113th Senate Committee on Civic Engagement
Date: 14 September 2025 Time: 2:45-3:45pm Location: Zoom Present: Chair Kirsten Amematsro, Vice Chair Alan Perez, Karen Valezquez Luna, Jingyan Zhang, Omotola Alaofin, Ava Florres, Avi Liu, Caraline Sommer Absent (Excused): Absent (Unexcused):
Meeting began at 2:48pm
Kirsten: First order of meeting, we must find out what we can do. Civic Engagement can apply Sequicentennial Grant Kirsten: Democracy Dialogue Grand Fund from the SNF Agora Institute offers up to 10k & that’s an opportunity for us to take that money to do something for the dialogue.
- Note: Minimum 2 clubs apply for 1 grant. We must collaborate with another club
Caraline: Reach out to the HOP to find a club we can collaborate with to do the democracy dialogue grant with. Kirsten: Second order of business, Kirsten: These are some other initiatives I’ve been thinking of, if we can collab
- We need to get the New York Times with games
- Alumni Interviews
Kirsten: Asks if someone can talk to admissions to do alumni interviews and to email Jessica asking who we email from the Dept of admissions to push this initiative. Ava: Suggests SGA Sunday / Friday, where we do weekly posts showing transparency by showing committee meetings, GBM & more. Kirsten: Asks how we should approach this. She thinks we should communicate with the director of communications. Caraline: Suggests that we should do our own Instagram page to show; however, Chair Kirsten says that it’s best to post in the official SGA account for everyone in SGA to use & organization. Tola: States that we should bring up these ideas to the agenda to talk about what’s the status of how we should post content or ask for, because our committee wants to conduct street interviews to post. Kirsten: Will message Srigouri to add to the GBM today by midnight. Kirsten: Third order of business, J-Cash printing minimum. Chair Kirsten asked students of different majors Karen: Suggests that the library dept (no specific name) can help us with this initiative because faculty cannot do much about this, but the library department can fulfill these requests. Kirsten: Adds a possible solution if professors can use EReserve and to communicate with the library department to send a specific amount of money needed for printing beforehand to fulfill the amount printed. Ava: All CS Students have special swipe access to Malone, and there’s a specific room in the building that provides unlimited printing for its students. Kirsten: We need to figure out the whys of why the CS department has unlimited printing, and why certain humanities majors don’t. Due to the stinginess of certain faculty, sometimes printing is inevitable. Caraline: Suggests an idea on utilizing the Chair of Research. She suggests if they can survey the student body almost weekly, to go along with the relevancy of the social media posts we can suggest. Tola: Suggests an idea of whether it’s possible to do a partnership of speakers from different parties (JHU Democratic Club & JHU Republican Club) Kirsten: For the Sequicentennial Grant, there are three categories to look at. We have to find a way to use most of the 10k possible. It will open sometime this week (as of Sept 14th). We could have a big 150th anniversary party on campus, basically to do something relaxing. We should have the Sequicentennial staff come to GBM as well to help raise school spirit. Kirsten: Mentions this coming week is National Voter Registration Week. Ava: Volunteers to email Jessica about who to email for the alumni interviews. Kirsten: Next week, we will aim to do an in-person meeting on campus. Alan: Will communicate with Student Services Chair Jason on the issues of the J-Cash printing given to students not being nearly enough as how it should be.
Meeting ended at 3:16pm