Attendance: Victoria, Thea, Emma, Yehyun, Mena, Coco, Kelly, Ben, Yehyun, Julia, Grace, Grant, Kabir, Tim, Bukky, Yuriko, Jorja, Claire, Keyla
Agenda:
1. Old Business
2. Plenary
– Subcommittee
– Structure of Plenary
3. StuCo Engagement
– Haverford 2030
– Meeting the Moment
4. Closing Remarks
– Any other updates since we last met?
– Slack us with other concerns!
Old Business
Victoria: Hi guys, welcome to our general meeting. We haven’t had one in a while, it is great to see everyone. We are going to go over some old business, general updates, plenary, and then some StuCo Engagement generally. To start, we can go around the room and give some updates.
Yehyun: This weekend we were busy with the board of managers at Haverford. It was a good start to get the board familiar with us. It was a productive meeting. It was also a lot, I think they are excited to work with us.
Victoria: Thank you to everyone that was able to attend the Board of Managers dinner on Thursday night.
Emma: Thea and I met with Don from facilities before fall break and went over the proposed ideas for the facilities fund. We have some more follow up meetings this week, and once the idea is finalized we will announce it.
Thea: We have also been meeting with SEAC to work on a student’s space accessibility handbook.
Bukky: I have been working with Diamond on some of the events for the MCC and with Yuriko on other events.
Coco: I have been meeting with a lot of people about the resolution I am writing.
Julie: I have been working on getting art festival sign ups started. It will be on December 7 from 1-4pm in the VCAM lounge. I sent out the sign up to all the arts groups on campuses and will also be sending it out on the StuCo instagram and StuCo newsletter.
Kelly: There’s a campus wide trick or treat (and scavenger hunt) this Thursday at 8 to 10 pm. There are little events during family and friends weekend, which is this upcoming weekend. SECS sent a general email with everything at the beginning of this week. Quizzo has changed to Thursday from 6 to 8pm. Regarding elections, there will be a SECS-supported event hosted by the Bens, where they will be providing helpful commentary on election night (8pm at Sharpless Auditorium). There are also ongoing pledges for voting on campus. Some individuals have reached out to the Student Council for us to encourage people to join the Tri-Co Voting Challenge (https://drive.google.com/open?id=1MsI6b7WB_FbpGo02x239BzvH_2c7IKVtb_pmj05tm7Q). SECS is also finalizing events for November (will send out an email in the near future). For those interested, Snow Ball will have a casino theme again.
Tim: The librarians have been trying to get in touch with Nikki Young about plenary. We can discuss this more later.
Ben: I can talk about the board weekend. Yuriko and I as student reps went to 4 or 5 of the meetings. We went to the opening general meeting, plenary session, property committee, student affairs, and the closing general meeting. We discussed various topics. In the property committee meeting we brought concerns forth about accessibility and providing more student spaces on campus. In student affairs we gave updates on campus culture and climate. HavOC came and presented to the board that they were impressed. My primary takeaway was that they are very concerned about the financial state of affairs of the college. They are worried about solvency, the endowment, and decreased alumni donations. I think it would be good if all of us, the co-presidents and the student reps could have more time to talk and present. We probably talked for 20-30 minutes in all of the meetings. It would be good to have a specific time where we can present and give a state of the college from the student point of view.
Mena: I got a better grasp through my first year survey on what students are concerned about. Now it is more obvious what people are interested in, it’s networking between first years and upperclassmen and alumni. This is the same thing that the sophomores are interested in so I am going to try and collaborate with Aaron for this.
Appointments
Kabir: Hi, this week we just met with the appointments committee for the remaining committees. We have a few vacancies, which we will take volunteers right now. We are first looking for two juniors for the commencement committee. Commencement committee has one hour meetings during the spring to plan commencement. Do any of the juniors here want to serve on this committee?
Ben: I can.
Kabir: Next is for the dining center committee, they want two reps from each class year. We got seven applicants, but did not get two from each class year. We are going to propose that we keep the seven students and have a minimum of one per class year. We need a senior since no seniors applied.
Grace: I possibly can.
Kabir: They meet once every two weeks for an hour.
Grace: I can do it.
Kabir: We are looking for one to two students for the campus safety advisory committee. This committee helps align campus safety goals with student needs. It meets multiple times per semester and works on fostering trust between campus safety and students, and identifying areas for improvement. I want to make a point, that from our discussions last year, we referenced how campus safety impacts students in emergencies, and so we are trying to use the committee more this year. Any class year can be on it.
Victoria: Yehyun and I have already been invited to be on this committee. Do we count as representatives?
Kabir: It could. This was separate from their request to us.
