A month before the Initiative steering committee is expected to make a public statement about its progress thus far, the Dartmouth Action Network -- a group dedicated to including Dartmouth students and alumni in Trustee decisions -- has begun a fundraising campaign, but the organization still has no specific projects planned.
Action Network co-founder Steven Sugarman '97 said the group's main focus for now is "contacting and identifying alumni who will be active in our organization."
Student Assembly President Dean Krishna '01, a member of the Action Network's Executive Student Committee, said "I think they're trying to gain a certain dollar figure of monetary support and build more alumni support."
As for other Action Network activities, "This summer has been really low-key," he said.
"In the spring, the push was to pledge and support, monetarily or non-monetarily, the cause. Since then, we, the executive board, haven't heard anything. Our job is still recruiting," Krishna said.
"We've contacted about 10,000 alums and are having a 20 to 25 percent success rate," Sugarman said. "Our goal is to have over 10,000 supporters of the Action Network. The only thing in the way of getting the number of supporters is our ability to contact them about our objectives."
Sugarman said then-Acting Dean of the College Dan Nelson denied him access to addresses and other alumni information, and so funding is needed to identify, locate, and contact people.
"Fundraising is needed because the school has not made the process as simple as it could otherwise be," he said. "Basically, the majority of the money we're raising is to help us contact alumni and build a coalition."
Sugarman said the organization's focus will turn in the coming weeks more towards promoting other student and alumni concerns, including making Dartmouth more affordable.
"We will be putting out some financial aid initiatives, concentrating on the correlation between the ever-growing endowment and the growth in tuition," he said.
Krishna said he has a personal stake in the financial aid issue.
"My freshman year roommate can't be here because his financial aid package got changed. I think [the administration is] not really student friendly, sometimes," he said.
Krishna said while he doesn't know the specifics of what those financial aid initiatives will be, he does know students have concerns about the issue.
Aside from fundraising and building an alumni coalition, the Action Network's main goal for the immediate future is to garner recognition from the Trustees and the administration.
"We will be introducing ourselves to the administration more formally in early fall, asking to have an active role in any discussions they have that deal with those issues, and doing other grassroots advocacy things, making sure the administrators understand the depths of our support," Sugarman said.
Krishna said he will continue the Assembly's efforts to get a student vote for trustees -- now with the Action Network's help.
Since the organization's founding, Sugarman said its main accomplishment has been the formation of the Student Executive Committee, which he called "a diverse group of student leaders ... quality individuals."
He said about 700 students positively responded to an e-mail sent out during the Spring term, although he has not distinguished how many of that number are 99s and have since graduated and how many are current Dartmouth students.
Sugarman co-founded the Action Network with Richard Yeh '97 and David Hawkins '99, all members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity in the hopes of making the Trustees accountable to the opinions of Dartmouth students and alumni.
