The Student Government Association has met goals to improve student participation and is now looking to end a streak of uncontested elections this spring.
Executive Secretary Chloe Gates said SGA has seen increased participation within the organization this semester, in accordance with start-of-semester goals.
“Our involvement has gone up a lot across the whole school, but we have really gotten a lot of people in the student government more involved,” Gates said. “In the past years, it has been the main four executives who are doing all of the work. I think we’ve done a good job, especially Ashtyn as president. She’s done a good job of delegating work and getting all of the students involved.”
Improving visibility is tied to improving student involvement. According to Gates, both areas are seeing improvement this term.
“We’ve been working on getting to where OC knows what SGA is and what it does,” Gates said. “It’s just going to take some time, but I think it’s gotten better. More people are understanding what SGA is.”
As SGA’s social media manager, Gates said she has leveraged Instagram and email announcements to ensure students know which events are SGA’s doing.
“We have been trying to be better with our emailing and posting things ahead of time on Instagram,” Gates said. “At the event, we try to make it clear that SGA is funding it and is a big part. Things like posting pictures of people at events helps them to understand SGA is the reason they’re there.”
SGA President Ashtyn Hutchison explained the organization is responsible for funding a large portion of Homecoming.
“Clubs do other things for it,” Hutchison said, “but the things that the executive committee puts on — that we do all week long — like the movie, hot dogs, the kickball tournament. All of that is SGA funded.”
Hutchison said she wants to create more casual events and ways to support competing students going into spring.
“We want to create more outlets for students to be involved and active in supporting our sports and fine arts departments,” Hutchison said, “as well as creating more fun opportunities, kind of like the pumpkin patch that we did earlier this fall, so people can come do something fun and leave at their leisure.”
SGA executive candidates have run nearly uncontested for the past several years, something Hutchison said she hopes the new focus on involvement will remedy.
“We are going to put more emphasis on elections and running for office,” Hutchison said. “We have our executive office, which is president, vice president, secretary and treasurer. We have those that most people know about, but we’re really trying to push getting people to run and having more than one person run for each position.”
Hutchison said the goal is not only to have people run for executive positions, but for the committee heads which historically have had no candidates.
“All of our committees have a committee head, and those can be voted on within the Senate,” Hutchison said. “We want that to happen. We want people running for those positions, because, in past years, no one has run for them; they have just been appointed by the Executive Committee.”
Vice President and Head of the Activities Committee Adalynn Neal provided a few specific event concepts planned for the spring, including a Valentine’s Day flower delivery service.
“You can order a carnation and send it to someone, either anonymously or with a note,” Neal said. “You’d be able to order it through SGA, and we’d deliver it for you. It would be a fun little thing to hype up Valentine’s Day.”
Neal also said a festival may be in the works.
“We thought about a harvest festival this past semester, but it didn’t work out with any of the schedules and banquets,” Neal said. “We are looking for some sort of event that matches the energy of a festival, maybe a farmer’s market with all the clubs. We haven’t worked out the details yet.”
In the fall 2025 semester, one of SGA’s most attended events was Junction Coffee’s visit in the Baird Loop, which resulted in such high turnout, the vendor had to leave before all were served.
According to Neal, Junction Coffee served more than 150 students before eventually having to close due to the seemingly never-ending line.
Hutchison urges students to follow SGA on social media “so they can be informed on what we’re doing around campus.”
“It’s an easy way to contact us through DM and comments,” Hutchison said. “We can get feedback from a larger group of people that way.”
Interested students can follow SGA on Instagram.
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