SGA celebrates achievements in State of the Student Body address
With SGA's 100-year anniversary coming this December, the organization’s current leaders celebrated past accomplishments, especially in the past two years, at the Feb. 26 State of the Student Body address.
Subjects spanned everything from student voting, to fall break, to Vice President Lyndi Rose's Menstrual Hygiene Product Initiative, to on-campus sexual assault as Student Government Association reminisced on how far SGA and CMU have come and remarked on how much further there is still to go.
“I think the thing that I’m most proud of would be the fact that we were able to work together to have a great team that was able to get so many different things done,” President Jake Hendricks said. “I think we really had an impact because we came in with the new university president, and we were able to set the tone and create a collaborative relationship where we were able to really implement a lot of things that we wanted to get done.”
He cited the campus programming fund as one of the more important initiatives his administration has been able to push forward. The fund puts money in the pockets of Program Board, SGA, Student Activities and Involvement and more. SGA worked with Interm Vice President of Enrollment and Student Services Tony Voisin to temporarily reallocate $227,258 that had been cut from the fund.
Another hot topic was Fall Break, which student leaders proposed as a key way to aid student mental health during the fall semester, when the number of health clinic appointments made by students peaks. While no official dates were announced during the address, the Fall Wellness Break is expected to take off next year.
In her speech, Rose spoke about the Menstrual Hygiene Product Initiative, which she started to increase accessibility of women’s hygiene products for students.
She also spoke about the ongoing issue of on-campus sexual assault, which the SGA has helped improve in a number of ways, but it’s about more than simple acknowledgement, she said.
“We don’t really do the best at addressing the actual issue," Rose said. "We don’t do the best at training, but I know there are a lot of committees and a lot of efforts across campus working toward giving students proper training... It really comes down to rape culture as a whole, that every single person has to be willing to have that conversation and recognize their own ignorance.”
The prevailing sentiment of the night was that despite how far SGA and CMU have come in the past century, there is still a long way to go, and in leaving their mark, this current cohort of student leaders hopes that they’ve left much behind.
“(It’s) leaving that lasting community, where we’re able to have the partnerships and carry that forward,” Hendricks said. “So, I think the first step is the community, and then the second step is what do students want and how can we help them achieve it.”
