As the summer comes to a close, Student Body President Samantha Mims revealed her five main initiatives for the upcoming year. Each project that comes out of the Executive Branch will fall under one of these five initiatives.

The five initiatives are: accessibility, health, community engagement, campus culture, and branding and marketing.

Accessibility

One of Mims main goals is to create accessibility between students and Student Government.

“Student Government needs to be more accessible. We hear that all the time,” Mims said. “[Students say] ‘We don’t know what student government is doing, we feel like we can’t talk to our representatives, we don’t know where our fees are going.’ That’s a problem.”

To tackle this communication problem, Mims plans on creating a new project called Forum Fridays. These Forum Fridays would be once a month and would be an open forum focused typically on one topic. The locations will also vary. The first three Forum Fridays dates and topics have been announced but the locations have not been revealed.

The first Forum Friday will be focused on parking. Students can talk to SG representatives about questions, concerns, and problems they have with parking on campus. This will be on Aug. 25. The second Forum Friday will be on campus environment. The scheduled date for this is Sep. 8. The third Forum Friday topic is on the Florida Student Association (FSA) agenda for the year and how it will affect UNF on Sep. 22. 

Community Engagement

One of the main projects that SG wants to continue into next year is Community Swoop. Community Swoop started at the end of the spring semester and was a program where students could get a 20 percent discount at certain businesses each week. Students had to have an SG wristband to get the discount.

Mims wants to continue the project and make it a year long discount for a variety of different businesses. Students no longer need to have an SG wristband, but they just need to show their UNF ID to the select business and they would receive a discount. The exact discount amount and locations where the discount would be viable have not been revealed yet, however last year businesses like Rebounderz, Pieology, The Loop, Bold Bean, and the Great Escape Room worked with SG.

Health

Mims would like to help students focus on their health, which includes mental, physical, and spiritual health. One main project that Mims would like to work on is partnering with the Jacksonville City Council to create a city wide mental health awareness day. This coincides with one potential initiative by the FSA where they would like to create a statewide mental health day.

Branding and Marketing

Within SG, the three agencies, Lend-a-Wing, Osprey Productions, and Club Alliance, will be undergoing rebranding. Club Alliance has already started some new changes, such as registration. Last year, Club Alliance had year long registration where clubs could register at any point in the year. This year however, clubs have to register by Sep. 21. More details on the rebranding of OP can be found here.

Campus Culture

Mims stated that she wants to promote more school spirit on campus.

“That was a big thing I heard throughout the campaign was that we don’t have school spirit,” Mims said.

No exact projects have been made public so far that could fall under this initiative.

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