Michael Borowski and Gianna Naulivou are running for president and vice president of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Student Government Association (SGA), campaigning on three main points: registered student organization (RSO) reform, nightlife development and community wellbeing.
Borowski currently serves on the SGA as a student senator and is on the undergraduate registry oversight committee. Most of his work concerns meeting with clubs and helping them with the RSO application process.
Naulivou is not currently involved with SGA, but she reviews the senate meetings and believes she can make a difference to a structure she doesn’t think serves the students.
Outside of SGA, the two are highly involved in campus life. Borowski is a member of the marching band as well as a member of the PR team for it, the theater guild, the Amherst Repertoire Company and brother of Phi Mu Alpha sinfonia. Naulivou founded the Amherst Repertoire Company, is on the legal studies undergraduate board, is an RA for, as well as a member of, the honors college.
The presidency wouldn’t be the first time Borowski and Naulivou have worked together. In Naulivou’s efforts to form the Amherst Repertoire Company, Borowski was able to step in and get the company off the ground without SGA’s support.
The ticket’s first point is RSO reform. The processes for applying for RSO status, applying for funds and booking spaces are “unique to UMass Amherst and are failing,” Borowski said. They believe that the SGA has the resources and talent to better these services but is not currently using them.
Their second point is nightlife development. They aim to reopen the U-Pub, UMass Amherst’s on-campus bar which closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. They also hope to increase the availability of transportation late at night so students have a safe way home after going out on the weekends.
They plan to start communicating with the PVTA to try to extend the hours of the bus schedule or look for other means of transportation for students.
Their last point is campus development and community outreach. UMass has many student organizations, agencies and businesses on campus that give life to it. Borowski wants to promote these organizations to “make sure students have outlets in which their talents can prosper.”
In addition to their three points, Borowski and Naulivou plan to remodel the current outreach efforts. Instead of students coming to the SGA for communication, like for town halls or open forums, Borowski and Naulivou plan to go to the students directly to hear from them.
They have already begun this work to figure out what students need by visiting with three dozen RSO’s executive board meetings to ask them what SGA does currently and what it needs to be doing to support the agencies that make UMass, UMass.
“Bringing other people into our work is really important to us,” Naulivou said. The ticket thinks it’s important that students are the central focus of SGA. Since visiting with RSOs, Borowski and Naulivou learned that SGA doesn’t have the full support of the student body.
“It’s a responsibility to advocate and act on behalf of the student body,” Borowski said.
One way they plan to do this is by opening communication with Residential Life. “They have their fingers on the pulse of this campus,” Naulivou said. Even students who aren’t involved with RSOs will be aware of and have the opportunity to connect with SGA from the start of their college experience.
“There’s a job that has to be done in the Student Government Association and we don’t see anyone else stepping up who has the initiative we have to get the job done,” Borowski said. “We want to get in there, we want to fix the problems that we have felt, that we have seen other students facing, and make sure they’re lasting solutions.”
“The refreshing of ideas and the refreshing of initiatives in any government, let alone something like a student government where people are always coming and going out of the UMass community, is vital,” Borowski added. “We want to focus on lasting solutions so that students at this school don’t have to focus on who’s the current SGA president, they can just have a student government they can rely on no matter who’s in charge.”
Piper Morgan can be reached at [email protected].
