The executive committee of the Student Activities Council elected College junior Natalie Vernon as its new chairwoman last week. Vernon will replace former SAC chairman Eric Van Nostrand, a Wharton and Engineering senior.
Vernon and Van Nostrand sat down with the DP yesterday to talk about SAC's successes from this year and goals for next year.
The Daily Pennsylvanian: For those who aren't familiar, what does SAC do on campus?
Natalie Vernon: SAC is the Student Activities Council, and it represents over 200 student groups. It provides funding and resources for all the student groups and it also serves as a liaison between student groups and the University at large, whether that be other student government branches or other administrators.
DP: How and when did you get involved with SAC?
NV: I was first elected last February. I am [also] the treasurer of the parliamentary debate team, and you have to be a member of a student group to be elected [to SAC's executive board].
DP: What are some of your goals for this year?
NV: [Van Nostrand has] done a really good job working on a lot of the big picture things last year . I'm going to be concerned with [asking], how can we better serve student groups? How can our liaisons be more helpful? How can we make funding decisions fair and equitable? What kind of customer services-type initiatives can we add? . We really want to look into what groups need and how we can better provide those needs.
[Finding out whether SAC can fund political groups] is definitely a top priority of ours. We have made a lot of progress drafting guidelines and talking with the political groups on campus to get their input.
DP: Is there one thing in particular that you are excited for with SAC this coming term?
NV: I'm really excited to reach out to work more closely with other student government groups on campus, like the [Undergraduate Assembly]. The political funding source discussion initiated in that body and it kind of took a while for it to come over to SAC before it was done.
DP: What do you think SAC's greatest accomplishment of the year was?
Eric Van Nostrand: The major directional change that we took a year ago was to shift SAC's focus away from just the funding, just the budgeting.
We wanted to do more projects that really made things better for student groups, like reforming the funding guidelines. . In addition, last year we started the Spring Activities Fair, which was the first SAC-hosted event. The turnout for that event and the enthusiasm surrounding it blew us away.