Ben: I have shown up for the past two years, but am not formally a member, I would love to continue.
Jorja: I can also do it.
Kabir: Finally, we recently received an email from the arboretum committee. They try to steward the trees and the campus with people who live and work here. The committee serves as a think tank to discuss ongoing things happening with the arboretum. They meet four times a year.
Julie: I am already on it.
Kabir: We can let them know.
Grant: There’s meant to be another person.
Claire: I can also serve.
Kabir: In addition to that, we are happy to announce that SEAC got two more members. We will also be confirming the committee that meets with FAPC, and we will inform people about appointments today.
Grant: In other news, the constitution committee is continuing to work on updating the constitution. Our timeline is spring plenary. The finishing of appointments concludes most of our work this semester as VPs.
Victoria: So the dining advisory committee and commencement committee still need appointments.
Kabir: We got one senior for the dining advisory committee, which is fine if we shift the requirements for the committee. We need one more junior for the commencement committee. We are also accepting more people for the IDEA student council committee.
Victoria: What happens if we don’t have anyone?
Kabir: We ask if they really need a second person, and then we seek someone if they do.
Dominique: I met with Danielle and she expressed a lot of interest in building a relationship between StuCo and athletics. She has never met with any of the co-presidents or officer of athletics before me. We spent most of the meeting discussing what my role can look like. She wants to use the officer of athletics and StuCo to push the athletics plan, which is Haverford 2030 but for athletics. One cool thing is that we have implemented a snack station in the basement of the GIAC for athletes.
Grace: I haven’t been here in a while. I want to touch base with the co-secretaries about two things later. That is it.
Yuriko: Ben summarized the Board of Managers meetings pretty well. I am working on writing a summary about the board of managers meetings that Ben and I attended. I am trying to also create a one page summary to send out before the longer minutes we took during those meetings. A lot of students still feel like there is not a lot of transparency around what the board does, so it would be easier to have a simpler summary with key points. Once I have a draft, I will be sharing with people in StuCo who attended those meetings and HavOC. Besides that, things are going well, we are looking forward to next semester’s board meeting.
Jorja: I don’t have any major updates, just that Oliver and I have been going through more budgeting requests. We are trying to figure out a way to make our decisions on budgeting more transparent to the student body.
Keyla: From JSAAP side, we did not meet this past week. We have no new updates. We have received some emails from students about the alcohol policy, we are addressing and prepping for the ratification of the alcohol policy.
Victoria: Thank you everyone. We will go over some other committee updates. If we could have a haverfest update that would be great.
Kelly: We chose the Co-heads! It is Deric and Jillian. They will start meeting with student engagement and will choose committee heads soon.
Victoria: Mena, I know you have an update about the bulletin board.
Mena: The class reps met today and we went over what the board will look like for the month of November. There will be a countdown for plenary, but the rest of the month will contain other things like the class survey results.
Victoria: Finally, I wanted to remind everyone that your second one on one check-ins should be scheduled before thanksgiving break.
Claire: One update from the librarians. Our idea for instagram takeovers got a little delayed but we will be reaching out to the people that signed up to schedule those.
Plenary
Yehyun: Plenary is coming up. We want to be as ready as possible. Can we do subcommittee updates? Let’s start with the fun part, merch!
Julie: Merch orders are already placed.Everything should be here by November 7th at the latest. It’ll be sent to student engagement, and then I can bring it to the GIAC day of.
Ben: Tim and I can give an update for physical logistics .
Tim: We are waiting for a response from BLAST. We have to email IT for some ethernet cables.
Ben: We have the EMS reservation for Plenary, we need to talk to Jodi about having facilities help us setup.
Julie: Also the stickers ended up being $40 less than we anticipated. So we have roughly $40 left.
Victoria: If you feel very strongly about snacks, budget those $40 by the end of the day and get it to Oliver.
Kelly: For advertising, we put out two posts today about plenary. Julie and I reserved tables next week for DC tabling.
Julie: I will make a spreadsheet and send it into the slack. Please sign up if you can.
Kelly: We will make a huge poster, we are planning (next week) on tabling Monday and Thursday. We will have lots of posts next week in general.
Yehyun: For plenary workshop updates, we were not able to have our accountability resolution workshop. However, we have been in touch with the resolution writers and we are expecting two resolutions for this plenary.
Victoria: We should receive the final drafts tomorrow.
Yehyun: Can we get an update for day of logistics?
Claire: We need to assign roles for days of logistics to different people.
Kelly: I can assign SECS people to the roles that still need to be filled.
Victoria: If we can have one StuCo member in Sharpless that would be great.
