Student Union President Tyrin Truong created three task forces by passing three executive orders Monday.

The first task force will focus on restructuring SU’s current bureaucracy to streamline processes and encourage student engagement; the second re-establishes the constitutional task force; and the third will investigate the experiences of affinity and cultural groups with financial leadership.

Courtesy of Beth Wiesinger

SU President Tyrin Truong signing three executive orders Monday.

“We discussed it as an exec board, and we thought that releasing all three at the same time would have the most impact and garner the most excitement moving forward,” Truong said.

Truong will chair the task force focused on restructuring. This goal was a key part of Truong’s campaign when he ran for president.

“Two of those task forces directly address two things I ran on: fixing the Student Union financial policies and restructuring Student Union to make it more accountable and transparent to students,” Truong said. “I think the finished products that come from these task forces will accomplish those goals.”

Vice president of finance and sophomore Ariel Ashie will chair the task force to investigate the financial experiences of cultural and affinity groups. According to Truong, the task force will work to collect data on the history of cultural and affinity group funding.

“[The task force will] collect hard data to prove our argument going forward that Student Union has been failing our marginalized student groups,” Truong said. “Currently, there’s a lot of complaints around the student body that cultural groups are consistently underfunded. We didn’t want to go into that with an opinion—we wanted the hard data to back it up. That task force is there to collect all that data.”

Truong explained that because there was a previous constitutional council, they decided to “relegate them to a sub-committee so they could finish the rest of their work.”

“Every year, each exec board chooses what they want to do with the constitutional task force, and it’s used to revise the constitution,” Truong said. “Our exec board, the fifty-third exec board, decided that we wanted it to take a more hands-on approach in regards to how to make Student Union more equitable.”

The constitutional task force will be co-chaired by Truong and the vice president of administration, sophomore Nia Plump. According to Plump, the task force will work “hand in hand” with the restructuring task force.

“The constitutional task force will pretty much be writing the legislation that reflects the ideas or projects that will come out of the [restructuring] task force,” Plump said. “So, they kind of work hand in hand in that way.”

Additionally, Plump said the task force will address an audit that compares the structure of Student Union against other peer institutions.

“Right now, a lot of the focus has been on an audit, like a governance audit that was actually done by administration just comparing peer institutions to our student government and making suggestions accordingly,” Plump said.

The task force will also work on ensuring the language of the constitution is correct and updated. Plump said they will also remove rules that no longer apply to SU.

“I think [the constitution] says something like the president of SU should sit on this committee that has to do with the neighborhood of Clayton,” Plump said. “Theoretically and hypothetically, it would be awesome, but also we don’t want to make it contingent on a president’s role or make it a mandatory thing that they have to do in order to be president. I don’t want to speak on behalf of the task force because we’re joining them rather than the other way around…but the president’s role should be to the student body first and foremost.”

Ashie was not available for comment at the time of publication.