After a unanimous vote, Watts College senator Nora Thompson was elected as the president of Undergraduate Student Government Downtown for the 2020-2021 school year. The election also determined Monica Medina for vice president of services and Renuka Vemuri for vice president of policy.
The ticket ran unopposed for executive office with a platform of health and wellness, engagement and inclusivity.
The ticket’s inclusivity platform focused on housing, making sure that students who attend classes on the Downtown Phoenix campus are also able to live in the area, participate in events and get to class easily.
“We are hoping that we can be a presence at city council meetings to ensure students have affordable housing,” Thompson said, the ticket’s president and a junior studying public service and public policy.
Thompson said the sole residence hall on the Downtown Phoenix campus was Taylor Place, with a new dorm currently under construction for the campus. But until that dorm is ready, the rent prices at nearby apartment buildings were too high for students, making it more difficult for them to interact with events on-campus.
According to the campaign website, ASU Downtown is growing and looking to add 1,000 new students by 2021. Thompson will continue to push for affordable housing with the Phoenix City Council in order to ensure that students are able to live and fully engage with the downtown community.
Student and club engagement will also be a huge focus for the executive ticket, especially in the upcoming 2020-21 school year, providing more insight, visibility and resources for students across the downtown campus.
“There are seven coalitions here at ASU, we are lucky enough to be members of five of them,” said Medina, the ticket’s vice president and junior studying health science with a concentration in health law and regulation and a minor in history. “We are really trying to strive for more partnerships and working together more with these coalitions to bring everyone together.”
The three officers agree that student engagements are crucial to not only for the Tempe campus but at Downtown as well. They partnered with and were sponsored by various coalitions like the Black African coalition, Hispanic coalition and LGBTQ+ coalitions to unite for events such as pride week and month, Hispanic heritage and Black heritage months.
“We really want to work with the coalitions because they know more about their group of people and their partnerships with other clubs,” Medina said. “We can use them as resources to help better the community aspect of the downtown campus to make it feel more inclusive and welcoming to all walks of life.”
When it came to health and wellness, all three shared the same advocacy for the platform with an immersive focus on expanding more dining options and creating a sexual health pharmacy.
The sexual health pharmacy was developed from a concept from the student government at U of A they call “feminist pharmacy,” but the ticket wanted to make sure everyone could have access to proper sexual health.
“We wanted to implement that here, because for one thing students definitely need more access to contraceptives and things like that,” Thompson said. “We thought that a great idea would be to bring it into our office so that students could discreetly get dental dams, condoms, contraceptives. We are really, really gonna push for getting plan B into it as well.”
Vemuri, the current USGD vice president of policy and sophomore studying medical studies, said that finding food on campus for students with special diets and allergies was difficult. She said with the meal plans students have, sometimes the only option is the dining hall, which might not suit the students’ dietary needs.
Repetition of eateries also gets stale and boring, sometimes creating bad eating habits.
Vemuri worked with the rest of the senate and Bowl of Greens Fine Salads to make sure students could use Maroon & Gold Dollars, ASU’s student currency, at the restaurant when she was a senator.
Thompson said the process for more restaurants accepting M&G dollars would be difficult but is passionate about finding a way to make it happen.
“I definitely want to reach out to as many places near and on campus to see if there’s a way that we can get them to accept maroon & gold dollars because that will just provide so many more options for students to eat, so that is my goal,” she said.
Vemuri said that students need to take advantage of resources available to them on campus in regards to the dining hall, food allergens and food choices like campus dish. She also said that each dining hall has an “allergen captain” to help explain various common food allergens for any student with food restrictions so they can clarify what they could eat.
With the semester nearing an end and results in place, all three are gearing up for the 2020-2021 school year. Equally sharing a common goal to incite more inclusivity, provide more resources for students, collaborate with various student organizations & clubs and to overall be a great team for the downtown campus.
“A big goal of ours is just to do a good job and to do right by our students, making sure that we always keep them in mind when we make decisions and we make decisions that are student focused,” she said.
Contact the reporter at acdelgad@asu.edu.
Editor’s Note: Nora Thompson has previously written for Downtown Devil. She did not contribute to the writing or editing of this article.
