Twenty-two candidates — three full tickets, three duos and one independent candidate — are in the running for five positions available on the undergraduate Student Association’s 2026-27 e-board: president, vice president for advocacy, vice president for clubs, vice president for events and treasurer.
The Spectrum interviewed 19 out of the 22 candidates in the race, where priorities of engagement, inclusivity and transparency took the forefront.
Kaly Lin, a candidate from the “UB Forward” party running for treasurer, answered The Spectrum’s questions by email due to academic and work conflicts.
The Spectrum reached out to Cielo Saric — a candidate under “The Student Voice” party running for vice president for events — with several requests for an interview but did not hear back in time for publication.
The “UB the Dream” party — a two-person ticket with Keegan Foxvog for president and Sanah Ali for treasurer — was also contacted by The Spectrum for an interview, but did not schedule one in time for publication.
Stand on Business
President: Benjamin Lau
Vice President for Advocacy: Brittiny Ando
Vice President for Clubs: Arko Saha
Vice President for Events: Hassan Fousseini
Treasurer: Adrian Espinal
This ticket wants to stand on business through transparency, accessibility and inclusion.
A major focus is restructuring how SA handles its finances. Proposed changes include letting vice presidents directly access funds for events, increasing students’ accessibility to information on the general ledger that documents SA and club budgets and changing the structure of supplementary funding to be less “first-come, first-serve.”
“People don’t know what we do with our money,” Espinal, an event coordinator for the Latin American Student Association, said. “I want to make sure it’s spread out and everyone knows what we do with our money.”
Saha looks to tackle SA policies on club violations, which often carry financial sanctions resulting in budget freezes — worsened by delays in appeals to get the club reinstated. He said that one of the clubs he was in got a violation that took months to resolve.
“I think it takes longer than it's supposed to, and when that happens, your budget gets frozen, and you cannot host events,” Saha, an event coordinator for the Bengali Student Association and the Hindu Students Council’s Buffalo chapter, said. “They’re just halted because, maybe it’s a misunderstanding or maybe it needs proper checking.”
Ando, secretary for the African Student Association and treasurer for the Public Health club, said that full transparency was needed, where even general communication with SA was hard. She proposed making mandatory council meetings where each club would send one to two representatives, weekly newsletters and creating more spaces to have meetings.
Campus-wide accessibility to events, especially for students living on UB’s South Campus or off-campus, is also a must. The group proposed increasing advertising efforts at on-campus living spaces and working with the university to secure shuttles that would go straight to SA’s events.
“That shouldn't be an issue,” Fousseini, an activities coordinator for the African Student Association, said. “Eespecially if you're in college, like you should want to go to these events, you should be able to go to the events, and the school should take care of that for you.”
Lau, SA’s current vice president for events, says that everyone has a proven record of what they’ve done.
“We’re a collective unit to the point where we know how to get things done, but we also know how we can do things differently to improve the student experience,” Lau said.
REAL
President: Jack Koscinski
Vice President for Advocacy: Na’Dia Carter
Vice President for Clubs: Pranavan Balachandran
Vice President for Events: William Dong
Treasurer: Laron Fomby
The “REAL” party had a lot of serious conversations and agreed on nearly everything, Fomby said.
What they agreed on most was to make SA more “human” above all.
“The bottom line for the whole campaign is trying to move SA away from being so rigid and making it a much more human, and a much easier to interact with, organization,” said Koscinski, SA’s current treasurer.
The party has three main ways to accomplish this: an SA staff directory where students could easily look up officers’ names and emails, public town halls and increased accessibility of financial transactions.
“SA is something that, whether a student knows or not, everyone interacts with it in some way,” said Balachandran, president of the Tamil Student Association.
Fomby — who’s worked in SA for the past two years — wants to make SA more approachable for financing clubs.
“I want to make sure club presidents and treasurers that have to deal with the finance system in SA have someone they can go to get a fast result, and not wait weeks for certain things,” Fomby said.
SA needs a more visible presence on campus, the group says.
Large events such as Fest will still continue, but new and smaller events will join the mix.
“I want to have more small events for more students so all people can get involved,” he said,” Dong, SA’s current vice president for clubs, said. “We don’t have anything for handicapped people for example, so we want to have more diverse programming for events that everyone can enjoy.”
SA won’t shy away from current issues, especially around the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“We want to make sure international students are supported both during and after college, that we make active steps towards helping them stay in this country if they want to, and to make it easier to stay on campus without fear of ICE coming,” Carter, SA’s assistant director of advocacy, said.
Koscinski called the group a “ticket of doers.”
“We just want more push for the things we’ve already been trying to do,” Koscinski said.
