IUSA, Union Board seek student voices

IU Student Association and Union Board organized a town hall meeting for 7:30 p.m. tonight in the Georgian Room at the Indiana Memorial Union.

All students, faculty and administrators are invited to attend, IUSA’s Vice President of Administration Patrick Courtney said.

Two representatives from Union Board, President AJ O’Reilly and Vice President of Programming Riley Voss, and four representatives from IUSA, including President Kyle Straub, Vice President Patrick Courtney, Treasurer Casey Baker and Vice President of Congress Stephanie Kohls, will discuss any concerns students have with IUSA or Union Board programming.

The executives present will also take a few minutes at the beginning to explain their current initiatives and discuss future plans, Courtney said.

“A lot of students don’t realize all the things we do or all the things we plan to do,” Executive Chief of Marketing Alex Sabol said.

After these introductions, students can present comments or questions both in person or through Twitter to the @IUSA account that someone will monitor during the event.

The event is expected to last an hour to an hour and a half, Sabol said.

The idea for the town hall meeting emerged early during spring semester last year, Courtney said, as an aim to provide increased transparency into initiatives.

“We were elected as the voice of student opinions,” he said. “It’s great to be in a forum to get feedback and receive comments and questions, because that’s our goal at the end of the day: to serve students.”

This town hall event is the first of its kind that IUSA has organized in the last few years, Sabol explained.

“It takes a lot of work, and you don’t know exactly what the results will be,” Sabol said. “We’re very positive about getting a great turnout, but maybe in the past some had been afraid of what students had to say, good or bad. It’s something that really set our administration apart so far ... we really want to hear what students have to say.”

Courtney said many of the current senior staff of IUSA had their first experience in the organization last year and faced a bit of a learning curve trying to come up with ways to gauge student opinion. They surveyed a few thousand students last year, he explained, but added IUSA preferred directly interacting with the students they serve.

“It kind of naturally branched from our desires to hear what the students really want, and it seems like a very good way to do it,” he said.

This event marks the growing cooperation between IUSA and Union Board.
Union Board, like IUSA, is entirely student run, and members hope the event will prove informative for the student body, Union Board Public Relations Director Brad Domash said in an email.

The event was partly organized by Union Board Campus and Community Engagement Director Matt Wilkinson.

“As IUSA is also a prominent leader on campus, Matt thought it would only be appropriate to include them in the event,” Domash said.

Both groups expressed hopes to expand their working relationship in the future.

While the event is the first of its kind, Courtney is optimistic.

“It’s obviously the first one, so it’s still going to be kind of a trial, but full groups of IUSA members are working on the best way to make this town hall meeting work,” Courtney said.

Above all, the focus is on the students, he added.

“We are really stewards of the students and student money,” he said.