A hope to ‘Bridge the Gap’

On Wednesday, as students sat in the South Park Blocks eating and studying, ASPSU presidential candidate Hannah Fisher and some of her running mates worked to spread the message of their campaign.

The “Bridge the Gap” campaign by Fisher and her vice-presidential running mate, Kyle Cady, is designed to attract students to this month’s student government election, which runs from April 20 through April 26.

The campaign is committed to canvassing, and according to Cady, “if you don’t see us outside, something’s wrong.”

If elected, Fisher and Cady say they hope their intensive footwork will continue into the next year, after they have settled into their new offices. At the core of the campaign, they say, is a desire to create an atmosphere of cohesion and community on campus.

Currently a sophomore, Fisher gained student government experience as ASPSU Universities Affairs Director last year and serves as a member of the State Board of Higher Education. She has also served as the outreach and advocacy coordinator of the Disability Advocacy Cultural Association since last year.

Cady, a senior, became involved in student government while attending Portland Community College at the Rock Creek Campus, where he was a political organizer. He eventually got involved with the Oregon Student Association as an intern over the summer of 2006, which led to a position as an event organizer. He recently quit his job to fully pursue the position of vice president.

“We really want to bridge the gap between the resources that are there and students being able to access them,” Fisher said.

The campaign’s idea is to get resources to groups so that they can be seen and be better equipped to involve the campus community. One of the persistent problems to this goal, they say, seems to be a lack of funds.

In the view of Fisher, a more solid campus culture would lead to more endowment funds from alumni.

One problem that Fisher said she would like to fix is the passing of knowledge each year after ASPSU switches hands.

“Student governments pretty much work on the same thing from year to year,” Fisher said. She points out ASPSU’s campaign to lower the TriMet FlexPass price, which has been a platform item for many recent student governments. The problem in her eyes is that every new government starts out as just that: new. There is little that is passed on each year that can assist in achieving common goals, she said.

The solution to this, Fisher said, is to create an online archive, akin to www.wikipedia.org, that student government can use to keep running documentation of progress and challenges. The proposed archive would detail, among other things, whom the previous government talked to, whom they found useful and in what areas they were advancing.

Fisher said if elected she would like to see student senators get paid, and would find extra money by possibly cutting excessive expenses such as previous ASPSU trips to Miami and Washington, D.C. She proposes paying $200 a month to all senators.

As University Affairs Director, Fisher attended the yearly LegCon conference in Washington, D.C.

“There are a couple of conferences that I went to that I think are a waste of student fees and that are unnecessary,” she said.

Another of Fisher’s, and her campaign’s, goals is to push for a disability studies minor at PSU, which she said would be very possible to implement.

“If you look at Christian’s [Christian Aniciete, also running for ASPSU president] and my platform, it’s very, very similar,” Fisher said. “Students pretty much want the same things. The question is how we go about doing them.”