On Thursday, Oct. 9, Macalester College Student Government (MCSG) held its weekly Legislative Body (LB) meeting in the DeWitt Wallace Library’s Harmon Room.
The meeting commenced with a presentation from Associate Director of Health Promotion Rachel Banen ’16 and Director of Health Promotion and Sexual Respect Tiger Simpson of the Laurie Hamre Center for Health & Wellness. The presentation covered details including Health Promotion’s (HP) role on campus.
“It’s not promoting health despite the name,” Banen said. “Health promotion is a subfield of the very large, all-encompassing field of public health, which essentially means that health promotion is really focused on prevention and proactive measures.”
“The work that we do in [HP] specifically, is looking at what is happening in our physical environment on campus and in our culture that is sustaining some of the mental health challenges that we see,” Banen continued.
Banen and Simpson then moved into fielding questions from the LB. Responding to a question on whether HP prioritizes sexual health, Banen detailed HP’s efforts in multiple areas of wellbeing.
“In [HP], we have [a few] primary focuses — positive mental health, safer substance use, harm reduction and sexual respect,” Banen said, also noting that HP provides sexual health supplies across campus and anonymously by PO box.
Banen hopes to expand HP’s reach in the future with more messaging around safer usage of marijuana, in tandem with its recent recreational legalization in Minnesota. Simpson noted that HP will struggle to achieve this due to the end of a grant that supported an additional staff member.
To highlight current mental health goals, Banen noted that HP hopes to work more closely with student promoters and has successfully advocated for the installation of anti-suicide breakaway rods in residence halls in the coming years. Banen later noted HP’s increasing efforts to create spaces of belonging on campus and the importance of creating community as a positive mental health factor.
“We’re trying to push out more messaging and do more programming specifically about the presence of loneliness on campus,” Banen said.
Simpson proceeded to outline, in response to another question, Residential Life’s emergency housing program. The program is available to students who may be experiencing anything related to domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking and urgently need a place to stay.
“They can get access to an emergency room … through Residence Life staff, a hall director, the Dean of Students Office [or the Title IX coordinator],” Simpson said. “We stock those rooms with various different types of shampoo and conditioner for various hairstyles, phone chargers, blankets, sheets, pillows [and more] things, so that … it’s able to be lived in, at least with some essentials, no matter what’s going on.
Simpson noted, however, that these rooms are intended as temporary accommodations before a more permanent solution can be found and that certain details about the rooms are intentionally withheld to protect students who require their usage.
Banen then responded to a question about barriers to creating community and what students can do to break down such walls.
“I think the biggest thing … is if you feel like you have a core group of people in your life that feel like [they] really understand you,” Banen said. “[Support] doesn’t have to be this really formalized process of going to Hamre for counseling. The most powerful social connections we have tend to be informal, right? So anytime that you’re just kind of being a person in the world, connecting with other people, it’s going to be [and] really is more impactful than we probably even realize.”
Banen rounded out the presentation by detailing HP’s Partner Fund, whereby student organizations can receive funding to work with the office in its health promotion mission.
Following the HP presentation, Planning and Implementation Manager Jonathan Cardenas gave details on the grants set up by the college in response to student advocacy for divestment from firms with connections to Israel. While a Board of Trustees committee on the issue voted not to adopt a proposal for divestment, the committee approved a plan to create a $44,500 matched fund for violent conflict relief. $17,420 has been donated by the end of this summer and dispersed to groups selected by MCSG and other student organizations.
Student Organizations Committee Chair Liv Peterson ’27 wanted to contextualize the fund’s place and critique certain aspects of the Board of Trustees’ plan.
“This mostly came out of the resolution that we passed last year for the Mac for Palestine divestment, and this was one of the Board of Trustees’ responses, which was placing the burden of raising money on the students,” Peterson said. “Which is fine, but considering that 76 percent of our endowment goes towards financial aid, I think that we should look at this a little critically.”
Cardenas noted the importance of a collaborative effort between students and administration to achieve the aims set out in the student body’s proposals.
“I think it’s important for me to hear from this group and other students on what kind of strategy we want to enact in order to build that coalition,” Cardenas said. “I would love to do that in partnership with others [as] I think that’s the main thing as an advisor that I’m looking for in this moment, because I can’t advise students who don’t exist.”
The LB proceeded to move into discussion on chartering Dojo Explore, a club that aims to “expand undergraduate access to the biotechnology industry through structured seminars, curated mentorship and community building events,” according to a prepared statement read on the club’s behalf.
The motion to charter Dojo Explore passed with a vote of 18 in favor, one opposed and one abstention.
Following Dojo Explore’s chartering, the LB moved into discussion on Health Professions Student Coalition’s (HPSC) request for $5,893 to allow 16 students to visit medical schools in the Chicago area.
“We have six med schools in the Chicagoland area, and Macalester has never really done any outreach with any of them,” HPSC Co-President and Senior Class Representative Marina Moberg ’26 said. “I was able to get three meetings for a two hours each info session, Q&A with the med students and tours of the campus with Rosalind Franklin School of Medicine, and Rush Medical College and University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine.”
In response to a question on how students are selected to go, Moberg said that applications will be prioritized based on class year and quality of application.
“We are planning on removing everyone’s name off the application and just going based off of how good their responses were,” Moberg said. “How detailed they were, in terms of their ‘why medicine’ and their questions that they would ask admissions.”
The motion to approve HPSC’s request passed with 21 in favor and one abstention.
Cabinet Chair Ainsley Meyer ’26 then opened discussion on MacGPT’s Community Chest request for $2,103.
“[MacGPT] was started two years ago by a group of mostly senior economics but also international studies and political science students, kind of seeing a gap in opportunities for students interested in making public policy,” Emma Runchey Smalley ’26, a co-organizer of MacGPT, said. “This year’s theme is public health, and [students] develop a policy anywhere in the globe to address our specific question, which we announce day of, throughout the day.”
The motion to approve MacGPT’s request passed with 18 in favor and three abstentions.
Speaker of the LB Catherine Kane ’26 then gave a presentation on her effort to secure an institutional Minnesota Star Tribune subscription for the college.
“I have submitted an FAC request as a class rep on behalf of MCSG for $3,000 to fund an annual institutional subscription to Star Tribune, similar to how MCSG funds a New York Times institutional subscription,” Kane said. “I think that the Star Tribune would be a wonderful resource for professors in classrooms and groups on campus and students. I also believe that this is an important resource that we have in our community, the Star Tribune, and that we, as Macalester College, should be supporting this institution by paying for their news reporting.”
The LB then heard updates from committee chairs. Communication and Engagement Committee (CEC) Chair Sammi Shelton ’29 shared that the CEC is planning a spree of event promotion in the near future including Meet the Cabinet, Legislation Week, a Curriculum Implementation Committee town hall and community interviews for Muslim and interfaith chaplain candidates.
Financial Affairs Committee (FAC) member Julian Ricco ’29 shared that the committee had denied two requests and approved two requests, adding that the FAC will create a bill to confirm the switch to a semesterly budgeting system and the increase to a $315 student activity fee.
Academic Affairs Committee (AAC) Chair Samantha Schafer ’26 explained that student participation in MCSG’s GSAT support program was meeting expectations.
President Willow Albano ’26 then adjourned the meeting.
