ASUSU Student Advocate restructures committee
The ASUSU Student Voice Committee is being restructured by this year’s Student Advocate Jason Russell, who said his goal is to fully utilize the committee and bring it to its full potential.
Russel said the new committee will help him learn what students want from USU.
“This restructuring of the student voice committee is going to be so great,” said ASUSU President Erik Mikkelsen. “He’s creating himself an avenue to get that voice — to hear that voice.
Mikkelsen said the student advocate is the voice of the students as a whole for the ASUSU Executive Council.
“All the people on the executive board, they know their groups of students,” Mikkelsen said. “But they have nowhere near the access to student opinion as the student advocate does.”
Russell said the committee currently has one member, but applications for the rest of the committee have been given out. The director of the
Student Voice Committee is Keenan Neuhring.
Neuhring said he is “the person that is coordinating everything, making sure people are staying on task, and just overall facilitating meetings.”
The committee and the student advocate will help students voice their concerns to the university administration and the ASUSU Executive Council, Neuhring said, as well as help students with any concerns they have.
Russell said he spent the summer interning with many of the services on campus such as Student Housing and the USU Bookstore. He said the internship helped him learn who he should talk to about any concern a student may have.
“Students have rights at this university that they don’t understand they have,” Neuhring said. “They have a voice first of all, and they have outlets. The administration is willing to listen.”
The rest of the committee will be made up of, potentially, six or more officers and eight students, elected by each of the USU Senators, Russell said. The officers appointed by the senators will represent and work with their specific college. They will be required to do at least one survey in those colleges every year.
Russell said there will be officers in charge of each of the student advocate programs, as well as officers over the committee’s use of social media, like Facebook.
Two programs Russel said he plans to offer are Brutally Honest and Start, Stop, Continue, which were run in previous years, and he said he hopes to bring them back.
“What I envision (Brutally Honest) to be is a panel of ASUSU officers getting together and having an open-mic night with the students,” Russell said. “This will provide valuable information in letting us know what the real concerns and issues are.”
He said a different committee officer will be in charge of Start Stop Continue, which invites students to write down what they want the university to start doing, stop doing and continue doing. The program was started last year by the ASUSU President’s Cabinet, but will now be handled by the Student Voice Committee, Russel said.
Neuhring said suggestions from last year’s Start Stop Continue program ranged from resolving parking issues to requests concerning dances.
Most of these programs will happen next semester, Russell said, but Neuhring said they hope to have the committee running by Homecoming Week.
Russell said he is also rebranding the entire program. Previously the program’s brand was “Voice Your Concern.”
“It’s always been ‘Voice Your Concern,'” Russell said. “A fresh start, having a new theme — ‘Speak Up’ just seemed about perfect.”
Russell said the new brand will be all over posters and fliers for all the programs the student advocate organizes. He said he likes this brand because it “is exactly what he want students to do: ‘Speak Up.'”
— chris.w.lee@aggiemail.usu.edu