What is the Student Leadership Council?

Article Submitted by Audrey Grice

Have you ever stopped to fill your water bottle up in a dorm, gotten food from the Bruin Community Pantry or grabbed dinner late at the Bon? If so, you’ve benefited from the work of the Student Leadership Council.

The Student Leadership Council is composed of nine undergraduate students who work for the student body in various capacities. There are currently seven campus representatives alongside Council Chair Jack Anderson and Treasurer Janessa Antemann. Positions are filled through an application process, with submissions closing mid-January of the prior school year.

Previously, the SLC was a traditional student government body, with positions filled by student elections. After the COVID-19 pandemic, participation dwindled to the point where most candidates ran unopposed and only around 3-5% of the student population voted, according to GFU Associate Dean of Students David Johnstone.

In 2024, the Student Life Office transitioned the council to a nomination process, with representatives selected from different branches of Student Life such as Resident Life, Spiritual Life and Student Activities. Anderson said that becoming an SLC representative is similar to applying for other branches of Student Life.

Serving as the university’s student government, SLC acts as a central point of communication between students and GFU staff, advocating for proposals to the Board of Trustees, managing student support funds, and forwarding initiatives to better support students.

“[The SLC is] part of Student Life,” Anderson said. “Its main function is to take things that aren't necessarily working on campus and get student input to then hopefully be able to make changes there.”

Council maintains a closed meeting every Wednesday to discuss progress on proposals, social media initiatives, student responses and research results. Each representative serves a different purpose.

“Everybody is technically a representative but they don't do the same things,” Anderson said. “The thing one representative is really good at is different than the thing another representative is good at. Same title, different jobs.”

Some SLC representative duties include tabling and interacting with students, conducting research on other universities’ policies, designing flyers and managing social media outreach. 

The work done during the year culminates in an annual meeting with GFU’s Board of Trustees, where members of the council present a proposal for their consideration. A previously approved proposal added approximately ten water filling stations in dormitories.

“There's been a lot of dorms and places on campus that don't have a lot of water filling stations,” said Ella Trecker, a current campus representative and previous president. “For example, Pennington only had one in the entire building. A couple years ago, we put in a proposal to the school board to put in more water bottle fillers on campus.”

Trecker also noted other changes, such as more ADA ramps on campus, adding sharps boxes in public bathrooms, extending hours in the Canyon Commons and expanding the reach of the Bruin Community Pantry.

This year, the SLC focused efforts on an upcoming proposal: make Good Friday a university holiday.

“Last year, a student voiced concern that, as a Christian institution, we don't really do anything for Good Friday,” Anderson said. “So over the past year, we've been working on getting student input as to how widespread a concern this is. At this stage, we're writing an official proposal that will hopefully be done by the end of this term.”

Most of the proposal process comes from student input. Different approaches have included tabling outside Murdock Library and the Canyon Commons, individual outreach and sending surveys through the Daily Bruin.

These approaches vary in success. Surveys sent out for the Good Friday proposal received around 260 total responses, reaching approximately 10% of the student body.

Where SLC has found most success is the Community Life Fund (CLF), a reserve designed to reimburse students for community-building events. However, widespread knowledge of the CLF hasn’t led to more recognition of the council.

“Almost everyone knows the Community Life Fund. They just don't realize it's tied to student government,” Trecker said. “We're the ones every year who confirm there's going to be more money coming in. We're the ones managing the numbers and handing out the reimbursements.”

This year, the fund closed mid-March after reaching its budget. Students who applied for the CLF before it closed were still eligible for reimbursement but no new applications were accepted for the remainder of the school year. Trecker sees this as a positive.

“We want it to run out,” she said. “You might think that's a bad thing. No, we want it to run out because if it runs out, that gives the school the thumbs up. This is working. This is good. We're building community. People want this and then they'll keep the cash coming in.”

The changes made in the last few years don’t mark the end of shifts in the council’s operations. Both Anderson and Trecker are optimistic about the future of the SLC.

“SLC is in a big transition period, a good one,” Trecker said. “We've had good interactions with our social media, our responses and just with people. I think my dream for SLC is that those keep getting better.”

“I'm hoping that in the future, SLC can be this well recognized, well-oiled machine that can take in student inputs and faculty questions and have a solid way of getting it out there,” Anderson says. “Right now it's just trial and error and nothing has seemed to click. I'm just hoping for that click.”

Part of the click Anderson is waiting for is engagement from the student body.

“If people got to the point where they knew about SLC, I think people would be more interested in it. Then it could take off a lot more and be a lot more effective,” Anderson said. “To some extent, it might only be as effective as the people know about it.”