LSU Student Government’s executive board is continuing work on the Multicultural Leadership Coalition, which began its revival last semester with the help of former SG president Zack Faircloth and former SG director of policy Monturios Howard.
SG president Jason Badeaux, along with SG director of student diversity Alex Robertson and one of SG’s director of policy, have began to gather organizations that qualify to be a part of the MLC.
The purpose of the MLC is to discuss issues the panel’s communities are facing as well as initiatives that SG can assist with to improve their student experience, Badeaux said.
“Right now, we’re compiling a list of all the organizations that would qualify to fit as a multicultural organization,” Badeaux said. “From there, we’ll have one to two representatives from each organization to sit on a panel.”
Badeaux said this panel is slated to meet every other week, and, as with all SG meetings, is open to the public. This means that any member of the community, including students not selected to be a part of the panel from their respective organization, can still attend and input at the meetings.
“We’ll have [Robertson] as well as one of our directors of policy, who are our initiative people, so that they can take the suggestions and ideas that [the MLC brings] and put them into an action plan,” Badeaux said.
The MLC faced issues with diminishing participation. To counteract this, Badeaux said Robertson plans to make the MLC more initiative-based while also being a place where member organizations can meet with one another on a social level.
The idea to make the MLC more initiative-driven, thus retaining participation from member organizations, came out of a partnership between Badeaux and Howard, who has assisted Badeaux in revising the structure of the MLC.
“[Robertson is] looking at having an organization host it every week,” Badeaux said. “They would maybe bring dinner … to bring for the meeting, so it would give them an outlet to meet other people as well as bring initiatives and ideas for Student Government to work on.”
Last year, Faircloth and Robertson worked on compiling a database of faculty interested in sponsoring a multicultural organization, in an effort to assist organizations should they lose their faculty sponsor or students who wanted to begin a new one.
While the database never officially got launched, Badeaux said work has began to revive this effort and expand it to all organizations on campus.
Currently, SG is in the recruitment process to find faculty interested in sponsoring a student organization. All student organizations must have a faculty adviser to be created.
“It [will] be on the Student Government website,” Badeaux said. “We could work with some other departments on campus to include [them.]”
