The Student Action party has announced four more candidates running under its banner for the ASUC Senate elections.
The candidates include Ryusei Best Hayashi, Hitesh Kamisetty, Tyler Mahomes-Kramer and Jordan Ullman. Their platforms advocate for greater representation for marginalized groups on campus and improving the quality of student services.
Candidates running under Student Action cite diversity as one central tenant to their platform. According to Best Hayashi, it is Student Action’s mission to “represent every community on campus.”
“We believe in diversity, and inclusion, which is why Student Action supports candidates from all different backgrounds to run,” Best Hayashi said in an email.
Kamisetty, a campus sophomore studying industrial engineering, believes in a similar sentiment. Working under the external vice president’s office of the Engineering Student Council, Kamisetty says he helped implement the “Blue and Gold Initiative,” legislation that encourages engineering organizations to become more inclusive and accessible.
“Some of the organizations on campus require you to come in essentially knowing all of what you would need to graduate,” Kamisetty said. “One of my objectives is to break down these barriers and provide students the opportunity to learn these skills, to be able to contribute and be part of these (organizations).”
Kamisetty said one way to do this is to encourage organizations to create mentorship programs so that applications will be open to more students. This would allow more students to participate within Berkeley’s “unique” campus organization culture, according to Kamisetty.
Tyler Mahomes-Kramer also wants to make participating in campus organizations easier. As the vice president of the campus’s Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, Mahomes-Kramer believes low-income students should have the opportunity to join fraternities and sororities. Mahomes-Kramer said he is running to develop scholarships for low-income students to afford the dues associated with Greek life.
Mahomes-Kramer also wishes to guide Greek life toward being more active in the local community.
“Donating is always great, but doing things like toy and food drives to local organizations is a great way to bring the community together and actually allow people in Greek life to give back to the local community,” Mahomes-Kramer said. “There’s so much we can do, and if there are more opportunities to serve, people will do it.”
Ullman, a campus sophomore minoring in Jewish studies, sees his candidacy as a means to represent the campus Jewish community.
“As the party that has historically represented Jewish students in the ASUC since 1995, I am humbled to announce my candidacy with Student Action,” Ullman said in an email.
Ullman’s platform consists of recruiting Jewish students, promoting basic needs provisions and providing academic and professional opportunities to all pre-graduate students. As a part of this, he has advocated for publishing a newsletter that identifies scholarship opportunities to undergraduate students.
In his current role as the chief of staff for ASUC Senator Jason Dones, Ullman says he has been prepared to advocate student needs to the administration, such as his recent work in opposing campus’s Instructional Resilience Enhancement Fee.
“Ultimately, it is through these experiences that I feel confident and prepared to deliver on my platforms, and it is my hope that we can come together as a university to facilitate change for future generations of Golden Bears,” Ullman said in the email.
