GPSA promotes civic engagement

Pitt’s Graduate and Professional Student Assembly received a Good Government Award this year… Pitt’s Graduate and Professional Student Assembly received a Good Government Award this year for its dedication to making democracy stronger and encouraging students to get involved.

The League of Women Voters of Greater Pittsburgh honors citizens, organizations or businesses that have helped to better the relationship between citizens and the government with the annual award.

Nancy Naragon, the vice president of the organization, said that GPSA received the award this year because its mission and members “exemplify everything the award is about.”

Through various programs such as Pancakes and Politics, the student vote coalition and Pitt Day in Harrisburg, the GPSA members have “gone out of their way to make democracy stronger,” Naragon said.

The nonpartisan political organization that presents the Good Government Award grew out of the women’s suffrage movement. Once women won the right to vote, they realized they need to be educated so that they could vote intelligently, Naragon said.

In 1997, the League decided to honor people who stepped up and went the extra mile to make democracy stronger in Allegheny County. Since its initiation, the league has given over 60 awards to different individuals, organizations and businesses.

Past winners include Bill Isler, CEO of The Fred Rogers Company that produced Mister Roger’s Neighborhood; North Hills Community Outreach; former chief executive of Allegheny County Jim Roddey, and the Allegheny County Charter Drafting Committee.

Nila Devanath, the GPSA’s president at the time the group received the award, said she was very shocked but pleased when she got a call at home saying that the organization won the 2011 award. Both GPSA and Student Government Board were nominated for the award last year but didn’t win.

“I felt that one of my goals as president was to combine our powers with SGB to do bigger and better things,” Devanath said. “So I started working with SGB and really pushed graduate and professional students into civic engagement.”

GPSA, the governing body for all graduate and professional students at Pitt, won the award for getting students involved in politics, primarily through various programs that it has put on during the past year.

In May 2010, GPSA started working on bringing together a civic student engagement campaign with SGB, which encompassed a variety of different initiatives. These included a student vote coalition to get students to register to vote and a voter registration drive, Devanath said.

David Givens, the current vice president of committees for GPSA, said that GPSA has voter registration forms at every event it puts on, including each school’s orientation in August and the welcome back picnic, to impress upon students the need to register to vote. The group will even mail the forms for students once they are filled out.

“[Voting] is one way that anyone can make their voice heard,” Givens said.

The campaign also included Pancakes and Politics, an event series which brings in politicians such as Rep. Mike Doyle, state Sen. Jay Costa and state Rep. Jaret Gibbons to talk to students in an informal setting about current issues.

On Sept. 7, 2010, Devanath said she worked with Patrick Dowd, District 7 city councilman, to proclaim September student civic engagement month in Pittsburgh. Her hope was to encourage schools around the city to use that month as a kickoff point to start the voter registration process, since in the past Pitt have only participated civically in presidential elections.

“Our hope was that by incorporating the city into this, it [would] rebuild relations after the city tuition tax [discussion] and also act as a kicking-off point at a time when students are coming back,” Devanath said.

GPSA also got involved with government when Port Authority was facing major funding cuts from the state in November. Devanath said the organization put up a petition website on its server that allowed students to find their state representative’s email address so that they could contact them with their concerns.

Devanath said the petition got more than 600 signatures and that she got calls from state Senators asking her to shut down the website because of the volume of emails they were receiving from students.

GPSA made a similar website where students could find their representatives and email them over the budget issue in March. This website was put on by the coalition of Pennsylvania students and reached more than 5,000 signatures of students across the state. Once again, the organization got calls from representatives saying they wanted the website to stop, Devanath said.

The organization also put together a letter-writing day with SGB after Gov. Tom Corbett announced the potential 50-percent funding cuts to higher education. The event sent out around 300 letters to legislators in Harrisburg.

GPSA also played a part in Pitt Day in Harrisburg. Devanath said that even though SGB put on the event, a good number of graduate students participated, the largest showing they have ever made.

And the next day, April 6, was Pittsburgh Student Government Council Lobby Day. Devanath holds the council chair for that organization, which represents colleges and universities throughout Pittsburgh. She said that they had more than 40 visits with state representatives and senators regarding how higher education cuts and Port Authority cuts were affecting students in Pittsburgh.

Givens said that GPSA has always been involved in representing student interests at both the government level and within the University.

GPSA has student representatives sitting on 58 various University committees, including the Board of Trustees, the University Senate committees and the Provost Committees, to “make sure that the administration represents our interests,” Givens said.

This year GPSA was nominated for the award by the Doyle, nonprofit organization the Pittsburgh Urban Magnet Project (PUMP), the Pittsburgh Council on Higher Education, Pitt’s Office of the Chancellor, Office of

Governmental Relations and Student Affairs, Devanath said.

Nominations can come from anyone, and once it receives the nominations, the League then selects the winners — which are usually three or four each year. Naragon said that the winners are chosen for various reasons such as timeliness or how long some people have been around.

The winners of the Good Government Award this year include A+ Schools, an independent community advocate for improvement in public education in Pittsburgh; Dan Onarato, Allegheny County executive who ran for governor in 2010, and individuals Tom and Bonnie VanKirk.

All the winners will be honored at a fundraiser dinner on Oct. 27 at Station Square.

Givens said that it was nice to hear that other people were taking notice of the efforts GPSA has made over the past several years.

“I was very, very pleased to hear that our efforts we’ve gone through over the past two years had received that recognition,” Givens said.

“Of course, we don’t do it for the recognition — our mission and passion is to help our fellow students here.”