MISSION TO INCREASE ATTENDANCE

For years, there has been an issue with attendance at student government meetings. For my practicum, I set out to understand why that was and how to solve the problem. My leadership role in this project was being the Vice President of Hobart Student Government. I first conducted a survey of students who used to go to meetings and then stopped. The consensus from them was they stopped coming because they only saw people ask for money and gained no information. 

In an effort to change this, several steps were taken

• Have club status and club funding requests every other week

• Have committee representatives report their status and listen to student complaints 

• Bring different speakers from across campus to address questions

Some of the speakers that came to student government included

• Lynn Pelky, General Manager of Sodexo at HWS

• Martin Corbett, Director of Campus Safety

• Tremayne D. Robertson, Deputy Title IX Coordinator

• Katie Stiffler, Prevention and Education Coordinator

I found a correlation between attendance when there was a speaker brought to student government. In the chart below, the red lines show when a speaker was at a student government meeting. As shown in the chart, attendance was increased during meetings with a speaker. ​

Bringing speakers to student government will continue for next semester and hopefully attendance will continue to rise.