Attendance: Jorge, Emma, Thea, Grant, Ben, Julie, Clay, Kelly, Irene, Grace, Julia, Anagha, Yasmin, Stefan, Claire, Tim
Agenda:
- Check-ins
- Presidential Updates
- Plenary Updates
Check-ins
Jorge: Everyone, welcome to our meeting. We are going to start with check ins.
Grace: I had a meeting evaluating disability in social spaces. Our task is to increase the accessibility of social spaces following the emails over the summer. It was a good meeting.
Irene: We had our Lunar New Year banquet yesterday. It was really successful. The Asian affinity groups worked really hard to put that together so I am glad that it went well. The Affinity Group Coalition met to talk about BIPOC Joy, which is basically a festival for BIPOC students. It is going to be April 27th, hopefully on Founders Green. We are working on budgeting right now. I met with Jorge and Maria and the co-treasurers to talk about budgeting concerns. I am excited for the co-presidents and co-treasurers to join the next AGC meeting.
Kelly: I made a draft of the advertising timeline for Plenary. Started working more with Ciera from Student Engagement on various tasks like trying to put SECS on EMS. After-spring-break-events are continuing to be planned. In addition, SECS shall be doing various collaborations with other organizations like the International Student Association and BID. SECS is also an active collaborator for Haverpop, and SECS will have an event during Haverfest. There is an interest form for Haverpop for anyone who would like to perform at the Haverpop concert on April 6th from 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm. SECS did send an email about some of our events (email sent on February 8th). For example, today (Sunday) is our Super Bowl Watch Party and Friday we will have our Valentine’s Festival. A poster detailing some of the SECS events is attached. Finally, people have been contacting SECS and I for help, like through hc-secs@haverford.edu. All I have to say about that is: WE LOVE THE EMAILS! KEEP SENDING THEM!
Stefan: These past two weeks I have been working on the honor degree for graduation in 2025. I have been collecting nominations and feedback. I also have been able to send out an email as a general check in to the junior class. I intend to send out another email to find interest from current juniors about being a senior rep next year.
Jorge: For the new members, every beginning of our general meetings, we do updates on your position. If you don’t have anything we can move on.
Clay: Hi, I am the new elections coordinator. We finished up the elections for honor council this week.
Ben: For plenary planning we have reached out to IITS to get the wifi boosted and events to make sure the room is properly set up. We have also met with BLAST to discuss how they will help for both the day of and for the plenary rehearsal. I have also met with James Keane to talk about Bionic. It is a behemoth of a system but there is still work we can do. Last but not least, I attended the campus safety meeting, we talked about accessibility for events. Campus Safety raised the opportunity of more student escorts for the program. We will send something about that to the consensus.
Jesse: I am currently drafting an email to the Swarthmore registrar about some students that had delayed exam grades from Swarthmore.
Tim: Hi I’m Tim, I’m the librarian treasurer. I am in the class of 2027.
Grant: Today I have been working on writing the committee report we will be presenting Thursday. We have received responses from all of the committees and almost all of the representatives so we are really happy about that. We met this past week to work on the plenary timeline. It will be in an email tomorrow. We finalized when the resolution workshops will be. We will have our first workshop this Thursday from 7-8.
Kabir: We also met with one of the honor council co-chairs this week and are supposed to meet with the COMLs next week.
Yasmin: I finished meeting with everyone on exec board to update position descriptions for February election nominations. Now I still have to do my librarian check-ins with the officer and reps. This past week I also attended the Board of Managers dinner and it was nice to talk to a couple of people at the end about the issues regarding The Nest as they didn’t seem to be aware of the need for a food pantry on campus in the first place. I’d love to make myself available to help out with discussions related to The Nest because I haven’t even known about the gas issue, which is still at stake with ongoing construction work in Whitehead. I’m also looking forward to working with our new Librarians with the StuCo website and our other projects this spring.
Anagha: We are halfway through the regular semester budgeting cycle. We have made decisions on all the budgets that were submitted and made allocations based on clubs that have filled out the allocation agreement. If you are a club that has not received an allocation approval then it is likely that you did not fill out the allocation agreement. If you have filled it out but did not receive your allocation, please reach out to us ASAP. We are going into appeals this week. The appeal form is available on engage. The form is in the same location where you initially created your budget. When you go to your club on the left hand panel and click the icon of your club, then finance tab, then hit the big blue button of the create process. The appeal process should be the only one that appears for you to fill out. If you have any other questions please email to ask. We also want to share with the committee or anyone planning on submitting an appeal that there is only $1,728.52 available in this cycle’s fund for making approvals for appeals. Decisions on appeals are made by the budgeting committee, not the co-treasurers.
Julie: This week I have been doing a lot of gauging of what we want the plenary theme to be. People seem to really like the idea of camp. Also I have been talking to a few coheads for arts groups and organizations on campus about how they can be better supported because a lot of them are on their own. This has been one of my first steps to making an arts coalition on campus.
Claire: Hi I’m Claire, I’m a new StuCo librarian. I am a first year.
Thea: This week we met with Scott to discuss preliminary changes to the poster policy, we will be working on that this semester. We are setting up a meeting with DASH to discuss how we can incorporate accessibility into the policy.
Emma: We have also been inviting guests to Exec Board meetings. We have the student reps and VPs coming this week. Following that it is the NEST. If you have anyone you want brought to Exec Board please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Emmeline: I met with BLAST this week to discuss different microphone options to help spring plenary go smoothly. Senior week committee met for the second time this week and started drafting the senior week schedule. A note for the community, any seniors with ideas for senior week can send those to me through the senior class google form (shared in an earlier email) and any clubs or groups on campus with events for seniors during senior week should reach out to have their event added to the senior week schedule.
