The SGA held a meeting Tuesday in the Ferguson Theater to discuss upcoming events and hear a message from the SGA president.
SGA President James Fowler showed a video featuring such phrases as “I Have A Dream” and “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” to motivate SGA officials to become leaders.
“It is important that we are leaders on campus, and although it is not always easy, we have to reach out to members of the campus in hopes of unifying our campus as a whole,” he said.
Over the past month, the SGA’s initiatives have included student organization seating, the High Tide Club, Bama Laundry and the Big Al Committee. They have also hosted a gubernatorial debate and voter registration drives and offered free textbooks to students.
The SGA’s student organization seating initiative worked to include Alpha Phi Alpha, a traditionally African-American fraternity on campus.
“We heard about the opportunity at the beginning of the school year and how the SGA was pushing for all organizations to participate,” said Thomas Walker, president of Alpha Phi Alpha.
“The impact of this has been great and the SGA has been really receptive,” he said. “Hopefully it is the first step that will motivate other organizations to join in making change and continuing to unify our campus.”
Some of the upcoming events under the vice president of external affairs office include continuing voter registration, hosting a social among students from Tennessee and Texas to watch the Titans and Cowboys game on Oct. 10, the Women’s Political Initiative and the Campus Radio Loop.
SGA’s most recent initiative is allowing the use of Crimson Calendar and Crimson Docs through the Crimson Mail system.
“Crimson Calendar (similar to Google Calendar) is a way for organizations to better communicate with their members about events and share their update calendars instantly with members,” said Ryan Flamerich, a senator from the college of engineering.”
This effort was done in conjunction with the Office of Information Technology to help organizations communicate with members and enable students to share calendars with other students.
“This project launched also includes Crimson Docs (similar to Google Docs) that is a free office suite that includes Word, Excel and a presentation software that students can use for collaborative efforts,” Flamerich said.
The next step in this project is to have the program fully linked into MyBama, so when a student drops or adds a class it will show up on their calendar.
“Some of the upcoming projects that we want the student body to know about are the Ride with the Tide effort that will allow students to ride on a bus to the LSU game, and to pay close attention to the voter registration tables that will be set up across campus,” Fowler said.
The tickets for Ride with the Tide are $45 and will be available beginning Sept. 27. There are also group tickets available. More details can be found at sga.ua.edu.
