KC Spotlight- Student Government

Hello everyone! I’m Bryan Goers. My day job is overseeing the Office of Student Engagement at the University of Missouri; however I also serve as the newly appointed Region IV-West Student Government KC Rep.

Nearly every college and university around the country has some form of student governing body on their campus. I know this to be true because of the ridiculous number of student government election horror stories being shared across the US at the moment. (For a really interesting one check out Texas State University - https://star.txstate.edu/2018/04/the-timeline-of-connor-cleggs-administration/.)

However, until this year there was no NASPA Knowledge Community focused on student government. The newly created Student Government KC will focus on connecting individuals and providing best practices to everyone who does student government work. Believe it or not, there is not a lot of interaction between different student governments across the US. Some regional work happens in certain areas and there are a few national conferences, but these are not nearly as well-known as some of the other emphasis areas in student affairs (leadership, assessment, etc).

So what exactly is the SGKC going to be doing? Great question, thank you for asking. The regional reps will begin to collect information on as many student government advisors across their region as we can to create a database of contacts. My goal is to have a list of every student government advisor in the 4W region. We hope to then use that list to foster conversations, share best practices, and help solve problems (oh and there will be memes). Here’s the link to the fom. Please share this with your SG advisor(s) on your campus: https://goo.gl/forms/NjHJ4zHUsYfOZOR52

The SGKC will discuss and hold “hot topics” forums centered on “hot topics” in student government. We hope to establish national awards and collaborate with a few of the national conferences. Additionally, we are looking to set up benchmarking data for campuses to use. For example, how many universities have student governments involved in the approval process for student organizations? Lastly, we will begin to collect documents relating to election policies, bylaws, and constitutions then store them centrally for anyone to access.

We are excited to get started on all these new initiatives and encourage you to share this information with your student government advisors on your campus. You can follow our new KC on Facebook and Twitter @NASPASGKC. I can be reached at goersb@missouri.edu if you have any questions. Talk to you later!

I’m back. One last thing, please, please, please share this link with your SG advisors. It is our region’s form to collect contact information from any SG advisor. https://goo.gl/forms/NjHJ4zHUsYfOZOR52 Thanks! Bye for real this time.