Students erected a Wall of Burning Issues on Monday in the SUB, and student Travis McKenzie recited a poem encouraging the UNM community to participate in the event.

“Coming with the people, we are making the choice to stand up united — fight with our minds. Our words are our swords, and our thoughts are our knives,” he said.

About 50 students and organization representatives scribbled their concerns about UNM on the Wall of Burning Issues. Their comments related to problems with student advisement, sustainability and the smoking ban.

The wall acted as a backdrop Monday to the student town hall, which turned into a meet and greet between different organizations. The Student Action Network, a newly chartered organization that acts as a networking aid for organizations and students to get involved in the UNM community, put the event together, said McKenzie, who co-founded the group.

McKenzie said SAN is still useful for networking, even with Web sites like Facebook and Myspace.

“It’s the feeling,” he said. “Hopefully if you came, you felt welcome, you felt like you can be part of it, like you can participate. Hopefully, you didn’t feel isolated, and that is what we are trying to support.”

SAN was born out of Service Action Network, an organization that withered away a year ago. McKenzie and Daniel Marzec revived the Student Action Network this semester.

Since SAN is a young organization, the details of its mission have not been clearly fleshed out, and the two co-founders have different ideas about how SAN will evolve.
“SAN is absent of an ego,” McKenzie said. “It is not like SAN is going to make an official decision for an issue, because what we are is a network — a network that can say, ‘Here are the issues,’ all sides of the issues, then present all the information so everybody can decide for themselves.”­­

But Marzec said he sees SAN as more than a forum of ideas. He said he sees the network backing certain issues in the future.

“We are a network that, I believe, brings common themes that intertwine all these different organizations together,” Marzec said. “Then we will put those themes into a policy that we can introduce and bring into the agenda of those higher up.”

The common theme that will unite those issues is community service, the co-founders said. But they haven’t decided what specific issues, if any, to take up.

One possibility came from Andrew Marcum, a graduate teaching assistant in the Research Service Learning Program. He spoke at the town hall about a class that is designing a sustainability program for the dorms using student involvement.

“In my classes that I teach, we do research, but then we figure out how we can use that research,” Marcum said. “The idea behind it is to find a way to get students engaged in their community, but also to take the intellectual energy and the knowledge here on campus and direct it to serve the communities.”

Marcum said he showed up to the meeting to cheer on civic engagement.

“Cultivating an atmosphere of civic engagement on campus and making students realize it is their campus, and they should take responsibility for what is going on here — that is really a strong message,” he said.

McKenzie said one message SAN is already pushing is that community service doesn’t have to be a chore or a punishment.

“When you get into jail or a juvenile detention center, what are they going to make you do? Community service,” McKenzie said. “We are trying to flip the paradigm and say community service is being active in the communities we create.”