News
Newly-elected SU leadership outlines budget and advocacy goals

Student Union Senators discuss issues affecting students at a Fall 2024 meeting. (Anna Calvo | Staff Photographer)
Student Union’s (SU) Senate and Treasury leadership for this calendar year were elected in an internal election on Dec. 4. Student Life spoke to the Senate and Treasury’s eight new leaders to hear about their goals for the semester, with many members focusing on changing the budgeting, appeals, and correspondence procedure and addressing student concerns regarding academic resource accessibility, alcohol and substance abuse awareness, student health, and relationships with University leadership.
Treasury
Junior Aryan Pradhan, the newly-elected Speaker of Treasury now in his second year in Treasury, hopes to maintain strong funding for culture groups on campus.
“Cultural groups are now our second most funded organization group and I want to continue that trend [of] giving more funding to culture groups [and] affinity groups because they serve the widest body of populations,” Pradhan said.
Pradhan also plans to expedite the appeals process. Appeals occur when Treasury allocates funds to SU-recognized Category I groups for unexpected expenses, and the process has historically required clubs to meet with a Treasury Representative to undergo a 10 to 16 day-long process of discussing budget needs.
Pradhan said the long turnaround time for appeals has created scheduling issues, for sports clubs in particular.
“We have run into issues this past semester with especially sports clubs where they want to go to Nationals, but they don’t know if they’ll qualify until a week before, but they’re appealing to Treasury three weeks in advance,” Pradhan said.
In the past, clubs have used “placeholder submissions” to avoid this issue, by listing events or programming in their yearly allocated budgets even though they might not happen, in part because of long wait times.
This upcoming semester, Treasury appeals will use a more comprehensive form initially instead of having Treasury Representatives meet with clubs, which will reduce the turnover to just two days, according to Pradhan.
Annual budgets that list events that might not happen lead to more money being allocated than a club is using, which some SU leadership said was the cause of this year’s diminishing appeals budget.
Retrieving this money can take months, as Treasury has to wait until after the scheduled date of the event to recoup the funds.
“We just had our retrievals come back, and we retrieved about $100,000 which is honestly less than I was hoping for; that may not last us until the end of the year,” Pradhan said. “We will continue to do more retrievals, which will help replenish the appeals pot.”
Sophomore Katie Cho, who is in her second term as Budget Committee Chair, aims to remove placeholder submissions in clubs’ budgets to prevent overallocation in the future now that appeal turnarounds will decrease.
“If the student group is unaware of these costs, please do not request these items during the budget cycle, but rather submit an appeal in the following academic year,” Cho wrote in SU’s Budget Allocation Manual for the 2026 fiscal year.
Sophomore and newly-elected Activities Committee Chair Varun Vadhera plans to take an inventory of items in SU storage and share those items amongst clubs on campus, which he hopes will help decrease Treasury’s expenses. He said this system will also benefit clubs as it will decrease waiting times for clubs to get the resources they need.
“Without having to submit an appeal under $1,000 to [the Vice President of Finance] and wait for a week to get approved and shipped, they can just check out [what we already have],” Vadhera said.
Vadhera said this is a long-term project and it will take time for SU to get to the point of checking items out of SU storage to clubs.
Senate
Junior Omar Abdelmoity, who is now in his second term as Academic Affairs Committee Chair, said the goal of Senate leadership this year is to pursue viable projects to help create tangible change that students want.
“[Think] of it almost as an inverted pyramid, with the Senate leadership and senators being at the very bottom and the student body being at the top, and so [we’re] really trying to listen more to what students want from us in terms of the projects we push forward,” Abdelmoity said.
Abdelmoity plans to follow up on two resolutions his committee passed in Senate last semester: pushing back the Add/Drop deadline by two weeks and creating a reservation system through Olin Library so students can get free access to course resources. Abdelmoity said he has had productive conversations with WashU administrators about these two projects and hopes they will be in effect soon.
Sophomore and Campus and Residential Experience Committee Chair Maya Santhanam is focused on increasing University transparency. Santhanam said she was concerned by the lack of University communication during the bomb threat last year and plans to meet with administrators to improve transparency with students during emergency situations going forward.
Santhanam said her primary goal is to give senators in her committee the space to create their own projects.
“I really don’t want to dictate the vision,” Santhanam said. “I came into Senate with so many ideas and so many things that were bothering me that I wanted to tackle, and I just think that conversations [with senators in my committee] [are] going to yield a lot of great results.”
Santhanam said she wants to focus on making senators feel heard as individuals in light of previous reports from senators calling Senate’s culture toxic.
“[Senate is] not [about] making our minds up without hearing the other side. It’s not to vote based on just opinion. It’s to vote based on the facts at hand. It’s to vote based on the evidence that we have, to treat each other like real people,” Santhanam said.
First-year and Health and Wellness Committee Chair Asher Lubin wants to create a space where senators feel comfortable, which he believes will lead to more productivity in Senate.
“Making sure that I can facilitate a place where people are excited to come to and where they’re passionate to be, I think, is how real work gets done,” Lubin said.
Lubin plans to focus on substance and alcohol abuse awareness on campus.
“I feel like I have seen [during] my time at WashU, and just overall in life, just too many incidents of sad outcomes that could have been changed or hopefully affected in a better way,” Lubin said.
Lubin along with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee Chair Saara Engineer both aim to increase period product accessibility on campus in their upcoming terms. Engineer, who is a sophomore, also wants to advocate for a Native Studies and Indigenous Department, expand staffing and programming through the Relationship & Sexual Violence Prevention Center, restructure mental health crisis responses on campus, and encourage WashU to pay Payment in Lieu of Taxes.
Engineer hopes that, while Senate promotes a positive culture, it doesn’t lose sight of the importance of having tough conversations.
“Avoiding uncomfortable discussions for fear of conflict undermines the very purpose of our work — these conversations are difficult because they matter,” Engineer said.
Junior and Speaker of Senate Beni Bisimwa said his goal for this semester is for senators to overcome their differences to serve the student body. Part of Bisimwa’s effort to foster respect and positive relationships in Senate includes a community agreement that he worked on alongside the Senate committee chairs and Director of the Office for Religious, Spiritual, & Ethical Life the Rev. Callista Isabelle.
“We want to make sure that [the agreement] is a living document and so we’re gonna work on the new class of Senators inputting their thoughts into it,” Bisimwa said.
Bisimwa said another key goal of his term is to improve Senate relationships with University leadership as it impacts Senate’s ability to forward change on campus. Now, only committee chairs and the Speaker of Senate can correspond with University leadership. Bisimwa said this step is to ensure Senate is on the same page in future endeavors involving University leadership.
Bisimwa hopes that in his new role as Speaker of Senate he can elevate the voices of senators and help them pursue action and advocacy that can better WashU.
“My word for this semester is going to be ‘empowerment,’ because as a speaker, I’m here to empower others,” Bisimwa said. “[As senators] we all joined SU for a reason. We all have goals and aspirations. We will have the vision of what WashU should be. We’ll have a vision of how WashU should serve its students.”