COMMITTEE REPORT
Report No. CC-08
Committee Minutes, Wednesday, April 2nd 2003
Secretary Ted Gellar submitted the following report on Thursday, April 3rd 2003, on behalf of the Campus Community Committee, and pursuant to its Wednesday, April 2nd 2003 recommendations:
There were seven (7) Members (Choe, Gellar, Callip Hall, Langdon, Marxreiter, Stephenson, Allison Watkins) present.
There was one (1) Member (Blackmon) absent.
A quorum was present.
The following officials were also present: Cox, Modeen, Zurney
The Campus Community Committee heard reports from the Directors of ReCreate State, Nightwalk, Community Service, and Feed Raleigh.
Meeting called to order at 9:30 p.m.
ReCreate State:
Jessica Modeen—Facilities does everything, you just have to advertise the day. It’s really not a lot of work. It is good to a degree, but there is no variation on it. You cannot always do more if you want to.
Dustin Choe—Were there any problems that we can address for next year?
Jennifer Zurney—Facilities does all the scheduling.
Jessica Modeen—You have to be flexible. In the fall, Crystal Young was working on publicity, but none of that worked out. If there is going to be an Executive Department for ReCreate State, it needs to be more well defined. I used some of our money to purchase paint and rulers to pain the Free Expression Tunnel. That sort of stuff can be used again and again. There was not much bad.
Jennifer Zurney—Everyone enjoyed it, everyone was excited.
Jessica Modeen—We got webspace (http://students.ncsu.edu/recreate) and advertised our website. Web development is something that the Commission could look into next year.
Nightwalk:
Jennifer Zurney—Nightwalk went off very well this year. We are in the process of doing the report. We are still evaluating clipboards. The only problem is that we had food left over. We scaled it down to thirty people, and although we had sixty to eighty people at the event, not many people came back to eat the food. Chancellor Fox came and that went really well. She wasn’t able to stay, but Dr. Stafford walked around with us. A Campus Police patrol went with us. Everyone who went with us was really great.
Dustin Choe—Nightwalk is part of Campus Police’s on campus activities.
Jennifer Zurney—We were shown maps indicating problem areas from last year so that we could evaluate achievements and progress. We did not produce t-shirts because it could not be fit in the budget. I think that the student participants who went saw that there were a lot of areas that needed protection but that there are also a lot of areas that are really safe, and that Campus Police is working hard with the students.
Allison Watkins—I participated in Nightwalk and one of the things that bothered me is that even though it is such a big event in scope, I was disappointed in the attendance.
Dustin Choe—That was the day of the Free Expression Tunnel forum and the SBP candidates’ forum in Witherspoon.
Jennifer Zurney—You can’t have it the size of Service Raleigh. There were groups of about six people: The Campus Police or other official would lead the group and the group’s clipboard would be passed around, but what tended to happen was people would talk to each other and not many people were looking out and giving suggestions. If there were more liaisons and Facilities representatives, we would have split into smaller groups.
Allison Watkins—There were some people in my group who were there because they were required to be.
Community Service:
Jennifer Zurney—We did well as a department. Everyone pulled their load, every one of the projects went well so far. What we have this year to complete are Service Raleigh (we have 2,600 volunteers), ReCreate State, and Feed Raleigh.
Feed Raleigh:
Kelley Carpenter (via electronic correspondence)—Feed Raleigh has not yet taken place for the school year. It is scheduled April 7-11. For the 2003-2004 school year, I would suggest combining Feed Raleigh with the Second Annual Beat UNC Food Drive. Instead of having two food drives within a month and a half of each other, have a large food drive in February with the intentions of beating UNC in the collection of food, all proceeds to be donated to the food bank.
Also, for next week’s food drive, please tell people to watch for an e-mail this weekend telling them how they can help with this year’s Feed Raleigh. We hope to have groups of students collect food from various apartment communities around NCSU. Also, two collection boxes will be placed on campus, most likely at Talley and Witherspoon.
Jennifer Zurney—I think we’ll get more cans donated if we make a challenge to UNC. Except for three people declined to donate went I went door-to-door, everyone was excited about competition. When working a food drive, the best amount of food for work is not putting out boxes in front of doors.
Dustin Choe—I think that one reason why Feed Raleigh is so late in the year is because you can get people to cash out on their Board Bucks. Last year, we wiped out every C-Store of their canned goods because it was in the last couple weeks of class.
Jennifer Zurney—One suggestion was to include Duke in the competition next year. I think that such a food drive would be better than any other food drive. Even though Feed Raleigh has a name, bragging rights are more effective. We are going to publicize a box near Student Government for Feed Raleigh so that students can get more familiar with the SG office and interested in Student Government.
Allison Watkins—Are you going to do the C-Store thing?
Jennifer Zurney—We can do that.
Dustin Choe—It is kind of far from the end of the semester for that.
Jennifer Zurney—We were planning on going door-to-door and asking people to announce it in their class, write it on the board, and talking to RAs. We could potentially have a drop-off in Talley.
Dustin Choe—I would suggest high-traffic areas only. Another recommendation is that at Lowe’s Foods, right before Christmas, there are baskets of pre-bagged canned foods, where you can buy it and dump it in a nearby drop box. We could take advantage of this.
Scott Stephenson—If someone wanted to collect money instead of cans, can they do that?
Jennifer Zurney—Yes. What the Food Bank said this time is, since we are not competing on poundage, we can give money to them because they get better prices on wholesale. The grocery stores in this area are not student-friendly. If we go against UNC and Duke next year, we are definitely going to get some corporate involvement.
Off Campus Governance:
Meagan Langdon—I cannot take the head of the Outer Residence Council until I step down from my Senate seat, which will happen after this meeting. Right now I sit on the Housing and Neighborhood Preservation Task Force with the City Council. Soon we will have a six-hour business meeting. I am working closely with Dr. Stafford. We say that we see each other more than we see our families. Right now I have to set up a meeting with Deb Luckadoo to discuss legality issues and I have to go over what information is given out by University Housing. The community is pissed at the University because it feels that there is no responsibility towards the students. I am working on putting together a website with lots of information, including coverage of the Noise/Party ordinance. Next year, as well as the website, I want to have an off-campus fair held in Reynolds Coliseum, including landlords and ordinance information so that students can find out about their rights and responsibilities as tenants. Even small realty companies are out to get students like sharks, so that says nothing for the big companies like the Preiss Company. Dr. Stafford and I have to work out legal issues, but right now we are working after a model from the University of Florida, which had surveys which could be filled out by residents.
Dustin Choe—The problem with surveys is that if the apartment company finds out who filled out a negative survey, then the resident could be evicted. We ran into that problem last year. An anonymous survey would ruin the credibility of the survey process.
Meeting adjourned at 10:07 p.m.