While other students were preparing for Dead Week and finals, Dominique Beaumonté, one of next year’s student senators, was learning how to be a stronger leader.
About 40 University students attended a leadership retreat over the weekend in which they learned to relieve stress by painting pictures, practiced their communication skills, exercised the art of delegating responsibilities and even sang Boyz II Men tunes.
The Leaders Eagerly Advocating for Diversity (L.E.A.D.) 2001 leadership retreat took place Friday and Saturday. The free event included workshops, housing and meals at the Namaste Retreat and Conference Center in Wilsonville, Ore.
Beaumonté, director of the Black Student Union and the Multicultural Center’s public relations coordinator, said the transition retreat allowed student leaders to get to know each other and to build diversity.
Beaumonté said students participated in an activity that involved taping written-out stereotypes to the foreheads of a few individuals, and then helping them figure out what the stereotypes were.
There were representatives at the retreat from almost every student union on campus, said Bola Majekobaje, the MCC’s networking advocate assistant. She said the MCC staff organized the retreat as a chance for participants to get away from Eugene and build relationships with each other.
“If we can all trust each other and work together next year, we will be that much more powerful,” Majekobaje said.
ASUO Accounting Coordinator Jennifer Creighton gave a presentation Saturday called “Knowing the System.” Students learned about the University and the Oregon University System budgets as well as the Green Tape Notebook, which contains the rules governing the ASUO.
“Student unions need to know the Green Tape Notebook is a resource. It is knowledge, and knowledge is power,” Beaumonté said. “Student unions need to strengthen their knowledge of how the system works.”
He said students also learned how to fill out forms to spend money from their budgets and how to ask the ASUO Student Senate for funding.
“It was really valuable because I’m going to be on the Student Senate next year,” Beaumonté said.
Beaumonté added that it is important for senators to serve as a resource for students.
To test their communication skills, he and four other leaders formed a mock senate, and participants practiced asking for money from the student incidental fee general surplus.
“They were really hard on us,” said Hang Huynh, next year’s office manager for the Asian-Pacific American Students Union. “But now we’ll know what to expect. It was a good learning experience.”
Huynh, a freshman business major, said she and seven other members from APASU attended the retreat.
Huynh said it was a good opportunity because APASU members bonded better with the members of their own organization and met members of other student unions as well.
ASUO Vice President Joy Nair said she attended the retreat to meet the people who will be taking on leadership positions in the student unions next fall and to hear their concerns about what she and ASUO President Nilda Brooklyn can do to improve student government. Nair said she wants the ASUO to serve as a resource for student unions throughout the year, and she wants the student union members “to see our faces more.”
“It was a great way to start off the year with the new leaders,” Nair said. “I think it will help a lot toward the success of the unions next year.”
Leadership retreat builds diversity
Daily Emerald
June 4, 2001
0
More to Discover