Hey Colby! We, Laura Maloney and Justin Rouse, are running to be your Student Government Association (SGA) Co-Presidents! Co-Presidents? Yes! We have decided that as equal partners, we will most effectively serve you. With our leadership experience and involvement on campus, we are the best ticket to represent you! 

For the past three years, we have dedicated our time to the SGA, consistently working on initiatives to improve student life on campus. 

Justin served as 2012 class president for two years and as publicity chair this year. He has focused on improving the accountability of SGA by creating the bulletin board and increasing the accountability of dorm presidents. He has co-chaired the Housing and Facilities Advisory Committee (HFAC), initiating block housing and relaxing senior quotas. 

This year, Justin got every student Mid-Maine Chamber of Commerce cards, which gives students access to discounts at places like the Purple Cow and Mainely Brews. In addition to his involvement in SGA, he is a cross country and track athlete and has served in the Goldfarb Center.

Laura has served as 2012 class president for the past two years. Last year, she was one of three students to serve on the hard Alcohol Policy Conference Committee. She worked with the administration to secure concessions from them such as lighter punishments and consideration for medical cases. 

This year she served on the Committee on Race and Racism, where she worked to increase student activism and to air student grievances about the sudden departure of the assistant dean of students and director of the Pugh Center. Laura also initiated the expansion of the “popular release” DVD collection in Miller Library this fall.

We have both sat through hundreds of meetings and have read thousands of emails, and we know what it takes to actually get things done at Colby. We have built relationships with the administration and we feel comfortable disagreeing with them and asserting student concerns. The Colby bureaucracy is hard to navigate, but we both have the experience and have gotten the results to demonstrate that we will be successful advocates for students next year. 

If elected, we pledge to focus on the issues students truly care about. We will constantly reach out to the student body because, after all, SGA is here for you. Through frequent surveys and a higher standard of accountability and communication for Dorm and Class Presidents, we will ensure that our priorities are your priorities. We also have identified several issues that we would specifically like to work on as well.

We will evaluate the hard alcohol policy by eliciting student opinions and personal experiences in order to assess whether or not the policy has been successful. We value the importance of a safe drinking culture on campus, and we want to make sure that the policies of the administration do, in fact, effectively assist our campus in achieving this goal.

Since student welfare is our top priority, we want every student to feel comfortable and safe here at Colby. Therefore, we will continue to push for more institutional support for multicultural programming and student assistance. Through collaboration with the Pugh Community Board (PCB) and Tashia Bradley, the new associate dean of students and director of the Pugh Center, we will ensure that SGA does everything possible to support student initiatives and activism. 

This year, SGA helped create Colby’s first ever student gender and sexual diversity resource officer. We will work with Berol Dewdney, the current officer, to enhance its effectiveness, and hopefully expand the program to address other aspects of diversity on this campus.

We both see a great potential for improving Colby’s school spirit. This fall, Laura and Justin helped plan the senior-junior tailgate before the Middlebury football game. We pledge to support more pre-game festivities for all sports teams at home games. We also want to follow this year’s initiatives and expand funding for fan buses to away games.

Finally, we want to work on improving Colby-Waterville relations. We want to enhance publicity and student participation in Hill n’ the Ville, the music festival that takes place in September. We also want to get student members on the board for the non-profit Waterville Main Street. Finally, we will make it a priority to support existing programs and new initiatives that engage students in the community.

We both sincerely love Colby. We truly want nothing more but to spend our senior year working to empower students to get involved on campus. If elected, we guarantee to work constantly for you. Vote Laura and Justin for your SGA Co-Presidents! 

Your SGA, Your Colby.