Disclaimer: This letter has been edited for clarity and AP style. CCSGA funds Cutler Publications, which means The Catalyst indirectly receives money from the student government to operate. The Catalyst remains independent and does not allow student government to influence its coverage in any way.
CCSGA Cares.
Dear campus community
I’m sure you have heard about the many struggles your student government has encountered this past year. I, for one, would like to acknowledge the obstacles we’ve been through and will admit in full transparency that dealing with such issues has been deeply challenging for me and has allowed me to garner much growth throughout the year. I would like to take the time to update you all on the accomplishments CCSGA has made this year and to highlight our push for leadership that transforms, is accessible, community-oriented and promotes rest and joy on our campus. Throughout my time in CCSGA, these past three years, I have seen us struggle to recruit and retain representatives and inherit a student government that was quite distant from the student body due, in large part, to the pandemic and the safety measures that we had to take to protect the collective wellbeing of our campus community. CCSGA is not a group of students who shy away from challenges. We lead our campus in whatever state we receive it and work to make it a better place. In fact, throughout the year CCSGA has become increasingly visible by relaunching our social media and holding the most robust track record of community events and collaborations of any CCSGA cohort within the last four academic years. Together, we have sponsored and collaborated on events centering BIPOC mental health and workshops around student activism, critical conversations with scholars such as Dr. Angela Davis, events celebrating student artists like Goth Prom and Winter Jam, and have held town hall meetings and a fourth-year class meeting. These are just some of the spaces we have crafted to bring together our campus community. We do this because we seek to transform our idea of leadership, to ensure we are seen and can be accessed for the student body and to create spaces that hold both a critical lens of the world’s most prevalent issues but also make space for the rest that is needed to combat such problems. In doing so, we are bound to encounter problems, but what I need you to know is that we remain committed to meeting these problems with an eagerness to improve, to learn and to continue to do the good work. I sincerely hope you can see that we care and that sometimes meeting things with great care takes a lot of labor and revisions.
In community,
Vicente Blas Taijeron