GPSG President Benjamin Verdi said IUSA President Anne Tinder and its Chief of Staff Sara Zaheer reached out to him in efforts to arrange more meetings between them. Tinder said she and Verdi plan to meet twice a month to tell each other what their organizations are working on, and Verdi said he hopes the two organizations can draft resolutions together.
“Technically, we are a student government who is representing the entire campus,” Tinder said. “So, in my opinion, it’s crucial for me and for the executives and the Congress of IUSA to at least be aware of the issues grad students are facing.”
Mental health is a focus of IUSA’s current administration, and GPSG recently devoted a committee to student health and wellness, so Tinder said she thinks that area presents an opportunity for collaboration.
Verdi said surveys reported by IU-Bloomington Provost Lauren Robel have shown graduate students are disproportionately unaware of services on campus, including mental health resources like Counseling and Psychological Services.
He said he hopes GPSG and IUSA can start their work together by addressing the visibility of mental health resources.
“It shouldn’t have to be something you have to go dig around and find,” Verdi said. “It should be very, very obvious how to get access to those services.”
Later work by IUSA and GPSG could focus on bolstering CAPS and other services for mental health, Verdi said.
However, sometimes graduate students, who often work with other students in a teaching role, are those in which someone might confide an issue or incident they experienced, Verdi said.
For this reason, Verdi said it is important for graduate students to understand the resources available for mental health, so they can guide those who might look to them as well as lead the way in removing stigma surrounding mental health problems through open discussion of such issues.
“By making it something that’s not uncomfortable, that the leader is talking about, then somebody else might feel less inclined to disavow their need for some kind of service and maybe they’ll seek help a little bit more,” Verdi said.
Tinder said the collaboration between IUSA and GPSG could exceed mental health issues. Tinder said one area this could happen is asking IU to divest from fossil fuels. This is something Tinder said both she and Verdi care about on a personal level, although Tinder said IUSA has never before taken on the issue.
Many topics on which both organizations want to focus are not exclusive to either graduates or undergraduates, Verdi said, but rather reach campus-wide with issues surrounding sustainability and diversity efforts.
“The stuff that is fundamental to what the GPSG wants to do is not in any way incompatible with IUSA’s mission,” Verdi said. “When we work together selfishly it helps us bolster our initiatives and things we want to get done, but also in the spirit of service, which is why we get into these positions in the first place, it helps us serve more students. If we know IUSA and GPSG is working together, then everyone is represented.”
