Jake Hendricks hopes to garner more student input as SGA president
SGA presidential candidate Jake Hendricks in Moore Hall on March 27
Traverse City junior Jake Hendricks and Nashville sophomore Lyndi Rose are Student Government Association president and vice president, respectively, for the 2018-2019 academic year.
More than 830 students voted in this year’s election, which took place April 1-6 via OrgSync.
Hendricks and Rose defeated the ticket of presidential candidate and Indiana senior Shane Guenin and vice presidential candidate and Greenville senior Allison Harrison.
Central Michigan University policy does not require SGA to disclose candidate vote totals.
Central Michigan Life spoke with Hendricks to discuss election results, campaign promises and what the new administration’s first step will be when it takes over next academic year.
CM Life: How do you feel about winning the election?
Hendricks: It’s super exciting. The coolest thing about it was we had the opportunity to go out and talk to students on campus. I know that’s the part (Rose) and I enjoyed the most. Bringing those views into our campaign was the most important thing to us and making sure students felt heard on campus.
In regards to your platform, what are you doing first?
(The) first thing is we want to have a functioning cabinet. We’re going to be doing interviews — the post will be going out sometime this week (on the SGA Facebook page) about different positions — and hopefully we’ll be able to interview everyone and have a meeting together before summer break.
Once we have those people together, we want to brainstorm how we can take some of the priorities we campaigned on and add priorities of the student body that weren’t in our campaign and see what kind of plans we can put in place so we can start on the ground running next semester.
What suggestions from students are you planning on implementing?
We’re going to encourage students in SGA to participate in programs that are about diversity. We’ll make sure our budget is sustainable. (There have been) different questions about organizations we want to partner with. One of our ideas is to partner with Take Back the Tap to hand out reusable water bottles. It’s important to encourage a sustainable mindset on campus. We also want to make sure SGA includes members of the community who aren’t (Registered Student Organization) representatives so people might feel more comfortable coming to our meetings. Anybody can write legislation, so we want to encourage that and get people to come in with their different viewpoints.
SGA President Anna Owens’ administration was more program-based than in previous years with a lot of legislation. How would you want your administration to function?
We would love if there was passionate legislation that comes through. That would be awesome. I imagine, starting out, we’ll have a lot of the same representatives who we’ll encourage to work on those projects.
I’m hoping it’s a balance between projects and legislation because we really need to do those projects to be recognized in the community. That makes our legislation more meaningful.
You’re planning to bring students who were not previously in SGA to the organization. What other method do you have to do this other than projects?
We want to send out senators to different RSO meetings — maybe two meetings per semester — so they can go out to organizations and talk to them about what senate is and what house is so students might be more inclined to be a part of SGA. Rather than them coming to SGA not really knowing what it is, being passionate and encouraged to come to us.
Can you explain how your idea of a Greek community liaison is going to be implemented?
We want to make sure the volunteer coordinator is working closer with the Greek community. Ideally, it would be someone who either has a Greek background or is passionate about working with student groups on campus.
We want to reach out to the Greek community to maybe partner in volunteer activities or help them raise money during Greek Week or something like that — just trying to bridge that gap because a lot of students feel there’s a gap although we do have Greek representatives.
