Student leaders from Registered Student Organizations throughout campus are scheduled to come together at the first Student Organization Cabinet meeting today.

Kaci Abolt, the student vice president for student affairs and a junior communication studies major, organized the Student Organization Cabinet, and said bringing students together from all kinds of different RSOs would be a powerful resource for the organizations to grow and develop.

“During these meetings, people will be able to share different ideas and practices with one another, which will add to their networking skills,” Abolt said. “The different things they learn will be easy to translate into methods that could be helpful to their organization, and then they will be able to take that back to their organization and implement it.”

Abolt said they will discuss what topics RSO members think are important to them at the meeting and, based off of those topics, it will determine the content of future meetings throughout the semester.

Examples of certain topics could be recruiting, fundraising, philanthropy projects and leadership experience, she said.

“One of the main goals of the Student Organization Cabinet is to identify the areas that impact the organizations the most and to then try to help improve resources that these organizations have,” Abolt said.

Any member of any RSO can come to the meetings, and students who are not in an RSO, who are thinking of possibly creating a new RSO, are also welcome to the meetings, she said.

“Everyone there will be a leader in some kind of a way, and as leaders we should all help each other,” Abolt said.

Abolt said the idea for the Student Organization Cabinet was developed after the fall Pantherpalooza when she was trying to think of a way to bring all of the student leaders together to gather input and determine what improvements should be made for the next Pantherpalooza.

“The idea expanded from there,” Abolt said. “Then we found out that there was a Student Organization Cabinet at Eastern, but it had fizzled out after a couple of years, and we figured it just needed to be revamped and recovered.”

The Student Organization Cabinet is scheduled to meet at 8:30 p.m. today in the Charleston-Mattoon Room in the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union.

Rachel Rodgers can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].