The Undergraduate Student Government has formed preliminary ideas for its three initiatives for the 2011-2012 school year. USG President Greg Scharine said they will revolve around neighborhood relations, the digital era and healthy living on campus.

“These are just ideas we discussed,” Scharine said. “These are kind of like the umbrella ideas in our initiatives, but we don’t exactly know how they’re going to happen. Nothing is final, but it’s kind of what we’re working on.”

Neighborhood relations was an initiative from last year that USG decided to carry over to this year. Scharine said after personal experience with living off campus, he thinks students could be more prepared.

“At 20 years old it was my first time living in a house on my own and not in the dorms,” Scharine said. “A lot of students think, ‘I don’t know how to act.’”

Scharine said USG came up with a possible solution for student-neighbor expectations.

“Basically we want to give a care package for neighbors and students with numbers and things like that,” Scharine said. “But we’d also like a resolution maybe from USG on some key things that might say, ‘this is what we expect from our students in the neighborhood, and this is what neighbors should expect from our students in the neighborhood.’”

Scharine also said USG wants to get more students to serve in the community with neighborhood litter pick-ups. Sophomore James Dohnalek said a litter pick-up would be beneficial.

“I think it’s a good idea because there’s a lot of trash out there after Saturday night or Friday night,” Dohnalek said.

USG hopes to cover a lot of ground with its digital era initiative as well. Scharine said he wants to “make a social media push to really bring the campus together.”

One idea under this initiative is to get credit and debit cards accepted as forms of payment on campus.

“It’d be good because most students don’t carry cash around,” Scharine said. “This could also be an and/or expansion of Express off-campus to be used at places like SA (Super America), which would make it more valuable. And if we expand the Express card, we want to be able to check our balances. This will help students to be able to budget better.”

Senior Jake Nelson said letting credit cards be used as a form of payment is long overdue.

“Because I work at Scooter’s, a lot of people would get annoyed by not being able to use a credit card,” Nelson said. “It doesn’t make sense why it’s not like that already.”

Scharine also said the council discussed forming an all-inclusive calender that would show students the events of the day and also be available as a smart phone app.

“When you read the Bulletin, it’s not until the end of the Bulletin that you see the events that are even going on today. For students that don’t live in the dorms, it’s very hard for us to put a central location of all these activities,” Scharine said. “So we’ve talked about making a smart phone app with nothing more than just the activities and where they are.”

In terms of the healthy living initiative, Scharine said USG wants to bring the farmer’s market back to campus and make students more aware of the Stewardship Garden.

“We want students to know about our Stewardship Garden and that they can use fruit and vegetables from there,” Scharine said.

Freshman Jacqueline Lucca said she thinks these are great ideas.

“I think they’d be good,” Lucca said. “I’d like more options for fresh fruit.”

Scharine also said USG formed a three-part nutrition plan. It would include nutrition classes from the Wellness Center providing healthy recipes for students. The council also wants the farmer’s market to bring in different guest speakers to talk about healthy options. Finally, Scharine said the plan would include nutritional facts and labels in dining areas.

“We’d like to maybe see the nutritional facts like on a board somewhere or maybe like a little healthy fruit or leaf by like different meals or different sandwiches that are extra healthy for you.”

Nelson said this could be hard to implement.

“I think it’s like something that everybody wants, but it seems like it’s something the food service people can’t do that much about,” Nelson said. “But I’d hope it works.”

The council also proposed a weight room orientation in its healthy living initiative.

“We talked about some students feeling kind of intimidated by using the new AARC equipment and weightlifting,” Scharine said. “So we were thinking of doing a day or two of a gym orientation for students.”

USG vice president Mike Orth said last year’s smoke-free initiative was brought up again, but the council decided not to make it one of the main three of this year.

“In the end we agreed that the initiative would work better as a longer term goal, something that we’d work with hand-in-hand with the administration as opposed to the goals that we have for this year,” Orth said. “It really is something that is a multi-year thing.”

He added, “It’ll be difficult to do in one year, and we realized that.”

The other initiative from last year was making the transfer student orientation an easier process.

Cynthia Johnson can be reached at john3175@stthomas.edu.