Last semester, LSU Student Government launched an initiative known as the Multicultural Leadership Coalition in an effort to hear more diversified voices from around campus. Throughout the spring semester, participation in the initiative has vastly diminished.
SG director of policy Monturios Howard leads the initiative, with initial help from SG president Zack Faircloth during the development stages.
“For me … the Alton Sterling thing was a big deal,” Howard said. “Not just for the black students, but for a lot of students who had to come back and deal with it on either side. You had that and the floods. So you had a lot of people affected by different things.”
Most of the legwork began long before the Alton Sterling shooting, with that specific event expediting the timeline on the launch of the Coalition. The current SG board identified the sentiments of many students, noting that many felt SG looked very “white,” and other minorities did not feel included, Howard said.
This observation prompted SG to create the MLC, allowing those minorities to not only have a voice, but to affect change in SG.
“That was our way of trying to invite everybody to the table … because to lead is to listen,” Howard said. “There’s no way I can tell you how a Muslim student feels or how an LGBTQ student feels or a Hispanic student, because I’m not them. The only we can get their message and push their message forward is to listen to what they have to say.”
The plan for MLC was to invite representatives from various minority groups around campus to voice issues and come up with solutions.
Howard said SG used a targeted and focused process to identify the leaders of all the minority student organizations on campus and reach out to them.
The president and vice president of every minority group SG “knew” was important to the University received an invitation to be a part of the Coalition, he said.
“Our first meeting, we had 13 people there of the 22 we invited,” Howard said. “Now we might get five.”
As the leader of the MLC, Howard now finds himself looking for ways to reinvent the Coalition and make it more exciting to retain an active membership base.
One of the ways Howard aims to accomplish this is by appointing leaders, or “liaisons,” of the specific groups invited to the MLC. These appointed liaisons would have the responsibility to participate in the MLC as opposed to the MLC continuously trying to recruit and retain members.
“Most [of the students in the MLC] have nothing to do with Student Government, they’re simply students that represent a certain area of campus that we feel like is underrepresented,” Howard said. “Disabilities, athletes, Hispanics, Muslim, LGBTQ, black groups … that’s the beauty of it, they don’t have a Student Government agenda.”
