Fourth-year College student Valentina Mendoza Gonzalez served as Student Council’s 78th president from March 31, 2024 to March 30, 2025. Mendoza Gonzalez’s presidential term focused on ensuring Student Council growth by improving the organizational efficiency of Student Council and supporting student voices through increased Council representation.
“I remember, a year ago today, when we were doing the transition ceremony, my promise for the term was to protect and support students and create an environment where not only could we survive, but we could be selfish in our pursuit of growth,” Mendoza Gonzalez said.
Mendoza Gonzalez said she feels she rose to her presidency in an unconventional way, joining Student Council as a third-year and running for president just the year after. During her third-year, she served as director of coalition engagement, acting as a liaison between administration and the student body. The responsibilities of this position include informing student groups of Council resources and sharing information collected from the University administration with the general body.
Her decision to run for president came from her strong desire to unite the student body and create a community that would leave things better than when she started her time at the University. As part of the 7.8 percent of Latin American students at the University and the first in her family to go to an American university, Mendoza Gonzalez said that her accomplishments were in part due to the culture created by the student leaders who came before her and that her goals as president included strengthening that foundation for years to come.
“I’m the first Latina Student Council president, but that was not my doing, there’s so [much] work of past change makers who made that possible,” Mendoza Gonzalez said. “I wanted to lead the student body in thinking about what we do today … in a way that’s going to impact years to come, and there’s going to be students in ten years [who say], ‘because of these people, I can do this.’”
Mendoza Gonzalez said that underrepresentation in terms of both minority students and students with a diverse array of academic and social interests was an issue at the forefront of her term for two distinct reasons — a lack of trust and accessibility
Student Council works directly with University administration, and not every student group feels University administrators are trustworthy in representing the needs of all students. Student Council is also inaccessible to many students as it is not fully representative of the diverse student population at the University, Mendoza Gonzalez noted.
“We have institutional ties … and not every group of students feels like that's a trustworthy organization when they have issues with the institution,” Mendoza Gonzalez said.
One improvement made to Council representation was the addition of a student-athlete representative seat to the Student Council general body because athletes face problems that the typical student does not.
Mendoza Gonzalez stated she was proud of this decision, and she wished students knew they could be represented by just showing up to any general body meeting. All University students are able to speak during public comment — a period of time at the end of meetings in which students can sign up to make general statements or speak on ongoing legislation.
“The beauty of this legislation [for a student-athlete seat] was that a student community reached out to us and said, ‘we want representation in student-self governance,’” Mendoza Gonzalez said.
Mendoza Gonzalez also worked to improve the organization and efficiency of Student Council through the addition of a student-athlete representative seat to improve Student Council’s representation of the entire student body and the establishment of The Capital Campaign, the compilation of relevant project management data.
In accordance with her mission of building a Council that can operate efficiently for many years to come, Mendoza Gonzalez helped to establish the Capital Campaign. She worked with Ryan Bowers, former vice president for organizations and fourth-year Commerce student, and Brookelyn Mitchell, former vice president for administration and fourth-year College student, to establish this program which aims to provide Student Council with autonomous financial stability through alumni donations.
Mendoza Gonzalez said funding for Student Council currently comes from the Student Activities Fee — a $58 fee each University student pays every academic year. Another major contribution came from University President Jim Ryan’s gift of $250,000 per year for three years in fall 2023. He then announced he would extend this funding with $500,000 for another two years in January. She said the establishment of the Capital Campaign was not done out of risk of Student Council’s funding being depleted, but rather so Student Council can continue expanding its services to students.
“We want to get to a point where we’re financially autonomous and have some sovereignty in our finances, in the sense that we can continue to scale,” Mendoza Gonzalez said.
The extension of Ryan’s gift came after Student Council presented him with student utilization data of the Support and Access Services branch – established in 2021 to assist students in receiving accommodations access funding and other direct services. Mendoza Gonzalez helped to compile this data which inspired Ryan’s decision, stating that pooling these numbers together was likely a driving factor in Ryan’s decision by allowing him to visualize the impact of SAS on the student body.
Mendoza Gonzalez stated that she believes data has the power to tell the stories of many underprivileged students who rely on Student Council for help, while also motivating the members of the SAS branch to keep up their work because they could see how important it was.
“By collecting the data of all of the services that live underneath the SAS brands, we were able to tell [students’] stories,” Mendoza Gonzalez said. “I think [this] was not only the driving factor of the extension of President Ryan's gift, but it also [provided] this positive feedback loop of the folks who work in SAS… I think it also makes us feel more aligned with the work that we're doing.”
Additionally, Mendoza Gonzalez worked with the rest of the executive board — which included Bowers, Mitchell and six other branch chiefs — to create an end-of-term report to organize all Student Council projects from throughout the year. She said this report tracked which members started which projects and whether or not those projects were finished to avoid wasting time in restarting a project that is already underway.
Looking back at her term, Mendoza Gonzalez said a lot of Student Council’s work centered around budgeting and financing to make the organization more stable as seen through the Capital Campaign and data compilation efforts. She said her prediction for the coming year is that Student Council will be more focused on executing the initiatives that have now been built — especially because unfinished projects are clearly organized and can be picked up again.
“I think this next year is going to be all about communication and marketing,” Mendoza Gonzalez said. “Now that we feel like we have our mission aligned internally, how can we have folks understand that our mission is to protect and support all students?”
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