With early voting for the 2024 Student Body Election beginning today, students are getting ready to cast their ballot for the next student body president. From more dining hall space to composting, The Daily Tar Heel’s Cormac Baxter talked to UNC students about what issues they want to see the next SBP address.
Sampada Acharya, junior psychology and romance languages double major
“I’ve been seeing a lot of things lately about increasing accessibility to food and meal swipes specifically because I know a lot of people who live on campus. They can have this problem where they run out of meal swipes and then there are people who have an excess — there's this weird imbalance of people who don't need it versus people who need it. Maybe something like that where people can be ensured access to food, no matter how many meal swipes they have. I think that'd be really cool and [could] improve the physical and mental health of the student body."
Aliyah Carrion, junior media and journalism major
“Currently, I'm actually a part of student government in the environmental affairs branch and something I would really like to see us move forward with next year with a new student body president would be to redesign the current compost infrastructure on campus. Currently, most of our products are in the bottom of Lenoir and Chase, meantime, a lot of anything you get around campus is compostable materials. But, the only place you can find a compost bin is in the edible campus garden at the bottom of Lenoir — I haven't been to Chase in a couple years, but I'm pretty sure in the foyer — which to me, makes absolutely no sense. It also makes more work for the CDS employees who don't get paid enough to have to compost all our food for us when we could do it ourselves."
Fahad Aldulaimi, junior management and society and economics double major
“I think in a lot of cases after the voting period ends, a lot of the winners don't end up communicating with students as much after. I think finding a way where we kind of keep them in check. Maybe [they can] communicate what they’ve done or they could update us, on social media or in a monthly newsletter or some report, that is important because in that way we get to hold them accountable to what they’ve done."
Pascale Paul, junior chemistry and neuroscience double major
“One thing that I think could be a good idea is, I know a lot of the student body presidents are outlining exactly what they want done. It's kind of similar to [Aldulaimi's] answer, but essentially just, over the course of their reign, they can show exactly what they're making progress on as time goes on, keeping up with the students and showing, 'This is what I had in my earlier campaign, and this is what I'm working on now' essentially.”
