“If you had asked me in November of last year and asked me if I was going to be running for this position I would have said absolutely not,” Jacob Nevins, 2025 presidential candidate, said.

Nevins and Darren Truong are running for the University of Massachusetts Amherst Student Government Association (SGA) president and vice president. The ticket, while at the beginning of its SGA career, is looking to reform the organization while advocating for student accessibility as well as to reform the current support for Registered Student Organizations (RSOs).

“There were a series of decisions made by the leadership team within the SGA executive that went too far or didn’t go far enough in my personal opinion … if no one else is going to step up, then you know, I might not want to do this but somebody needs to soon,” Nevins said.

Nevins, a sophomore operations and information management (OIM) and public policy major, is the vice chair on the Undergraduate Services committee. In his time since joining, he has been a member of the Administration Transparency subcommittee, student representative on the Academic Matters Faculty Senate Council and a Senate representative on the Student Advocacy Task Force.

Truong, a freshman civil engineering major, serves on the Ways and Means committee, Rules and Ethics subcommittee, Administration Transparency subcommittee, finance committee and Student Advocacy Task Force.

Both parties in the ticket started their SGA careers last semester.

“In the debate they mentioned experience a lot, but a lot of us also have former experience before SGA. I was personally very involved in my junior and senior year in high school. I managed to get the handbook reformed … It’s not like we’re out of the blue and have absolutely no experience,” Truong said.

Nevins and Truong both emphasized the importance of reforming the culture of the SGA.

“The first step is bringing kindness back in the SGA, which at least in the executive is severely lacking,” Nevins said.

“We’re really hoping to bring that kindness back so that we can keep senators that want to stay and want to grow and want to learn … We have a very bad retention rate right now and the problem with that is that when we have a bad retention rate, we have senators that are always new. We talked a lot about tangible results, but if we have this terrible, you know, crisis of everyone leaving every year we’re never going to be able to get those tangible results,” he added.

A main initiative of Nevins and Truong is RSO support reform and finding a way for a more efficient funding process.

At a regular meeting on Dec. 4, the Senate voted to exempt the SGA of budget cuts.

“I’m one of the few senators that have voted no against this, and I think every student on this campus, if they knew what this was, would vote against it too,” Nevins said. “One of the candidates asked me at the debate if I would be taking a wage and I said no and I stand by that.”

Nevins affirmed that instead of taking the president’s wage, he would be putting that money towards the RSO emergency fund. The ticket stressed to help support RSOs on the UMass campus, they would streamline the funding process as well as re-implementing an RSO Advisory Board and a budget recommendation committee, which would assist Established Student Organizations (ESOs) with filling out their budget.

“We can be working with our RSOs, with agencies, with [Registered Student Groups], with more departments to provide more job opportunities, to make sure that they don’t get those severe budget cuts,” Truong said.

“There are so many students here who come here not just for education but also for campus life. We want to be able to grow as a person, and I think that really starts with the exemption, putting ourselves back before the exemption. So, to really send a message that we’re here for the students, if they go through budget cuts, we’re going through budget cuts,” he added.

The ticket has been campaigning on the topic of student accessibility. They want to implement a permanent bus route that takes students to University Health Services (UHS). Both students emphasized the importance of the SGA providing accessibility to students on campus.

Nevins mentioned that current accessibility policies are not accommodating to students.

“We want a physical bus route that has multiple buses that goes to every single residence community, that stops at UHS, that stops at the studio arts building, so students can have access to the food recovery network, and that stops at the Rec Center. Right now, there are multiple bus lines that go to all those areas, but they’re not connected.”

“When you’re sick on campus and you’re living in Southwest you have to walk to UHS. They have vans but the majority of students are just going to walk or they’re not going to go. I think that every student on this campus once a semester interacts with UHS and there should be a bus route that takes them there,” he added.

The ticket stressed the need for the SGA to support advocacy groups like Access UMass, and work with them to create plans to bring to administration.

Nevins and Truong hope to continue with some of the work the current administration is doing. Both parties mentioned a continuation of the Food Pantry, Kosher dining and sidewalk accessibility among other legislative initiatives. In terms of executive initiatives, the ticket wants to continue the work of getting the Student Code of Conduct to ensure UMass advocacy groups have the right to protest.

Both Nevins and Troung highlighted how excited they are to be campaigning for these positions together.

“I’d say we complement each other pretty well. We’re both honest and straightforward with each other,” Truong said.

“I’m limitlessly excited to see the things that we’re going to be able to do together as a team and the people that we’re going to be able to uplift and put into positions of power,” Nevins added.

Sydney Warren can be reached at [email protected]