Julia: I met with Natasha this week to discuss the international students lounge. We have discussed possible furniture to get for the place and alternatives to receive feedback from students on the space’s functionality. Students will receive a form this upcoming week to voice their opinions on what the lounge will look like for the international student community!
Presidential Updates
Jorge: Thank you so much. Maria is sick today, she cannot make it. Last week we did a bunch of things. Maria interviewed the new librarians. We had 10 applications. It was a big job. Now we have our new two librarians, one is a librarian for the treasurers as the treasurers have a lot of work that is administrative. Tim will be helping them. Claire will be helping Yasmin with the website and institutional memory.
In terms of budgeting procedure, something from our end is we got emails asking about budgeting procedures. We had a meeting with Irene to talk about PARC and other budgeting concerns. Because of the shortage in the budget, we had to move the Haverfest fund to the general fund. We are now securing Haverfest funding. I am saying this, not to create an alarm but to point out it was a very difficult budgeting procedure. The requests were much higher than the available funds.
In terms of the Board of Managers, on Thursday we had dinner with them and other students. On Friday we had meetings with them the whole day. The Board of Managers have multiple plenary sessions throughout the year, once in the fall, twice in the spring, and that’s when they come to Haverford. On Friday focus on two topics for this plenary session. Maria and I are reps to the student affairs committee and we sit in on the general plenary meetings.
In the two big sessions we had, the first topic was campus climate, something that came out in the discussion was that Haverford has been going through a lot, but the board wants to make sure all the processes of the honor code and confrontation are occurring so they do not want to step in. They want senior admin and students to resolve things among themselves. They want to make sure the processes that exist at Haverford continue to evolve. There was a lot of good dialogue. There was an emphasis on academic excellence and a discussion whether we should be focusing on academic excellence rather than social justice. Something that was pointed out by multiple people is that you cannot separate academic excellence from social justice as some students don’t have the privilege to ignore what is going on outside of campus. Outside factors impact different students on campus in different ways and thus academic excellence.
The second session was related to Haverford 2030. They are trying to fundraise in the hundred millions of dollars to create the new Haverford they are envisioning. Those are our updates.
Plenary
Jorge: Can we get weekly task updates? Anagha and Erin have nothing. Merch. Julie, now we have camp as a theme, is that decided?
Julie:. I am not sure. There are a lot of different interpretations of what camp is. People thought it would be funny. I think it is a stylistic choice. It’s an aesthetic. Styling merch and advertising in a way that is silly yet intentional is the point of camp. You don’t have to understand camp for it to be silly.
Jorge: Some of the past plenary packets are super camp.
Julie: I was trying to think of a theme that would get people’s attention.
Kabir: Can you define camp?
Julie: Over the top excessive in a way that doesn’t take itself seriously. It’s ironic.
Jorge: Wikipedia says that camp is an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value. Now that we have decided on camp, by next week, Julie and Irene, you need to have a logo for the stickers and the merch. By next Sunday we should be ready to order it. I am pretty sure that the boba was ordered. Ben, you reached out to BLAST right?
Ben: Yes.
Jorge: Grace, do we have the webinar link?
Grace: I am setting it up this week.
Ben: We need a set date for the rehearsal plenary.
Jorge: Can it be Friday? We don’t all have to be there. We need people doing satellite rooms to be there. I want to make sure the zoom and audio is working. Ask them if they could do Friday or Saturday?
Grace: I am not sure, but I will ask if it is possible to have the zoom link for the rehearsal plenary.
Jorge: Maybe we do two webinars, one for rehearsal and one for the day of?
Grace: What timing would we want to webinar for?
Jorge: Can he make it like 9am – 8pm?
Grace: We should be able to do that.
Jorge: For the webinar for the rehearsal, wait until you hear from Ben before setting it up. We reached out to BLAST and everything was secured. For advertising, Kelly, what are the updates?
Kelly: I used the timeline we made last semester and changed the dates. I will send it in the general chat right now. On Valentine’s day I am going to make a little instagram post announcing the plenary date.
Jorge: Next week, I want Anagha to make sure that all the orders are placed.
Anagha: Do we know if the plenary budget that is in our spreadsheet is the most updated?
Jorge: I think so. Julie does this look right? *nods* We have $300 to spare. Matthias is trying to get certified for the van. I think it is $50.
Julie: If we have extra money I have an idea that goes with the theme. I was assuming the art collective would do a table. Last semester they said they did not have a lot of supplies for their table. We could get them supplies and do like a tote bag decorating session.
Jorge: I wouldn’t be opposed. If you can budget and put links we can do that.
Julie: I will reach out to the art collective.
Jorge: For Ben and Emmeline, are we going to get BOUNCE?
Ben: We have not discussed it
Jorge: Make sure if you want to get BOUNCE, we have to reach out. Google forms for community comment and tabling, do we have any updates?
Yasmin: Not yet.
Anagha: For placing the orders, should we do it next week or the week after so people have time to make designs?
Jorge: The goal is that the design is ready by next Sunday and we should place the order by next Sunday.
Anagha: So the order will only be placed next Tuesday.
Jorge: The goal is next week to have the order placed.
Grace: One other thing, no one emailed me about needing to be a co-host on the plenary webinar. Please do that ASAP.
Jorge: Onto the timeline, we have the first resolution writing workshop this Thursday from 7-8pm. I am sending out the plenary timeline email tomorrow.
Anagha: Did we decide if the co-treasurer and budgeting resolution is going in a resolution separate from the rest of StuCo.
Jorge: We can talk about that later. If you have an update for your position, please add it into the document. We are done for tonight. Thank you. Meeting adjourned.
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