Yehyun: Yuriko, can you give us a food and transport update?
Yuriko: I have not yet reserved the vans. Keyla is van certified so she can help us with transportation.
Jorja: Oliver is also van certified.
Yuriko: We are ordering more boba than last year, so two vans might be helpful.
Victoria: We only budgeted for one van but we can use the remaining money to get a second van.
Kelly: We can also have someone in SECS use their car. I can ask today.
Yehyun: Grace, can we get an update on the zoom?
Grace: I scheduled an email to be sent tomorrow to set up the zoom for plenary. I’ll write a little paragraph to be included in a much longer email. It’s always a balance of random people using the zoom when they don’t need it versus people who really need it. If you think you might have to be on the zoom on the StuCo side, we can make you a panel member. Send your name and email. With the panel everyone needs to be sent a unique link so people cannot share it.
Yehyun: That sounds great! Having it in a panel way makes sense.
Grace: Last year someone shared the google presentation for the zoom. So they need to be a panel member.
Yehyun: Jorja, are there any budget updates?
Jorja: The purchase requests have been submitted to Tina. We are now just waiting on that. We will have to ask someone to pick up the stuff from Student Engagement.
Victoria: We have a section for people to pass the mics around. We got feedback that people don’t like walking up to the microphone. I want to see how everyone was feeling regarding that.
Ben: I think if people want mic passers, it’s fine by me. My only concern is if we have enough people to do this.
Victoria: This can also be people in SECS.
Grant: Kabir and I can be mic passers. I think mic passers will encourage more people willing to speak.
Thea: I think we didn’t do it last time because the wireless mics were not working. So we need to make sure those work.
Ben: When we talk to BLAST, we need to remind them to charge the microphones.
Kabir: I thought having the mic at the front got more people to pay attention but I also understand it could be nerve wracking to stand in front of everyone. Could we have both options?
Victoria: Both feel redundant.
Yehyun: If we want to make sure we can provide as many avenues as possible, a stationary mic might be another avenue. If we have both available, coordination is very important.
Grant: I think we should just pick one. We will also have to coordinate with the people on zoom.
Claire: We already have two people signed up.
Victoria: Let’s vote on mic passers. Okay, it seems like we will be having mic passers. Next, we wanted to discuss community comment and the open mic. We wanted to make it more accessible and orderly. We wanted to ask everyone what they thought of it.
Yehyun: For context, last year, we had a community comment option, where StuCo Co-presidents sent an RSVP as time for students to speak to the whole student body. We saw how it went, and we had feedback from the student body, and talked to the general council about thoughts.
Emma: There was some miscommunication about signing up for it last time and some people are not comfortable going up to speak in front of everyone. Maybe having a form for things to be read from the front?
Thea: I think the sign-up is important though because we don’t just want people going back and forth and arguing.
Grant: Last year, we had issues with people going over the time. We should have some enforcement of the time limit. We can have people hold up red, yellow, and green cards. We can’t cut mics but people should know if they are going over. We should also enforce signing up beforehand. On submitting written things, I am uncomfortable having things that we read out. If you want to talk in plenary, you should have to talk in person.
Kabir: We implemented community comment for the first time in the fall last year. We allowed sign ups on the day and sent out reminders in advance. We should definitely have the option for students to reserve a time to speak in advance. Due to the nature of plenary, I think that any form of community comment should have a name and a voice attached to it, and not be anonymized.
Yehyun: Any other comments or ideas?
Grace: Could we have the zoom possibly do community comment?
Yehyun: Yes.
Grace: I am not sure about the logistics of that.
Emma: How would we do community comment in the satellite rooms?
Grant: Community comment isn’t plenary, so if you want to give it, you should be in person, or if you have an accessibility concern you can say in the form we send out and we can work with you.
Thea: We can have an option in the form for community comment about whether the person will be in the GIAC and if not, we can work with them individually.
Yehyun: We want to improve in everything that we do. Collecting your thoughts together. Having a more comprehensive form seems necessary to coordinate and explain what community comment is for. I agree with Kabir about name and voices coming together. With the RSVP, I am still thinking about the cut-off. Would it be accessible enough if we advertise it enough, so the cut off day is still appropriate. For me, if I am prepping for community comment, I can think of something day of.
Victoria: I think we will have to work around the timing of these things. A portion of this falls into how much time we will delegate into community comment.
Thea: I feel like we can do day of. If we have already a lot of submissions for community comment then we can call it earlier.
Yehyun: Having a day of sign up is good, but anything after that cut off, you missed the time to RSVP.
Victoria: We can send the sign up in tomorrow’s newsletter. Thank you for joining us.
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