Duke Student Government seeks to reach out to community

BY ELLIOTT WOLF Guest columnist

As the new Student Body President at Duke University, I want to start by recognizing what is abundantly clear to members of the Duke community and Durham residents, but that is not often acknowledged by the Duke administration: Duke-Durham relations are, to put it mildly, strained. The events of the past few weeks have exacerbated an already tenuous relationship. It is a tough time for both Duke and Durham.

However, 'damage control' is not my intent. Tensions notwithstanding, the 6,400 undergraduate students at Duke are all Durham residents, and we should have far more contact (and not the kind of contact that generally occurs at 2 a.m. on a Sunday) with you, our neighbors. Community interaction is a major priority for the new Duke Student Government, and we have a long list of projects we want to pursue, including community service, Duke-NCCU joint initiatives and events that will facilitate student-community interaction.

But more than anything else, we want to work with you and be receptive to your concerns and ideas. Efforts to improve the Duke-Durham relationship and benefit the community are most successful when they originate from Duke students or the community itself -- not from us or the Duke administration -- and therefore we want to reach out to you early in our term and spend the summer forging relationships with our neighbors.

I already have many contacts in Durham from my work as a columnist for The Chronicle, but DSG as a whole still has a long way to go.

For that reason, I created the new cabinet position of community liaison, who will work closely with the Duke Office of Community Affairs, attend community meetings, and serve as a liaison between DSG/Duke students and the surrounding community. Our new community liaison, senior Daniel Bowes, lives in Trinity Park and will be serving on the board of the Trinity Park Neighborhood Association during the coming year. He is spending the summer meeting with neighborhood associations and community members and planning our efforts.

While Daniel is working to personally reach out to as many people as he can (and Jordan Giordano, the vice president for community interaction, and I will be joining him at many meetings over the summer and through the next year), we also encourage you to contact any or all of us directly. Daniel, Jordan and I will all be here this summer working on issues relating to Duke-Durham interaction. We are eager to meet and to work with as many of you as possible in the course of taking long overdue steps to bring Duke students and the community together.

Our personal contact information is as follows, and we look forward to hearing from you:

Elliott Wolf - Duke Student Government President

Cell: (301) 518-1632

Office: 684-3853

egw4@duke.edu

Daniel Bowes - Duke Student Government Community Liaison

(336) 263-7477

christopher.bowes@duke.edu

Jordan Giordano - Duke Student Government Vice President for Community Interaction (facilitates both interactions within the Duke undergraduate community and with Durham)

(908) 347-6032

jordan.giordano@duke.edu

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