ISU and the Amplify Party

Alex Diviney, Incoming ASISU Senator for Science and Engineering Submitted Content

ASISU might just be one of the better kept secrets on the ISU campus. An organization with almost two dozen members including students and even faculty members, ASISU, or “Associated Students of Idaho State University”, has as many active members as some of the biggest clubs on campus and yet very few students know about it.

To put it simply, ASISU is ISU’s student body government. It consists of an Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branch just like the US government. But why should you care about the bills that it passes? Well ASISU is funded through a fee called the Student Activity Fee that is a part of every student’s tuition. ASISU takes that fee, and through legislation, decides where to put the money to use. ASISU helps fund things like the KISU radio station, The Bengal Movie Theater, and The Bengal newspaper. The largest benefactor of ASISU funds, however, is the Student Activities Board (SAB for short). The SAB uses ASISU funds to put on big events and giveaways for students. So if you want to make sure that your tuition money is going to good use, it is important to contact a senator for your college and ask them questions, or ask them to consider any ideas or proposals you may have. If you want to get even more involved, you can run for a senate or executive position yourself next spring!

Now ASISU by itself is really just an entity, a tool. It can affect certain processes, but it doesn’t necessarily make things better or worse; it doesn’t inherently have an agenda or direction. The people who are involved with ASISU get to decide the direction that the organization takes and the priorities that it has in any given year.

So that is where political parties come in. Just like political parties on the national stage, ISU has had many different students start political parties throughout ASISU’s history. Last year, the majority party was called ASISU4U. This year I am part of a new party called the Amplify Party. Several other senators, and the incoming president and his VP are part of the party as well. The Amplify party has an agenda that can be summed up into a three letter acronym: ACT. A is for Activism, C is for Community, and T stands for Transparency. These are the guiding principles of the party, and all the goals that we have for next year are to advance one or more of those pillars.

The party has a few different specific goals going forward into next year. However, community is the most important of the three core principles to the party, and so it is the number one priority for us. Coming out of a year dominated and controlled by COVID, we’d like to see more engagement on campus (as safely as possible of course). In addition, we are going to use our positions in the senate to allocate resources towards clubs and student organizations in a more direct fashion than they are right now. We are working with faculty currently to host our own events early in the fall semester and have been, and will continue, reaching out to various ISU departments and club leaders to ensure that they are able to disperse information and get the support that they really really need this upcoming year.

The takeaway here is that ASISU is not meant to be an opaque or hidden institution and the more students that understand how it functions and want to influence how it operates, the better. If you have any questions or ideas that you would like to see implemented or if you are a club member or leader and would like information or support, reach out to me at alexdiviney@isu. edu or figure out who your college’s senator is and contact them. I am extremely excited for this next school year, and hope that you will help us create an active, innovative, open and welcoming campus this next year. Voice your roar and we’ll see you in the fall.