Diversity Efforts

The position of Diversity Efforts is honestly one of the hardest contested races this year. There are three very good candidates, and I will be watching the three candidates to see how their positions develop and how they behave on the Campaign trail.

Diversity Efforts' job, on the most basic level, is to coordinate with the ASUW Commission Directors and help bring a wide range of issues to the forefront of discussion in ASUW. Previous Directors have been very active in the Senate bringing forward resolutions and bills, others have focused on their issues at the Board level. There is potential for this position to bring ASUW into the greater Seattle community.

Candidates: Ty Huynh Chhor (Tie-win Chore) (One Campus), Kyle Rapinan (Husky Nation), Ben Lealofi (Team Legacy)

Strengths: Kyle has incredible name recognition, both on campus and off campus. His first year at UW he was very vocal and organized a response to perceived homophobia in the Daily, and received quite a bit of coverage in that same paper. He was also covered in the alternative weekly paper, the Stranger for that same issue, and has recently been mentioned on the Stranger's blog (The Slog) for his work on creating Queer Youth Space on Capitol Hill, a traditionally gay neighborhood that doesn't currently have much in the way of space for those under 21. That name recognition paired with obviously successful community organizing makes him a formidable candidate.

Ben's strengths are his connection to the communities. He is currently serving as the Commission Director for the Pacific Island Student Commission, which means that he has a weekly meeting with the other commission directors and has worked with them to put on events for the other commissions and communities. Ben has also served in the Office of Minority Affairs/Diversity, which put him in a place to work with members of each of the communities the Director of Diversity Efforts would work with.

Ty Huynh has spent this past year working to educate as many people as possible about what is happening within ASUW, the UW, and our communities, as well as what is happening that will affect those communities. During the Legislative Session, she covered several of the key issues on her video blog.

Weaknesses: Ben's weakness is that he cannot point to many specific examples of work he has done to further the interests of any one community. Yes, he has been the Commission Director, and yes he has been involved, but when reading his list of involvement it's full of "member of this" and "participant in that..."

Ty Huynh is similarly weak in that she also can't point to a specific example of something she did that made a difference. She lists a lengthy group of issues she has worked on, but does not say what she actually did to work on them.

Kyle's weakness, I feel, is that he might seem "too off campus." A lot of his activism seems to be aimed off campus, which is the end goal of every student, but we need to see how he will take that off campus experience and put it to work here at the UW.