Henry Scriven-Young, a member of GW’s student advisory panel and a former Student Government Association executive assistant, on Tuesday became the first to announce his bid to helm the governing body.
Scriven-Young, a junior studying political communication from Naperville, Illinois, said he’d like to lower the mandatory SGA fee all students pay as part of tuition, boost communication between the SGA and the advisory panel and expand student engagement in campus activities. Scriven-Young said his experience in the SGA as an executive assistant under former SGA President Arielle Geismar and outside the body in student organizations like GW University Singers and WRGW Radio will help him build an “effective” student government that supports all students.
“The simplest answer is that the student body government needs a student to lead it, not a long-time member of the SGA,” Scriven-Young said.
Scriven-Young said he wants to implement a program called The Revolutionary Route to offer students merchandise and other incentives for attending campus events. He said the program would operate on a point-based system and award students a certain amount of points for attending events and logging their attendance on Engage.
Scriven-Young said he wants students to feel excited to attend events at GW, as he’s heard from many students that they feel “trapped” in Foggy Bottom because the University doesn’t encourage them to attend campus events.
“I’ve had people describe to me that Foggy Bottom feels like a bubble, that the Foggy Bottom bubble is all consuming,” Scriven-Young said. “I want to pop that bubble, I want to bring students more events, more incentive to go to events.”
Engage currently allows student organizations to track membership and member attendance at events through scanning students’ mobile event passes upon entry.
Scriven-Young said he wants to enhance the student experience on campus by creating opportunities for students to “interact with animals” through partnerships with local shelters and GW student organizations like Paws for a Cause. He said these opportunities would relieve students’ stress and create more enjoyable activities on campus.
GW has previously brought therapy dogs and a petting zoo to campus in 2023 during finals week and a mental health awareness week.
If elected, Scriven-Young said he would maintain his role as a member in the SAP — a group of students chosen by dining administration who meet with GW dining officials once a month to discuss student dining concerns and ideas for new initiatives — to expand collaboration between the SGA and SAP to communicate a larger pool of student voices to dining administration at the monthly meetings.
“If you combine all of that feedback and all of that great work of all those students with the legislative ability of what’s currently happening in the Student Government Association, I feel confident that great things are gonna happen,” Scriven-Young said.
Scriven-Young’s platform also outlines other dining initiatives he plans to incorporate, like cutting waste at dining locations by encouraging students to reduce plastic waste by not taking lids on to-go containers and extending Absurd Bird’s hours until 1:00 a.m.
The SGA extended hours for Shenkman Hall’s market and dining hall in August, adding weekend hours for the market and expanding the dining hall’s operation to 10 p.m. from its previous close at 9 p.m.
Scriven-Young also said he wants to lower the “financial burden” of attending GW by decreasing the semesterly SGA fee from the current charge of $3 per credit hour to $1 per credit hour. Students are currently required to pay the fee upon enrollment to support student organization operation throughout the year.
“Things are very expensive, and every time tuition goes up, every time people pay their tuition, people feel that squeeze,” Scriven-Young said. “I want to do what I can to lower tuition and make life easier for students who are trying to attend GW.”
Scriven-Young said he would ensure student organizations limit unspent funds, prioritizing how organizations have previously used funds when allocating budgets, to ensure student groups receive the necessary funding.
The SGA Finance Committee currently considers budget requests on a tier-based system and places factors like the amount of students expected to benefit from the funding and how vital the line item is to the organization’s existence at the top. Efficiency of funds spent is currently in the second tier, according to the SGA general allocations handbook.
“I want to put that in tier one so that student organizations are spending the money efficiently, and they’re getting money so that more student orgs have the ability to get money,” Scriven-Young said.
SGA candidate registration opened Tuesday and will remain open until 5 p.m. on March 25. Scriven-Young must collect at least 379 signatures from students, which will then be verified by the Joint Elections Commission, before he will officially be on the ballot for the April 10-11 SGA election.