UB Forward
President: Grant Peterson
Vice President for Advocacy: Joshua Brodsky
Vice President for Clubs: Roja Khanam
Vice President for Events: Joe Laurita
Treasurer: Kaly Lin
The “UB Forward” party brings big dreams to the table with ideas that nearly overhaul SA’s club policies.
The group seeks to renovate the club budget tiering system, where clubs have to meet numbers of active members and meetings to qualify for a certain amount of money, into a more service-based model that allocates money based on student impact.
The current system measures a club’s activity by counting “active members” — the number of members that can vote in the club, determined by attendance requirements outlined in the club’s constitution.
The service-based model would see an increased emphasis on attendance, consistency of programming, campus impact, inclusivity and prior financial usage, according to Lin.
“If SA transitions to a service-based model, I would focus on allocating funds based on measurable impact rather than static tiers,” Lin, founder of the Creative Arts club, wrote in an email to The Spectrum.
Khanam says that club officers will have a voice in what the model looks like.
“At the end of the day, it is the people that are involved in the club that know the club very well and what kind of impact that they have,” Khanam, a freshman law major, said. “Even if big clubs have a lot of members, a lot of the time, they’re not active as well.”
SA interactions with clubs would see major changes.
The seven coordinators that oversee the club councils would also be moved into SA’s club services or finance departments. They will retain their roles, but would be required to be in SA’s spaces on the third floor to host regular office hours.
“Right now, SA is just shrouded in the mist of complete ineffectiveness at explaining what their office is, and inviting people to speak to them,” Peterson, a SA senator, said. “The weird thing with it is that this could be done so easily but it’s just not done for whatever reason.”
The events SA hosts don’t do enough to get students from different majors and years to meet each other, according to Laurita. He looks to bring local Buffalo artists to the UB community and to host more events during the winter, such as a winter fest.
“I want to see that type of love the community has for UB and returned,” Laurita, a freshman history major, said.
SA policies aren’t the only things that the party wants to change. They want to push a 24/7 dining option.
Goals include adding pre-made meals to vending machines and keeping dining halls open longer so students can eat something other than snacks during the early hours between 12:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m.
Higher wages and shorter periods for late-night shifts are proposed incentives.
“Us college kids, our sleep schedules are not good,” Brodsky, a SA senator, said.
Peterson also said he would divert SA funds in the organization’s development lines — which pay for travel expenses and SA merchandise — to food places that are run by UB’s Campus Dining and Shops or private companies, like Tim Hortons, that have a contract with UB.
Specific implementation plans are subject to further discussion with SA’s legal team but getting it done “shouldn’t be anything too complex,” Peterson said.
“So you would have to find a location that the contract would allow for it, which is not too difficult to do,” Peterson said.
SA President Aisha Adam told The Spectrum that diverting SA funds to dining shops would not be possible, where the only influence SA has regarding the topic would be to vocalize student complaints and input.
Student-run spaces, also under the university’s purview, are something the party wants to push.
Peterson vocally pushed the SA Senate to support the LGBTA club’s fight to keep a queer community space open in Student Union 373 throughout the fall semester, occasionally getting into brief clashes with other senators as a result.
The closest the Senate got to explicit support for SU 373 was in a resolution that supported student-run spaces and another that called upon the university to do a referendum on the general topic. Peterson and Brodsky co-sponsored the resolutions.
Specific details on how the university would run those spaces if reopened would be figured out later. Right now, according to Brodsky, communication will put the pressure needed on the university to follow through with the referendum.
“It’s all about communication,” Brodsky said. “We want that progress. We want that reform. We want that transparency.”
Tense exchanges between Peterson and other senators aren’t isolated to SU 373. In a Feb. 25 meeting, 13 senators had voted to forcefully keep Peterson on the advocacy committee — a contrast to a prior resignation request from another senator that was granted.
Peterson said that it just showed that the Senate is not an objective body.
“They’re very personally biased,” Peterson said.
Peterson also sued his prior college — Nassau Community College — in November over multiple NCC complaints against him that alleged “harassment” and “discrimination,” saying that they were in retaliation for his public criticism of the college. The allegations resulted in Peterson’s removal from student government and revocation of his tuition stipend.
Peterson also alleged that NCC discriminated against his handwriting disability when his Oct. 2024 complaint against staff was dismissed due to it being “illegible.”
NCC denied all retaliation and discrimination claims that Peterson, along with another NCC student, made, according to a response document filed last month.
Peterson says that he’s been transparent about the whole situation and that if people got ahold of the actual complaint documents, “nobody would take it seriously.”
“No reasonable person would take them seriously,” Peterson said. “There were a lot of claims made that were just so blatantly false that if you were in the student government meetings at NCC, you would be like, ‘This clearly did not happen.’”
