At Monday night’s Student Association meeting, members discussed their plans for a variety of upcoming initiatives and events that SA will run and sponsor.

Events discussed included Diversity Week, Take Back the Night and several initiatives by the Student Life committee, President James Franco and Vice President Angie Pati.

Diversity Affairs committee co-chairs Diasia Robinson and Khalid Khan introduced their initial plans for this year’s Diversity Week. That event will be held during the last week of March.

SA, Pride Union, the LGBT Resource Center and Color Collective in March will host a pride parade to celebrate the LGBTQ community. Robinson and Khan suggested inviting winners of the Pride Union’s drag show, held on Feb. 15, to be queen marshalls at the parade.

During Diversity Week, SA will work with the Department of Public Safety to educate the SU student body about the resources and services DPS offers.

For a small donation, students will be able to throw a pie in a DPS officer’s face. The money raised will go to the Dunbar Center, a community center in Syracuse.

At previous meetings, SA members discussed concerns about the relationship between DPS and SU students. Those concerns partly inspired the event, Robinson and Khan said.

A candlelight vigil will be held at the end of Diversity Week to express that SU is a hate-free zone, the two co-chairs added.

Take Back the Night will be held on March 22, said Janine Bogris, one of SA’s co-chiefs of staff. Every year, communities in the United States and around the world host Take Back the Night, an event created “to speak out about sexual violence, relationship violence, and other forms of interpersonal violence,” according to the Syracuse Office of Health Promotion’s website.

The night will consist of multiple speakers, including SU Chancellor Kent Syverud; M. Dolan Evanovich, senior vice president for enrollment and the student experience; and a student speaker who has yet to be chosen. There will also be a parade around campus and an event called Speak Out, in which students will be able to discuss their feelings and experiences about sexual assault and violence.

Bogris said the event will be a way for members of the SU community to show that they will not accept sexual violence on campus and in their everyday lives.

Elizabeth Sedore, chair of the Student Life committee, on Monday also proposed introducing kiosks to display a calendar of SA events in various building around campus. The kiosks would feature a touch screen so students could interact with the calendar, Sedore said.

SA members suggested Sadler Hall, Ernie Davis Hall, Bird Library and Goldstein Student Center as possible kiosk locations.

Sedore also introduced a new initiative to clean up Walnut and Euclid Avenues. She said students have been complaining about the amount of trash and debris on the two streets.

The first clean-up event will focus on Euclid and will be held on March 4.

Franco and Pati discussed SA’s partnership with SU Athletics to provide 1,000 free tickets to the SU men’s basketball game on Wednesday night. The tickets were funded by a sponsorship from Original Italian Pizza.

Obi Afriyie, SA’s parliamentarian who is also a Student Life columnist for The Daily Orange, expressed concern about the distribution of the tickets. He said he was worried that students who already held season tickets would take advantage of the deal, which might take away from the event’s goal to provide access to students who were previously unable to attend games.

The structure of this distribution of tickets is based on an event held in the fall semester, in which SA handed out free tickets for the Syracuse-Clemson football game, Franco said.

Pati said she has talked with the LGBT Resource Center to discuss how SA can help increase the center’s accessibility and continue to support the center as a whole.

“We want to value those cultural centers that are not administrative resources, but are instead that friend that you tell everything to and is your strongest ally,” Pati said.

Published on February 19, 2018 at 11:42 pm

Contact India: irmiragl@syr.edu