Student Council announced yesterday that Environmental Sensitivity and Sustainability will be the focus of next year’s University Unity Project. The focus was selected via a University-wide poll held last week.
Environmental Sensitivity and Sustainability, which beat out Socioeconomic Diversity, International Engagement and Connections and The Arts, received 38.4 percent of first preference votes, Council President John Nelson said, adding that the University Board of Elections tabulated 645 individual voters. Socioeconomic Diversity, The Arts, and International Engagement and Connections secured 21.6, 21.1 and 18.8 percent of first preference votes, respectively, Nelson said.
The Unity Project represents Council’s over-arching goal of unifying the University community behind a common cause through various projects and initiatives established under a specific theme chosen by University students.
Outgoing Unity Chair Rob Atkinson noted that he hopes the new theme will establish a broader focus for both Council and the greater University, encouraging student groups who do not normally work closely with Student Council to rally behind a cause.
“We’ve been able to work with other student groups to create a tradition of having students be more involved and finding new ways for them to contribute this year from an environmental stand point,” he said.
Nelson added that Council will be active in soliciting support and involvement from other groups and individuals on Grounds for the upcoming selection of the next Unity Project chair, who will replace Atkinson.
“The first step is to really advertise the Project and take advantage of the CIO ListServ and gauge which CIOs are interested in [the Project] and put together a meeting where reps from different organizations can make a collective effort ... to set the dates and timeline for the selection process,” Nelson said. “It will be the decision of that collective body.”
Atkinson noted that during the past year, he felt that the Unity Project was most successful in working with CIOs and CIO leadership.
“One thing we’d like to improve is to do more student-wide events rather than through student organizations so students can have more of a connection with the Unity Project and the University,” Atkinson said.
Nelson also noted that although environmental sustainability will be the focus of the Unity Project, Council also will work to address the other proposed themes.
“It certainly doesn’t mean that it’s going to take away our focus from any of the other important issues,” Nelson said. “The idea of the Unity Project is ... bringing together a lot of groups and evolving the idea to make it an appropriate and tangible project where we can achieve goals ... with a real united process and collective effort.”
Atkinson noted that he believes the publicity for Council’s Unity Project referendum vote was successful because the poll received a broad distribution of votes across all student years.
“Obviously we knew turnout would be lower than there would’ve been if we were able to conduct the survey through the regular election process,” Atkinson said. “We were realistic about doing it as an unofficial election, but we were able to publicize enough to get a meaningful mandate.
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