Lask week, GUSA’s Multicultural Council presented its inaugural Multicultural Week, giving students the opportunity to participate in various cultural events. Despite the council’s overarching goal of promoting diversity, leaders of cultural groups have responded negatively to Multicultural Week, expressing concern about the purpose and effectiveness of the council as a whole.
According to Randy Puno (COL ’16), president of Club Filipino and SAC commissioner, there was little communication between the Multicultural Council and the different cultural groups leading up to Multicultural Week. “I would say that involvement could have been better,” Puno said. “One of the things I would say is a problem is that we weren’t very well contacted.”
President of the Chinese Student Alliance Dennis Mai (COL ’15), echoed these sentiments, drawing attention to the lack of personal connections between the council’s members. “I think [the Multicultural Council] needs more face-to-face interaction. I don’t know that I’ve ever met any of the council members,” Mai said, “Occasionally [the Chinese Student Alliance] will just get an email asking us if we want to participate in an event.”
The Multicultural Council was initially launched in the spring of 2014 as a GUSA initiative to promote diversity through advocacy of cultural groups on campus and encouragement of cross-cultural interactions between groups. The council seeks to be a direct line of communication between cultural groups and the university administration.
Omika Jikaria (SFS ’15), vice president of GUSA and co-founder of the Multicultural Council, explained that the goal of the council is to become a way for university administration to hear and meet the needs of cultural groups through communication with GUSA. “SAC oversees all student groups, like International Relations Club, College Democrats, College Republicans, GUGS, and it has cultural groups within it, but all those different groups don’t necessarily have the same needs or concerns,” Jikaria said. “We’re looking at whether cultural groups might benefit from having their own funding body.”
According to Puno, however, the Multicultural Council might not be necessary because it essentially fulfills the same role as the Students of Color Alliance.
The SOCA serves as an advocacy board for students of color, providing some additional funding for cultural groups as well as meeting with cultural group representatives weekly to discuss issues. “[The Multicultural Council] provides more avenues to do the same thing, not necessarily new avenues to do new things,” said Puno.
Furthermore, Puno believes neither group has sufficiently addressed funding concerns.
Budgeting enough money for food has surfaced as a readily apparent example of funding difficulties faced by cultural groups. “SAC in general is not very receptive to using money for food,” said Mai. According to Mai, food is a more integral component of cultural events than it is for many other groups on campus, exacerbating this problem.
“We have to say there are more people coming than we anticipate, so we can have just enough food for people… or we should overestimate, and that’s a huge problem if you’re overestimating, because you’re cutting into the the budget of another club,” said Mai.
Puno also suggests that establishing a funding board exclusively for cultural groups would not solve the problem of scale cuts and inadequate overall funding. “It doesn’t matter how much they divide the pie, the pie is still the same size so moving cultural groups to a different funding board wouldn’t change how we have scale cuts, for example, on different things,” said Puno.
In its attempt to resolve the issues cultural groups face in terms of funding, the Multicultural Council initiated working groups dedicated to evaluating a wide range of issues that are now being considered.
“In the fall, we really focused on working groups,” Jikaria said. “We were looking at academic issues, institutional issues, programming issues, and funding issues. We had our coordinators lead them and have sessions and get feedback from people, and then we’re using all that feedback now to actually sit down and talk with administrators.”
Puno suggested that while Multicultural council had good intentions, its goals have not been actualized. He said, “The goals at first were very ambitious and there was reason for them to pursue those goals. Ultimately, they failed.”
