The Daily Illini spoke with Gabi DalSanto, junior in ACES, and Omer Mohsin, junior in LAS, about their campaign for the Illinois Student Council president and vice president.
Voting for ISC president and vice president, alongside other student government positions, begins Tuesday at noon and ends Thursday at 11:59 a.m. and will be available online here.
Their platform
The team has four major platform points: student rights, student needs, progressive solidarity and ISC success.
To protect student rights, DalSanto, the incumbent ISC president, and Mohsin, a student representative, place a heavy emphasis on reforming expressive policies. The team also wants to ensure the safety of undocumented students, the belonging of international students and affordability for all students.
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The duo, as part of their roles in the student government, say they have worked to broaden ISC scholarship opportunities and facilitate a multi-situational leadership survey to measure international students’ safety and belonging levels. DalSanto also said she’s working to amend FO-82, one of the policies delineating regulations for student protesting.
Mohsin said he contributed to the creation of “Know Your Rights” pamphlets to inform students and guide them to UndocuAlly workshops.
“When we’re talking about student needs, we’re talking about the things that fuel you as a person, fuel your education here,” DalSanto said.
The team plans to tackle food insecurity and provide preventative healthcare. By continuing to implement monthly food drives, which were organized by the ISC, and by providing more Narcan, condoms and pamphlets describing correct usage, the two hope to ensure every student can focus on their education.
DalSanto and Mohsin have roots in the campus environmental sustainability movement and the Palestinian cause, respectively. If elected, they plan to offer solidarity to other progressive movements.
“It’s about being great fountains of advocacy and of experience,” Mohsin said.
For their final campaign point, the team wants to improve the ISC’s efficiency. When students have problems, they get shuffled to various departments, and the problem doesn’t get solved or it takes a long time, according to Mohsin.
The two also plan to create a flowchart on the ISC website. Instead of researching various departments to determine where they needed to go, a student could select their issue, and the flowchart would tell them who to speak with.
Serving graduate and online-only students
ISC represents the entire student body, not just the undergraduates.
Mohsin spoke with the Graduate Employees’ Organization — a union that protects graduate workers — last week. GEO is about to return to contract negotiations with the University, and DalSanto wants to spread awareness to the undergraduates for more support.
“I think the main priority is … if it does lead to a strike, making sure undergraduates know to go to support their graduate students,” DalSanto said. “No undergraduate student goes through a day without interacting with a graduate student. It’s important that we show appreciation for them.”
Outside of supporting GEO in their negotiations, the pair wants to fill the ISC seats for graduate students since they often go unfilled.
“It’s absolutely imperative that we get an individual to be placed within our graduate representative seats,” Mohsin said.
With the current ISC framework, there are no seats for online-only students to serve as representatives. However, the various colleges are currently working on online-only degree programs.
DalSanto plans to be involved in those discussions, and she hopes to make sure that all important information is available on the ISC website for online-only students.
What makes them unique
As the incumbent ISC president, DalSanto says she is in a unique position to hit the ground running. Last year, she felt like there was quite a learning curve at the start of her term.
“We both have the knowledge of university systems to — the second we get elected, hopefully — hit the ground running,” DalSanto said.
In response to what differentiates them from the other candidate team, DalSanto pointed to their ISC experience. Mohsin currently serves on the ISC committee on DEI and has served as a student senator.
“We agree with them on many of the issues they brought up,” DalSanto said “The true difference is that Omer and I have a track record of getting things done and really improving things.”
DalSanto applauded the other ticket’s idealism but specified a few platform points that she claims demonstrated their inexperience.
Jaden Campbell, a junior in LAS who served in the student government and as student trustee at Parkland College before transferring to the University — and Ethan Lopez, a junior in LAS who has held various University student government positions over the last two years, are the opposing candidates. One point the pair mentioned in their platform was the University’s failure to provide adequate space reservations for RSOs.
However, DalSanto iterates that ISC has no power over the process. Student Org Development & Administration is the one with the power, and DalSanto says that ISC would only guide students and RSOs to SODA to resolve any issues.
“It’s really all about energy and expertise,” Mohsin said. “We believe we’re those for the job and that we know the ropes. We already built the foundation. Now, we’re just going to add upon it.”
DalSanto and Mohsin also want to improve their connection with the entire student body. To accomplish this, they have worked to expand their endorsements from the usual political RSOs on campus.
“What we’ve been trying to do is really break out and go to other RSOs that are not included in this campaigning season, making sure we’re going to cultural organizations that have been kind of historically overlooked,” DalSanto said.
They tried to include one person from every college to ensure everybody “felt like they had a voice” in the campaigning season, according to DalSanto.
Some of the RSOs that have endorsed DalSanto and Mohsin are the Arab Student Association, Illinois Coalition Assisting Undocumented Students’ Education and IMPACT, an organization they have collaborated with on campus safety initiatives.
Notably, the Illini Democrats, Young Democratic Socialists of America and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have endorsed Campbell and Lopez.
Building for the future
Mohsin recently contributed to the passage of an ISC initiative to provide snack bags for Muslim students to break their fasts during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, he said. The ISC just put in a purchase request for the materials. The initiative will hopefully carry on for years to come, according to Mohsin.
Bringing more kosher options to campus is another goal Mohsin said he is working on. The pair emphasized that their platform is not for a single group of students but for everybody on campus.
On top of that, DalSanto is proud of how much growth ISC has experienced in the past year.
“I’ve watched us go from an organization that has 12 resolutions last year, to us passing our 47th last night,” DalSanto said. “The administration is starting to acknowledge how much we really do for this campus has been amazing.”
The pair said they hope that every student on campus knows they are available to help, no matter the issue or concern.
“We are always here to help and support you, and we will do everything physically possible to do it,” DalSanto said.
