Even after a week of campaigning, Colin Danly ’15 and Kendall Lorenzen ’15 are still eager to discuss their platform and explain their plans to improve the College of William and Mary if they are elected the next SA president and vice president.
Danly and Lorenzen emphasize the three buzzwords on which their platform is based: collaborate, innovate and empower.
As a part of their focus on collaboration, the two SA candidates discuss their idea for a leadership summit, which would bring together leaders from major student organizations on campus that don’t typically interact with one another. The group would work together to discuss prevalent problems in the College community.
“Right now, not all the major student leaders are in the same room to talk about community issues, and we believe that community issues deserve community action,” Danly said. “[This leadership summit] is really posed to make our community more collaborative because it fosters unlikely partnerships.”
Lorenzen, the current Secretary of Outreach in the executive branch of the SA, said she hopes to empower student groups through civil discourse seminars. The pair has discussed these seminars with the Office of Community Engagement and would like to involve graduate students in the program.
“What we want to do is have these graduate students teach these students these [civil discourse skills], and have these students go out into the community … and stage forums for discussion,” Lorenzen said. “[It makes] our platform more proactive rather than reactive.”
If elected, the pair would work to improve transparency between the SA and the student body, as well as between the three different branches of the SA. Danly suggests using Google Calendar and Google Drive to keep the different branches informed about each other’s activities.
The pair also wishes to remain realistic in the promises they are making to student organizations. Danly, who has served as the chair for the Finance and Budget Committee, said he understands the budget and what is realistic within its constraints.
“Since I am Chairman of Finance and Budget … going through the budgetary process and realizing how all this stuff works, we know what the budget is there for and what it can be allocated for. We would love to do a lot of different programs and really expand things, but at the same time you have to be a little realistic and say, we have this budget and no one really wants a $150 student activities fee,” Danly said.
The duo cites their experience in the SA as what sets them apart from the other tickets.
“We really have experience picking out student concerns and student issues and making things happen,” Lorenzen said.
Danly and Lorenzen believe their dynamic as a potential SA President and Vice President pairing works well since they would bring two different perspectives.
“Kendall and I really come together being like we want to make William and Mary better, and we have over the last three years,” Danly said. “Through our different [activities that] we have been involved with or our different initiatives in the Student Assembly, I really believe we have made it better,” Danly said. “We can combine our forces and really look out and say we’ve accomplished so much and look at what we can accomplish next.”
