At its first official session of the year Wednesday night, the Duke Student Government Senate voted not to charter The Girls Club organization amidst concerns from the Community Service Center.
The Girls Club, explained program coordinator and co-founder Venus Wilder, is a mentoring program for adolescent girls at the West End Teen Center that started out of Public Policy Professor of the Practice Tony Brown's Enterprising Leadership class. "We are working to link Duke women to adolescent Durham girls," she said.
Wilder said the program, which works out of the Office of Community Affairs, had received funding from Senior Vice President for Alumni Affairs and Development John Piva, Senior Vice President for Public Affairs and Governmental Relations John Burness, private donors and had a first-year budget of $7,000.
DSG President Matthew Slovik yielded time to CSC Student Co-Director Heidi Schumacher, who expressed concerns over the group's alleged plagiarism, failure to collaborate with other groups and the background training of mentors to discuss certain issues with the girls.
"We do have some concerns about The Girls Club as an organization. When they presented their proposal to Tony Brown for their course they used a model from the Partners for Youth organization, which is under the Neighborhood Parternship. I haven't seen the document, [but] Leigh Bordley, who is the person who wrote the proposal for the Partners for Youth program, was very upset when she found that certain parts had been copied word for word in their proposal," Schumacher said. While careful to point out that the CSC applauded the community service work that The Girls Club aimed to do, she explained the center had its reservations.
"In addition, the Girls Club came to the CSC in the spring and we encouraged them to work with an existing organization and they then went to DSG and said they had spoken to us and gotten the CSC's word to go ahead; that wasn't in fact what had occurred. So while we very much support the work they are doing, we have some concerns," Schumacher said.
Wilder defended The Girls Club.
"There was usage of some of the outline from Partners for Youth and that has been corrected. The application itself is completely revamped," Wilder said. She added that there were no judicial ramifications however.
IN OTHER BUSINESS:
DSG voted to recognize Duke Students for Edwards, the Society for Success and Leadership and Students Against Multiple Sclerosis as well as charter Project Medishare and renew the charter for the Student of Caribbean Association.
At-Large Senators were approved and sworn into office along with the Senate-elect. Alex Barna was appointed chair of the DSG Curriculum 2000 Review Ad-hoc Committee, David Kahne was appointed chair of the DSG Reorganization Ad-hoc Committee and Mike Lynch was appointed Director of DSG Development, a newly established position.
Elections were held for the Student Organizational Finance Committee and the DSG Judiciary Committee. Kelvin Lo, Josh Allen-Dicker, Jeff Federspiel, Meera Patel and Keith Rand were elected to SOFC; Jay McKenna, Gus Golden, Dori Mayne, Margaret Andrews, Rishi Vasudeva, and Vyacheslav Kunaurcsev ere elected to the Judiciary.
Legislative Assistants were appointed for each of the committees including Jenny Woodson for Academic Affairs, Jennika Suero for Community Interaction, Emily Aviki and Kathleen Greene for Facilities and Athletics, and Dan Riley for Student Affairs.
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