam: I’m Adam, he/him pronouns, I am the senior representative. This week I have been chatting with potential thesis advisors, dealing with club issues, and grading.
Yasmin: Yasmin, she/her pronouns, I am a StuCo librarian. I have been baking cookies today.
Thea: Thea, she/her pronouns, co-secretary. We have started collecting ideas for the facilities fund. Just a little about it, it is 35k for an non-neccessary project, there is more info in the StuCo newsletter. If you have any ideas for us please fill out the form.
Emma: I am Emma, she/her pronouns, and I am the other co-secretary. I have been doing a lot of research for my thesis.
Victoria: I am Victoria, co-president, and I have had a lot of meetings so far.
Yehyun: I am the other co-president, he/him pronouns. I have also been in a lot of meetings, but I am looking forward to meeting with Norm about food insecurity.
Victoria: Some general reminders to keep in mind, please sign up for a room for the retreat. There is an updated list. Make sure we are keeping accessibility rooms open. Don’t be afraid of rooming with someone on council. If you have any concerns about the retreat, let us know. We want to make this as fun and accessible as possible.
If you have not yet signed up for a check in meeting, please do that as soon as possible. Yehyun and I strongly encourage you to sign up for a meeting so we can delve into more of what your projects will look like.
We’ve got a couple committee work things that were brought by the co-vice presidents, so I am going to pass it over to you guys.
Committees
Grant: One of the things we want to work on is creating a committee to look at making the constitution more readable. It is impossible to find anything on that document right now. A perfect example is the section on elections, there are multiple sections that contradict each other. I have some ideas and I think the best way is to form a committee. The general timeline is to create a committee and present at the spring plenary. It will be a very big document, as we won’t be changing or adding anything, we will just be making the different sections more readable and moving things around. It might be somewhat boring, but I find it fun. Raise your hand if you are interested. I will share a when to meet so we can get our first meeting scheduled. I have been communicating with Caroline about making an updated constitution as currently the constitution is not updated.
Kabir: Last semester we reached out to StuCo members to fill in empty committee spots after the committee application process. However, we want one committee to be fully StuCo members. This is our StuCo x FAPC committee. FAPC is kind of the exec board for faculty, they decide the agenda for meetings. Last year, three of us met with them once a month to share what we have been up to and ask questions. I am looking for 3 interested people, 1 preferably being the officer of academics. If anyone is interested please let me know now.
Plenary
Victoria: Now we will talk about plenary. If you haven’t signed up for a task, please do that now. The first thing I want to go over is that Yehyun and I will be releasing the plenary timeline to the student body tomorrow. We will be sharing important dates about the workshop, rough draft due dates and the packet release. There is additional information that we want to include. Last year we had a theme for plenary answers. I want to use this time to figure out a theme for this year’s plenary. I know Julie, we talked about this, we want you to have a lot of input as the officer of arts. Do you have any ideas?
Julie: I think that the theme is not something people care a ton about. It’s just to create a basis for which we can focus merch and advertising. I don’t have any really solid ideas but I am open to anything.
Victoria: Do you want to share the floating ideas? Then we can all jump in.
Julie: I was thinking about fall, nature, arboretum and making nature themed. This was the only solid idea I had. We have an idea that we know we want it not to be culturally specific unless it is Haverford, but not a tv show or book or movie. We want it to be more universal and something everyone can relate to. Last year having it Haverford focused was successful.
Kabir: Would it be called plena-tree?
Victoria: We could focus on the fact that we are an arboretum.
Aaron: I think it is a good thing that we stay away from cultural things, but we could do girly pop autumn. We wouldn’t call it that could lean into that and people could get excited.
Victoria: I see the vibe, like pumpkin spice lattes, wearing scarves.
Julie: I think it is a good idea for advertising. We usually make memes.
Ben: I very much like having an arboretum themed plenary.
Kabir: Is this also something we could put on the StuCo insta?
Victoria: We should have done that before, but we had poor timing.
Julie: If you ask any random person who knows what brat is, they are going to say brat right now. That is what I have heard when I’ve asked people. We could make the entire plenary packet neon green. I feel like if we open it to the general public people will put really niche things. The other thing is that people just don’t care. We sent out a form last year multiple times to ask for art and we got one submission, we’ll do it again.
Keyla: We could do earth toned shirts for merch for nature theme but then could still do a brat sticker.
Victoria: We could have limited brat stickers.
Julie: I think it would be fun to incorporate it somehow.
Victoria: It seems like everyone likes the nature idea, does anyone else have any other ideas?
Ben: Perhaps a wizard themed plenary.
Aaron: I would like to second the wizard idea.
Victoria: Okay let’s vote on the theme. Arboretum / Trees has won. I want to get a little more specific into the tree theme, is it nature in general or the arboretum specifically.
Keyla: I think we can do broadly nature but do specifics for promoting it.
Aaron: We could also talk about the falling of the leaves and tie that into trees. Nature in general might be too broad.
Kabir: I am in favor of keeping it as vague as possible so the people making the merch can cook.
Victoria: Let’s do another vote. Okay, the vote has decided to keep it vague. If you are into the tree idea then you can help design ideas for merch. If you have questions, reach out to Julie.
Julie: Like I said, no one really cares, it’s just fun for advertising. You can make an unrelated design too.
Victoria: Do we want to include an updated constitution to link in our email tomorrow?
Yasmin: The updated constitution includes the new honor code. We haven’t shared it with all of StuCo as we haven’t implemented the suggestion from the dean’s office surrounding the officer of multiculturalism description.
Yehyun: In our email to the student body sharing the plenary timeline we will also be sharing the updated constitution. This will be useful for the plenary writing process.
Victoria: The last thing we will be spending our meeting on is talking about the subcommittees for plenary. One thing we want to make known is if you are on a subcommittee that needs money, so merch and food, we are gonna need you guys to fill out the budget section of the document. You need to make an itemized list for the co-treasurers so they can most easily submit the budget. We collectively as a StuCo can agree if this is how we want to use our money. It is being led by Yuriko and Julie. We need this done by the 22nd. We can look as a council at the itemized list at our next general meeting.
Oliver: We have been in touch with Julie and Yuriko and we will have it done by next week.
Victoria: Please meet with your subcommittee this week.
Yehyun: So everyone can have a general timeline to plenary. Plenary is November 10th, we will have our retreat in 2 weeks. Fall break is there too. If you want to make sure a lot of work is being done before fall break so please meet on the sooner side. Fall plenary usually goes smoothly, but for that to happen we need to be in communication. Please reach out with any questions.
Victoria: I want to open the floor to any questions in general.
Yasmin: We actually have to share the constitution with Nikki Young’s office for final review. So you can say in your email that you will share the constitution soon but don’t do that before we get the okay
Ben: Why is our constitution being reviewed by Nikki Young’s office?
Yasmin: One of the items in the resolution was accepted with stipulations due to concerns with affirmative action. This was for the description for the officer of multiculturalism.
Yehyun: It is using language that guides people that if your perspective aligns with the job of the officer then to please vote. We need to make sure the position fills its role without alienating any groups. I saw in the slack that some affinity houses have concerns about their budget.
Yasmin: This is an update I received after leading the LCC teach in yesterday. A lot of the community and affinity housing groups aren’t receiving the home improvement fund this year, there are a lot of funding cuts in general for housing and they are frustrated. I suggested one of the Q-house reps to email us explaining the situation for a potential exec board meeting.
Yehyun: This was not a decision StuCo made so we are trying to understand how this was implemented. We are going to be working on this.
Victoria: Thank you!
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