The SGA Senate renewed the textbook donation drive, approved a textile donation week, and advanced a bill regarding lactation rooms and maternal facilities to the Student Affairs Committee for review Thursday.
At the beginning of the session, Kylie Buchanan, vice president of campus relations for the University of Alabama Medicine and Community, said the group will host a DKMS donor drive March 18-20 outside Fresh Foods. She said the goal of the drive is to encourage students to fill out personal information to register with the National Bone Marrow Registry to potentially match students with people in need.
“It’s so rare, but so important if you want to have a chance to save someone’s life,” Buchanan said, asking the members of the Senate to spread information about the upcoming event.
The Senate also passed a resolution authored by Bailey Berry, a senator for the College of Engineering, and Kennedy Jones, a senator for the College of Arts and Sciences, to make the textbook donation drive tested last semester a recurring event. The drive occurred through dead week and finals week of the fall semester and allowed students to turn in their textbooks and returnable materials to be sold to different students at a discount.
“We got a lot of textbooks,” Berry said about the previous drive. “This is just to make the drive a recurring thing to happen every dead week and finals week. It’s going to contribute to its own section in the local library and SGA office.”
The “Textiles for Tide” event was also approved by the Senate after a period of review. The legislation — authored by Hannon Bulger, senator for the College of Human Environmental Sciences, and Brooke Romanowsky, senator for Arts and Sciences — is intended to provide student fashion designers at the University with a greater supply of textiles and fabrics. The event will last an entire week, but no date has been announced yet.
A bill was introduced to the Senate that would support the improvement of maternal care facilities in University buildings. Authored by Vamsi Krishna Undavalli, senator for the graduate school, the bill’s passage would be an SGA endorsement of improving the state of maternal care resources on campus. The endorsement would be an official support for the improvements, and SGA would not be involved with the actual renovations or designing.
“When a pregnant person or parents with children are really visible on campus, it creates an unwelcoming environment that suggests parenthood and academic pursuits cannot coexist,” Undavalli said, citing the importance of proper care for these resources to help.
Undavalli said he hopes to establish a universal standard for these rooms across campus, as while some facilities are satisfactory, other buildings do not fulfill the needs of a parent.
