Student Union has secured contracts for seven of the eight approved Trending Topics speakers, with the eighth and final speaker expected to sign a contract soon.

Trending Topics is the revamped Speaker Series, developed by former SU Vice President of Programming Bonner Williams.

While Speaker Series funding allocation would occur in the fall, Trending Topics allocation occurred last spring, which left more time, Student Union Executives believe, for speakers to sign contracts and find dates to come to Washington University that worked with their schedules.

“By pushing forward the timeline, I think the key benefit we saw was that we were able to extend contracts over the summer and offers to the managers for the speakers,” Student Union President and senior Kenneth Sng said. “As a result, I think we’re seeing a much higher acceptance rate, simply because we have such a much longer timeline to plan.”

“Last year we ran into some problems with [getting speakers to come]. Because it was a little late, we’d reach out to them and be like, ‘Can you come in October, November, like maybe January,’ and then their schedules kept filling up, so we didn’t have the speakers,” SU Vice President of Finance and senior Vikram Biswas added.

While the job of securing speakers was left up to the individual student groups who had appealed for Speaker Series funding, for Trending Topics, the process of signing contracts and choosing dates for speakers to come was left instead to Student Union, which Sng feels contributed to a higher acceptance rate for speakers.

“Now that it’s one person trying to schedule the debates, we can spread out the speakers,” Sng said.

Last spring, Treasury accepted student group appeals to bring in architect and designer of the Vietnam War Memorial Maya Lin, Vox founder and editor-in-chief Ezra Klein, lawyer and Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani, violinist and mental health advocate Vijay Gupta, motivational speaker Josh Sundquist, software freedom activist Richard Stallman, St. Louis poet laureate Michael Castro and a panel consisting of J Mase III, Katrina Goodlett and Mya Taylor, three transgender people of color.

The only speaker currently unconfirmed is Sundquist, but Josh Gruenke, assistant director for student involvement and leadership, expects Sundquist’s contract to be locked down this fall.

In addition to bringing in the speakers whose proposals were accepted last semester via the Trending Topics funding process, SU is also bringing in CNN political commentator and New York Times best-selling author Van Jones on Sept. 12.

Last year, SU Exec accepted a proposal to bring in Jones, but they were unable to work around his schedule and the University’s. Now, using carry-forward funds, they are bringing Jones in this semester.

Biswas noted that SU plans to market Jones as part of the Trending Topics series in hopes of increasing student interest in his speech.

“We carried forward those funds, and now the idea of sort of having him as part of Trending Topics is just to like generate that buzz around him now,” Biswas said. “He couldn’t be appealed for because those funds were kind of already in place, but as far as things we want to focus on and big issues for the upcoming year, Van Jones fits in perfectly with that.”