The Associated Students of Laney College are headed off Laney College’s campus at Sept. 25’s meeting, five of the ASLC members made plans for the group’s travel to an upcoming conference, while also looking ahead to their winter retreat.
The conference and its particulars dominated the first half of the meeting, including discussion of lodging, transportation, and food. The ASLC will be attending the Northwest Permaculture Convergence Conference — which charges $150 per student, plus $100 per person for food — in hopes of bringing back sustainability-related ideas and plans to implement at Laney.
“It’s about creating ecosystems, and creating the human ecosystem that lives in harmony with the Earth, and regenerating what we consider our society and our living spaces and human spaces,” ASLC Internal Secretary Katrina Totten said.
“What’s the plan for directly applying that knowledge to campus?” Club Affairs Officer Jillian Mosley asked. “How would you dispense that information to the rest of us?”
“Everybody’s who interested going is also committing to sustainability efforts… so they’d come up with a focus that they really matters to them already,” Totten said. Totten explained that attendees would then come back with formal reports and outlines of how to implement these things.
The group also discussed the ASLC winter retreat to take place from Dec. 18 to 20. President Jon-Mychal Cox announced that he’d booked the lodging for the retreat before the meeting. He charged Senator Nona Claypool with drawing up a budget for the retreat by the next meeting.
Next, the ASLC approved the appointment of an IT specialist, a Laney student majoring in Computer Science. Although the exact details of the position’s roles and responsibilities weren’t clearly articulated at the meeting, the group votes unanimously to approve his appointment.
The motivation behind the hiring is an initiative that includes allowing students to pay the ASLC $22 a year to host digital content, like personal websites, on an ASLC-built server. Cox put a price tag of about $11,000 on the server, justifying the expenditure as an investment that could potentially drawn in large, long-term profits. “I think this could grow,” Cox said. “All [Yahoo!] did was start a server and students started putting all their class notes and information on there, and it developed into [Yahoo!]… so we’re starting at phase 1.”
Finally, the last major item the ASLC tackled involved putting a cap on how many clubs Laney College could support. Each club at Laney receives “seed money” from the ASLC upon its creation — currently $200 — to help fund them as they get their start.
However, in order to lower the amount of ASLC’s money spent on these clubs, the group decided to implement a first-come, first-serve policy: only the first 20 clubs that are created each semester will be offered the money.