UISG outlines goals and services in new report
The Service Report provides a concise list of student services offered by UISG, outlining goals for the future.
September 20, 2018
The UI Student Government has released its first-ever Service Report, which gives details and background to the many student services the organization provides.
The Service Report outlines a number of current and upcoming items that UISG offers. These include free IMU lockers, a checkout program for various equipment, and a shuttle service to the airport and Coral Ridge Mall.
The report was released to detail the results of a service audit that UISG Student Services Director Anthony Haughton conducted. He performed the audit in an effort to examine all the services that the group funds for students and ensure that UISG money is used efficiently, UISG Cabinet Director Kyle Scheer said.
RELATED: UISG, GPSG, hopes to increase student voter turnout through Voter Registration Week
One of the purposes of the audit was to identify if UISG funds were being used on unnecessary services and decide whether to discontinue some of them, Scheer said.
“Without that consideration of each of these services, we don’t have the information needed to make those calls,” he said.
When Haughton started as Student Services director this year, he saw that there wasn’t a well-organized list of the services he was managing. He said he decided to release the report as a way to provide comprehensive information on UISG services in an accessible way.
“I wanted to give a concise overview for students to learn about these services,” he said.
One of the upcoming services outlined in the report is the materials bank, which aims to provide materials to student organizations for events.
“A lot of student organizations have to rent equipment for big events, so we will buy equipment and have that available for checkout at the IMU,” Haughton said.
RELATED: UISG revamps recruitment process to reach more people, eliminate bias
The bank offers such material as sound equipment, poster board, tables and chairs, and other items, Haughton said.
Student Life Committee Chair Alexia Sánchez has promoted the creation of a number of the services in her time in UISG. Among them was providing free IMU lockers to students, an initiative she helped establish as a freshman.
“UISG recognized that many students live off campus and far away, and busy students might not be able to go back and forth with busy schedules,” Sánchez said in an email to The Daily Iowan.
A number of services that UISG started it has handed off to other organizations, Sánchez said. The IMU now runs the locker service, and Active Minds Organization has taken over Outdoor Yoga on the Pentacrest, a service started by the Student Life Committee.
“I am a huge advocate of institutionalizing programs and ideas whenever possible, because UISG members have such a short time at the university and in the organization,” Sánchez said in her email. “These services should continue even after we are done.”
The Service Report is in line with UISG’s goal this year of being accessible and transparent to students, Scheer said.
To go along with this goal, the Service Report contains a link to a student idea form, which allows any student to submit an idea for a new student service to be considered.
“That’s a big goal this year, creating more places where students can tell us what they’re thinking,” Haughton said.
