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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

Union Board plans fall semester programs

Due to its emphasis on advanced planning, Union Board has already approved several events for the fall 2015 semester calendar.

BloomingCon, scheduled for Sept. 25-27; the Block Party Concert and Carnival, scheduled for Aug. 22; a lecture by the first plus-sized model to win “America’s Next Top Model,” Whitney Thompson, scheduled for November 3; and the UB Big Friday Yule Ball, scheduled for Dec. 4, have all been recently added.

Union Board President Jacqueline Bales said the advanced planning structure will allow the Board to get the word out about events much further in advance, including lectures with potential to draw a larger crowd.

“Usually they’re a little more impromptu,” Bales said. “It’s really great that these will be out with enough time to really get to people.”

BloomingCon is on track with scheduling vendors and space for the event, Bales said.

This will be the local gaming conference’s second year, she said, and will be planned by the new UB Gaming and Electronics Committee director to be announced ?today.

Some event proposals are initially turned away at the weekly Thursday board meetings, however.

Bales said the committee director must first send their event proposals through the Budgetary Affairs Committee, which will screen the proposal for financial ?concerns.

“They are really the screening process,” she said. “Just kind of smoothing things over so it’s really prepared to come to the board meeting.”

After their approval, Bales said the proposal can be presented to the Board at their weekly meeting and they will put it to a vote. Bales said an event fails to be approved by the Board’s vote about once every other week and is sent back to the director of the committee that proposed it for revising.

“We, for the most part, trust the Budgetary Affairs Committee,” she said. “It has that vote of confidence.”

Bales said planning in a calendar format has been more efficient for the Board.

“At this point we’ve been very responsible with our budget to make sure we don’t go into the red and make sure we balance things out,” she said. “We definitely will have a little bit more of a variety. There’s at least something from every committee that’s being looked at right now.”

With the Board’s advanced planning, Bales said they hope to keep the programs students expect to see.

“With planning everything ahead of time, the idea was to make sure we got the stuff that we know people are going to want, we got that passed right off the bat,” Bales said.

She said there is a cap in place for how much money the Board can budget toward events planned in advance, so they can add new programs during the semester.

“(We) just kind of make sure that we keep a variety,” Bales said. “We try to make sure those things happen as well as the things that people might take for granted.”

Bales said she wants the Board’s advanced programming format to progress throughout the fall semester.

“We’re responding to what people want and getting a better and better system to do that,” she said.

Director of the UB Music Committee James Diamond said his committee especially benefits from their new programming structure when programming concerts such as the Welcome Week Block Party Concert. The artist has not yet been announced.

“As of right now, the Music Committee has a lot of ideas,” he said. “When I took over, it wasn’t a completely blank page. I think moving forward we’re going to try to take it even farther.”

The current calendar of events can be found at unionboard.org/events.

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