The Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) struck a motion to add a referendum question in the 2019 elections ballot, asking students whether they support a $0.43 increase per term in the Foot Patrol levy at its Jan. 8 council meeting.
Foot Patrol, one of CUSA’s 11 service centres, provides the Safe Walk program, where, if they feel unsafe, students can request a volunteer to walk them anywhere on campus, and the Walk and Talk program, where students can stay on the phone with a volunteer while walking to a destination.
The purpose of the $0.43 increase per semester is to provide mental health and first-aid training to volunteers, bring back the role of a volunteer coordinator, and create an app to facilitate electronic safe walk requests.
The total expense of providing mental health and first-aid training to volunteers is $2,250 and $2,500, respectively.
According to Liam Callaghan, Foot Patrol’s administrative coordinator, it’s important to increase the levy because it is the centre’s primary source of funding.
“Increasing that levy would provide a sustainable increase to our services, and allow us to address all these variety of issues and expansions that I’ve wanted to pursue, but we’ve been limited by the amount we currently have,” he said.
Callaghan said the idea of a safe walk app “has been floating around for years” and will “allow safe walks that aren’t comfortable calling or approaching the office.”
He said that people who considered using Foot Patrol services said they weren’t comfortable calling or dropping by the office, which are currently the only two ways of contacting Foot Patrol.
Making an app would “allow for the option of requesting a safe walk right away,” he said.
“The plan for the app is that someone puts a marker on a map, indicating that they need to be picked up at this building, send us a message if they’d like us to have any other information, and then we’d dispatch a team,” he added. “It would be really quick.”
According to him, the increase will also help the centre with its 2020 summer expansion plan.
“Currently we have plans to expand to summer operation. This was something I noticed last summer—we had missed several calls and some people emailed us, asking if we could stay open over the summer,” he said.
“With that in mind, and people requesting the service, I started looking into how to make that a reality—the things we need are a little bit of extra funding—I’ve only budgeted $1,000 for that,” he added.
“That $1,000 would cover everything from volunteer appreciation to office supplies and equipment maintenance for summer operation.”
According to David Oladejo, CUSA’s president, the purpose of having a referendum question on the election ballot is to avoid an additional expense.
“If we were to do an election as well as a Foot Patrol referendum, it is another cost that we have to incur,” he said. “The university helps us develop a software for online voting, so doing two things at one time helps us because we didn’t budget for a referendum.”
“I think it’s also better for engagement,” he added. “Hopefully, the voter turnout that we have for CUSA elections will carry over for the voter turnout for the Foot Patrol referendum.”
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