The Undergraduate Council of Students elected William Borges ’24 to be the first-year representative on the Undergraduate Finance Board after hearing speeches from four first-years at its general body meeting Wednesday evening.
Borges ran against contenders David Chu ’24, Octavia Rowe ’24 and Emily Ye ’24. Each candidate was given up to three minutes to speak, as well as additional time to answer questions.
Before their speeches, UFB Chair Akilesh Raman ’22 gave a brief introduction about the Board and answered questions from first-years.
“UFB is comprised of two parts: The first is the day-to-day aspect of the job where you are managing student finances and going through budgets that student groups present. The second part is working with UCS on new initiatives,” Raman said.
In his speech, Borges shared his experience working as a representative on the UCS Student Activities Committee. As the representative for academic and pre-professional groups, Borges’s role was to meet with those groups to help them navigate applications for re-categorization by UFB.
Borges noted that he hopes to work on UFB so that he can help clubs with the financial side of the Board’s activities rather than the categorization one. “I do want to make an impact on student activities, and I think that UFB, where the money is, is actually a very material way of making that impact,” Borges said.
A specific initiative Borges hopes to work on is the UCS-UFB pilot start-up fund, under which Category I student groups may request up to $100 in additional funding. “A lot of Category I groups have difficulty navigating funding, and I think that bolstering the amount of funding they can have access to in some sort of way would yield (a) more positive impact for these” groups, Borges said.
The Council also passed a motion Wednesday to establish special rules of virtual procedure. The resolution to establish these procedures was introduced due to concerns about behavior during virtual meetings, The Herald previously reported.
A special rule must pass a two-thirds majority vote, after which it must pass another vote with a two-thirds majority to be formally implemented. Wednesday’s meeting marked the first time UCS has voted on a special rule since 2013, Parliamentarian Zanagee Artis ’22 said.
The purpose of making the virtual procedures a special rule is to ensure that the Council has a set of guidelines it can follow in the future in case the need for virtual meetings arises again, Chair of Campus Life Zane Ruzicka ’23 said.
After voting to pass the motion, UCS also voted to enact the special rule.
The rules of procedure include establishing a public form where students will be able to submit comments relevant to agenda items, requiring participants use Zoom’s raise hand feature and limiting comments in the Zoom chat box.
The rules “come from an attempt to try to create more clarity and order within UCS general body meetings,” Ruzicka said.
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