A town hall meeting held Sunday by two write-in candidates in the Student Association elections was attended by just three people.

AJ Abell and Jonathan Dawson hosted the 15 minute-long meeting in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications to discuss their campaign progress and platform and hear back from the Syracuse University community. Abell and Dawson are running as write-in candidates for Student Association president and vice president, respectively.

The pair updated the audience on the progress of their anti-sexual assault platform. Abell said he and Dawson discussed the importance of proactive rather than reactive sexual assault policies and initiatives with Vera House, a nonprofit organization to end domestic violence and sexual assaults.

Abell and Dawson are also meeting with the DPS Crime Prevention Commander Ryan Beauford next week to create an open dialogue about how DPS and SU can begin to foster a better relationship with one another, Dawson said.

“Everyone loves Officer Joe (Shanley),” Dawson said. “Why can’t there be more of that type of relationship in student interactions with DPS?”

Abell and Dawson also discussed how they’ve been working to create improve transparency between SA, faculty and students on campus.

Abell said that although SU is a campus with many diverse groups, it remains, in a way, a “segregated” campus. This reflects a need for increased transparency and intergroup communication between the groups on campus, and SA should function as a mediator for these conversations, he added.

The third point of the pair’s platform is further enabling students at SU, which is necessary because there are a lot of resources on campus that exist but that people don’t know about, Abell said.

“We want SA to be a magnifying glass to help students find those resources on campus and pair the students to the resources that can benefit them the most,” Abell said.

Dawson said that he and Abell have been meeting with as many different groups on campus as possible to better understand what SA can do for them in terms of transparency and enabling.

“We have a certain understanding of how Syracuse works and what Syracuse can do for us, but that’s just us,” Dawson said. “We can’t accurately represent everyone unless we meet with them.”

The team encouraged those in attendance to vote. At last year’s SA election, only 31 percent of students voted. This year, Dawson said they want to see at least 50 percent of students voting to give a more accurate representation of what the student body wants.

University-wide elections begin Monday and run through Thursday. Students can vote on MySlice.

Published on April 12, 2015 at 7:53 pm

Contact Lydia: lawilson@syr.edu