The Strand: Tell me about your experience leading up to this position and why you want to run for it.
Zahavah: I want to run for this position because I’m interested in getting more involved at Vic. I’ve been involved in certain capacities in the Victoria College Council, in residence as the VP of Gate House. I was an orientation leader, I was in the mental health focus group. But I want to get more directly involved with VUSAC and how Vic is run. I think that, given the experience I’ve had with leadership positions and my personality, I think S&G is the best fit for me. I’ve done a lot of event planning in the past; it was a position I assumed in high school. So I thought this would be a good fit for me. And I just noticed, over the past year and a half before I decided to run or the position, that I was thinking a lot at Vic events about what I would do differently, how I would run it. I was even at one point looking into, if I were to host High Ball, where would I host it? So I think the ideas that I have are feasible and could reflect what students want, and I think I would really enjoy the position as well.
So Highball, for example, common criticisms in the past have been that it’s financially inaccessible. What sort of things do yu think you could do differently?
I want to expand how many people can go to Highball, because I think that it’s such a quintessentially Vic event. It’s not fair that it’s limited to just a couple hundred people when there’s so much hype. It’s seen as such a Vic thing, so I think it’s really disappointing for the people who can’t get tickets. That’s something that I’ve heard as the number one criticism that I’ve gotten just from being a student, not someone who’s planning High Ball. People are very disappointed that more people can’t go, so that’s something that I want to expand. I also believe and have experienced from the events that I’ve been involved in in the past that it’s not so much about how fancy the venue is as it is [about] if your friends are there. I think that people would be happier with a less expensive venue if more people could be there, and I think that will probably help with financial costs as well. I mean, Roy Thompson Hall, the 1 King West Hotel, those were both amazing venues, but they did have space limitations. It’s hard because all the demands being made on Highball kind of intersect with each other. It’s probably going to cost more to get a bigger venue if you want it on the same scale that it’s been on the past few years, but that’s not really fiscally possible. So I want to put out some sort of online survey where I’m going to ask people, ‘Where do you want to cut costs? Do you not want to have dinner? Because we could do that. Do you want to have it at a less expensive venue? We could do that.’ Just to see where students are okay with cutting costs, and then whatever they want, I’ll cut.
Moving beyond Highball, I know this year the Scarlet & Gold Commissioner did the pub night, which hasn’t been done in the past. Do you have any other programming that you would like introduced or that you see yourself pulling back on?
I thought [the current Scarlet & Gold Commissioner] did a great job with the pub nights this year. There is a new type of programming that I want to introduce that I’m going to be talking about at Town Hall. It’s something that would require collaboration with an Equity Commissioner–right now we don’t have anyone running for that, but hopefully in the fall we will–and with Sustainability. I want to create a series of events that hypothetically will be called Social Conscience. There would be a series of events that are tied to the values and morals and causes that are important to Vic students, so things to do with equity and sustainability. Because I think that Vic students are very socially minded people and are aware of important causes in the world right now.
What kind of programming specifically?
That would be something that I would have to collaborate with Equity and Sustainability. The way I see it working would be we would group together with an idea, and either it would be some sort of social event where we raise funds, or some sort of food drive or something like that. But I don’t see any reason why a social life and a moral value based life should have to be separate. I think that would be something I could see Vic responding well to.
What has being on the outside perspective of a lot of goings on at VUSAC has affected what you think you can or want to bring to it, as well as your perception of what VUSAC is like going into it?
I’ve had a lot of outside perspective on VUSAC. I wasn’t really friends with anyone who was on VUSAC in first year, so in terms of Scarlet & Gold I just experienced the events and my thoughts on them without any knowledge of the planning behind it. This year, I am friends with a lot of people who are on VUSAC, so I’ve seen a lot more of the behind the scenes, and I think the biggest thing for social events at Vic that I would want to work on is turnout. That’s not just advertising, because I think [the current Scarlet & Gold Commissioner] has done a great job of advertising, but you have to create the sense that this is part of Vic life. You go to Vic, you go to these events, this is where you meet people, this is part of your social life. I think that that’s something VUSAC can help with, the sense of community. A lot of people describe VUSAC as a bubble that’s very self-contained, and I think that while that’s something that can easily happen when you have a group of people that are all very driven and usually opinionated–because those are the kind of people that are drawn to student government–that can happen. But from what I’ve seen from this outside perspective, if you are constantly forcing yourself to bridge that gap and talk to students, and things like, ‘I want to do this online survey,’ then you can stop that bubble from creating a gap between what VUSAC wants and what students want.
So just emphasizing staying outside of the bubble?
Yeah, really making sure that you’re not closing in on the internal politics, but focusing on what VUSAC is actually about, which is about everyone who’s not on VUSAC, because that’s who you’re representing.