Unity4UB
Vice President for Advocacy: Sierra Fernandez
Vice President for Clubs: Aidan Thomas
The “Unity4UB” party aims to prioritize achievable change over empty promises.
“There are ideas and there is action,” Fernandez, a SA senator, said. “We plan to bring action.”
Thomas’s goals are to restructure the mandatory club officer trainings, minimize accidental violations and add semesterly workshops to help clubs understand SA policies. He also intends to work with the university to change its room reservation policy — often a source of miscommunications and frustrations.
“I want the clubs to feel connected to SA,” Thomas, a SA senator, said. “I want them to feel like they have somebody they can come to.”
Fernandez wants to create relationships between SA and other campus organizations, including UB’s Residential Hall Association where she serves as a director for advocacy.
One of Fernandez’s main priorities is to address complaints on UB’s Campus Dining and Shops. She says that many students had expressed their frustration to her over recent, temporary closures of some places — including One World Cafe’s Noodle Pavillon — due to understaffing.
Additionally, there was increased wait times for students with dietary restrictions, according to Fernandez.
“Something that you don’t have control over should not be affecting how fast you get your food,” Fernandez said.
Fernandez also seeks to make UB’s campuses safer, through expanding on the current “Know Your Rights” campaign on SA’s Instagram that shares tips on how to deal with law enforcement officers.
“The beautiful thing about advocacy is it promotes this idea that small changes can make a big impact in a person’s life,” Fernandez said.
Fernandez and Thomas say that they’ll promote student accessibility to the SA Senate by hosting office hours and tabling events. Thomas went a step further to promise that he’ll meet with the e-board for every single SA club.
“We want Student Association to be someone you can come to and expect to see results,” Thomas said. “Not just someone that you give your ideas to and it sits on the back burner.”
The Student Voice
President: Aeaad Alawaad
Vice President for Events: Cielo Saric
The “Student Voice” party promises to live up to their party’s name through increased student engagement in SA and adding visibility to the organization’s role in the UB community.
“Everything that you give us, we will give back and we will let you be heard,” Alawaad said.
Alawaad — an SA senator — seeks to expand on ongoing initiatives led by this year’s e-board, but also to further a relationship with the university administration to secure jobs, funding and community outreach within the local Buffalo community.
“The current E-board is doing a ton of social media outreach for students here at UB,” Alawaad said. “They’re doing these details to make sure the students know, ‘Hey, this is going on.’”
Tabling and distribution of informational flyers on SA meetings are some of Alawaad’s proposed initiatives to get students more involved.
“I would love to hear from a bigger audience to tell us their dislikes and likes of what our policies are doing for them,” Alawaad said.
UB The Voice
President: Charlene Okine
Okine wants student voices to be better heard in SA.
Social media is her way to amplify them. It’s her main way of campaigning and interacting with voters, and is something she plans for SA to use in order to boost student engagement.
SA should use more social media platforms, such as TikTok, to promote events and share important announcements, according to Okine.
“I want to be more on social media,” Okine, a sophomore political science major, said. “I hear these students and I want to appeal to them.”
Boosting advertisements of SA events on social media is just the beginning; students need to have the time to attend.
Okine says that she was unable to participate in some of SA’s on-campus events, including the annual Homecoming Carnival, because of scheduling conflicts. She looks to push the events to begin later than the usual times of 5:00 p.m. or 6:00 p.m., allowing students time to go to evening classes or their homes prior.
“You can’t accommodate everyone all the time, but you can at least try to accommodate more people,” Okine said.
Spring Fest is an event Okine wants to see again.
“What happens to someone who decides, ‘Oh, I couldn’t go to Family Weekend because I had to go to work’? You missed out on getting to meet other students.” Okine said. “We need two events in a semester so people can get to know each other.”
The inclusivity Okine wants to see stretches outside of events and into issues students deal with in their day-to-day lives: improving on-campus food options, maintaining quiet hours and hosting more mental health events throughout test seasons.
Being able to advocate for students is something Okine is familiar with as an aspiring lawyer, having landed an internship at the Steel Law Firm this month.
“I’m ready to bring new ideas to the table,” Okine said. “I’m ready to bring more cultural events, more inclusivity, creating spaces for student voices.”
A public forum with the candidates will be held at 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursday night at Natural Sciences Complex 220.
Undergraduate students can begin voting from 9:00 a.m. Monday, March 30, to 4:00 p.m. Thursday, April 3, on UBLinked.
Mylien Lai is the senior news editor and can be reached at mylien.lai@ubspectrum.com.
The news desk can be reached at news@ubspectrum.com.
Mylien Lai is the senior news editor at The Spectrum. Outside of getting lost in Buffalo, she enjoys practicing the piano and being a bean plant mom. She can be found at @my_my_my_myliennnn on Instagram.
