By Kassondra Granata
The Central Connecticut State University Student Government Association hosted the 2011 CSUS SGA Summit on Friday where they welcomed student government members from the three other CSUS schools to discuss and gain new perspectives on how to manage their respective schools and the communities surrounding them.
The four senates were mixed together and separated into groups where they openly discussed their schools involvement with certain ideas and events. Following the discussions were a series of presentations to present findings to the entire group in order to further their goal of creating new ideas that will benefit all four schools.
Eastern Connecticut State University presented a campaign called “Are You One?” where the main goal is for the students at ECSU to be good neighbors to the surrounding community in Willimantic.
“It’s basically our opportunity to change the community’s perception of our students,” said ECSU SGA President Wiley Dawson.
The next presentation also focused on the subject of community engagement where SCSU Sen. Brian Pedalino presented his senate’s approach to further the interaction with students at the school and their surrounding community.
CCSU also presented their contribution to the topic of community engagement in representing CCSU and their involvement with the community.
“I think that the residents need to be heard, but not everyone’s going to be happy,” Sen. Tyler Zajac said. “We at least need to try and do our part and respect them but also make sure that we aren’t misinterpreted.”
The following group presented an idea called “Feeding Students for Feedback” where each school demonstrated an event they had where the common factor, food, is used to appeal to students to obtain their views or criticism on the school and what to improve. Examples included CCSU’s coffee talks, ECSU’s wiener Wednesday and SCSU with peanut butter and jelly day.
The presidents each school’s SGA offered the summit a more creative approach with the idea of a carnival where there would be booths and ice cream trucks among other activities at the event. SGA would have their own booth where they would hand out t-shirts to students that have a conversation with the senators.
The summit allowed the senates the opportunity to gain new perspectives and find ways to unite together to perfect the schools and the communities around them.
“From what everyone shared it sounds like we all had a successful meeting,” said Jamie Canny, CCSU’s Interim SGA President. “It’s unfortunate that this is the only time we get to meet every year and casually discuss this. The presidents get to talk at the [Student Advisory Board] meetings but it’s very formal and we never get to just put our guard down and openly talk and enjoy each other’s company like we did tonight.”
Canny hopes that the summit will create friendships between the schools and will hopefully lead to a continuation of discussions about SGA to increase the ability to improve each senates respective schools throughout the year.
