GSA Meeting 7/16/2007

Community Service 8/6/2007

Nobody responded to initial listserv posting.

Need to make posters.

Dinner/dance volunteer at the Ritz downtown (December) must be over 21

Additional events throughout the winter/spring

Social Event 8/1/2007 (Wed)

Need to advertise

Jenn made poster (1/4 sheets) need to make big sheet and distribute

Volunteers: Ruth, Becky, Matt

Movie starts around 9 (sunset), we'll start at 8:30

Drinks and desserts

Community building grant - hopefully will find out very soon.

Budget

Need to do at some point due in September

Need to know if we got the community building grant

Megan will email Penny again about when we find out

Start a document on Google - add budget items that you want

Megan will send Harold the old budget files

Need to update the past quarter's worth of expenditures

We have around $600-$700 plus Chris Johnson still owes ~$300 for pizza

$150 for the summer social

Logo

Picked a new logo

Megan emailed about getting the high res version

Website

Matt has made some changes - purple now

Not online yet

Advocacy

Megan and Kate met with Mary - pregnant student to talk about her rights

RTVF graduate student rep - we are going to meet with him

Child-birth leave policy for TAs

New policy - still some things to be worked out

Housing

Harold is going to meet with assistant director of food and housing on Wednesday (11:00am)

Talk about what we would like to see on the webpage

Should outside landlords have to pay a nominal fee?

Reviews of landlords - people could post own experiences with rental companies

Grad Student Rights

4-5 Grad student bills of rights - compiled into one list

Currently our rights revolve around very general rights e.g. "assembly"

Student-University relations

Other bills of rights also include student-department (funding), student-advisor (right to refuse unreasonable requests), etc

Right to enforcement - how the university enforces it is up to them

Document that the University acknowledges so that we have something to point to

Santa Barbara, Colorado U, Journal Article, Arizona State (first page of Google)

Great thing for us to work on this year

Find a couple from the COFHE schools http://web.mit.edu/cofhe/

Condense into spreadsheet - list right and which schools have it

Outline of the top x number of things we want included

Deadline the board of trustees meeting in December

GSA/GLC Structure

GSA does a little more on the social organizing side

GLC supposedly does more on advocacy

Kind of interchangeable from the administration's point of view

GLC leaders from various graduate student associations

Neither organization really has enough people to have committees

Where is the power structure? What are the responsibilities?

If we get department reps - where do they fit in?

A lot of this is coming from dealing with Ashi

Is there someone in the administration that we can talk to about this?

Ombudsman

Faculty are getting a trial ombudsmen

Don't know exactly what for

We should keep tabs on how it works out - if they have one, why shouldn't we?