The newly elected Student Government Association Executive Committee is setting goals for the 2014-2015 school year.

The officers are looking to increase school spirit across campus and build enthusiasm among SGA members, while achieving greater transparency and accountability.

President Kekoria “Keke” Greer, Vice President of Senate Nick Lang, Vice President of the University Program Council Daniel Thompson, Secretary Sam Satterfield and Treasurer Adam McCollum joined members of The Flor-Ala staff for a roundtable discussion to share their plans for the upcoming year.

The SGA Executive Committee officers have developed their own slogan for the upcoming year.

“We’re calling it Keke and the boys and we’re ready to serve the students,” Greer said. “We want to get students fired up and excited about their voices being heard. If we start the year off right, we’ll end right.”

Building school spirit and campus traditions is important because students will enjoy their time in college more if they love their campus, Greer said.

“The reason I chose building school spirit and campus traditions is because I love this university and it’s something I’m really passionate about,” she said. “We’re just trying to have students enjoy their time here at the University of North Alabama by helping them get involved.”

UNA is known for being a suitcase school, meaning a lot of students live off campus or go home on weekends, Thompson said.

UPC can play a role in making students’ time more enjoyable by promoting them staying on campus on weekends, he said.

“School spirit is something we can always improve on,” Thompson said. “UPC doing movie nights, Miss UNA, Step Show and Step Sing on Friday nights encourages students to stay on campus on the weekends and get involved.”

For Thompson, it is all about informing students about what UPC is doing to make their time at UNA more enjoyable, he said.

“I think when you can get students to just love their school and really get them to feel connected with it, you can actually accomplish a whole lot,” said Treasurer Adam McCollum. “When you’re connected and you feel belonging, you try to do stuff to take part and get involved.”

The officers agreed increasing school spirit, promoting involvement on campus and keeping enthusiasm pumped among SGA members would encourage students

to become more involved in SGA.

Lang described one of the officer team’s goals for the year in one word: Enthusiasm.

“Students will want to be more involved with SGA if we are more enthusiastic,” Lang said.

“My goal is literally to drive enthusiasm and to have students comfortable enough with me and the other senators that they’ll come sit down and eat lunch with us to talk about their concerns and what they want to see happen on campus.”

Building personal relationships with students to show them SGA members are students who have homework and busy schedules just like every other student is a priority, he said.

Building personal relationships with students also means keeping them up-to-date on what SGA is doing.

Creating greater transparency is one of the main responsibilities for the office of secretary, Satterfield said.

“My goal is to be as accurate as possible and to be as detailed as possible for the students,” he said.

When SGA’s accomplishments are benefitting students, they will want to read the minutes to see what happened at meetings, he said.

“At that point, they have to be ready for them to see,” Satterfield said.

SGA has access to about $300,000 in student-generated money to spend each year.Achieving greater financial transparency is one thing the officers would like to see happen this year.

“One of my big goals as treasurer is to keep the budget process updated for students,” McCollum said. “I want to have something almost like a live budget students can see as we spend money. I’m going to be converting my campaign Twitter page to an SGA Treasurer page.”

Making UPC and SGA an organization all students and campus organizations can count on is a top priority, Thompson said.

“I want to see SGA reach out as that group that all organizations on campus can come to for support,” he said.