If you don’t know Brielle Lacroix as your FROG (First yeaR Orientation Guide) or your OPA (Orientation Peer Advisor) (like me!), then you definitely know her as the Student Body President of James Madison University. A senior Public Administration major, Brielle and student government are one and the same, making her a familiar face around JMU’s campus. Speaking with Brielle, you can see her warmth and excitement about working for and with people. It just comes naturally to her. Throughout our interview, she constantly wore a smile and made sure to greet people as they entered and exited the Student Government Office. She truly made this interview exciting to conduct and write.
Okay, so tell me a bit about yourself. Just, like, your life and JMU and all that fun stuff.
So I’m originally from New Jersey; I’m an out-of-state student. I loved growing up there. [I] was there for 18 years of my life, learned a whole bunch there, and decided to come to JMU during the pandemic without a really good reason (aside from the fact that I liked purple and gold and thought Duke Dog was cool). I was a Marching Royal Duke (MRD) originally, [and] I absolutely loved my time in the MRDs. That was my first, like, family I found on campus. Like, my first home.
Sophomore year, I was just kind of chilling, but I took on a little bit more leadership responsibility. My spring semester, I was our scholarship head for Student Ambassadors. That was a project recognizing the memory of Carrie Kuttner, a former student ambassador who’d passed away from cancer. So we give a scholarship out to a student in her name every year [and] it’s the only student-given student scholarship, which was really important to me. I also became the Ring Committee chair for student government, which was an awesome position. It was my first real time, like, having a project and a goal, and also my first time managing a budget.
Junior year, I became our Chief of Staff for Student Government. I actually ran for Student Body President going into my junior year prior to getting the Chief of Staff position, but I did not win. At the time, that felt like the absolute end of the world. I couldn’t believe that I’d put myself out there, done all this stuff and ran this campaign, only for it to not work out. I was really embarrassed and a little bit hurt, and really did think that was kind of the end of everything. But, you know, as you’ve got to in that situation, I got up, dusted myself off, and became our Chief of Staff. The Chief of Staff does pretty much all the back-end work, all the behind-the-scenes stuff. Stuff like booking the rooms, taking minutes, and event planning. It was a perfect job for me to get to know [how] everything worked, but not have to be the face of everything.
Then, I decided to run for Student Body President again in the spring of my junior year, and that was a hard decision. People asked me all through junior year, like, “Oh, are you running again? Are you planning to run again?” That was my most asked question and I said nothing. I kept it very tight-lipped up until I had to officially announce, and the support the second time around was just the craziest thing I’ve ever experienced. So many texts, kind words, phone calls, and just people who were genuinely really excited to see me go back at it again and try to win the second time around. I was not anywhere near as anxious or as worried. It was very much like, “I’ve done my time now. I’ve really worked my butt off; I have made the connections.” There really wasn’t a reason in my mind that I should have lost, so I was very excited when I did win. Sometimes it’s hard here to see your hard work pay off. There are a lot of things that you really put your mind, time, and effort into that you don’t get to see a physical reward for. Winning this position, for me, was like, “Okay, every sleepless night you’ve had, every email that you’ve had to send, every long conversation, every hard conversation, was worth it. You’ve got this job now.”
Then, oh my gosh, little did I know how difficult it was actually going to be! I guess I should have known, just, like, with the big title and everything comes a lot of responsibility. But it’s been just crazy since I was elected. I mean, as soon as I got elected, we had the protests that happened on campus last spring. That was, you know, like three or four days after I was elected. It was my first time seeing students really want something and be denied it. So, I was kind of wrestling with that. It very quickly became a very political and politicized landscape. I wondered, what can I say and what can I not say? I was a university actor with this job, but I was also just Brielle having friends. It’s just, like, the mental game of being Student Body President is the part that people don’t really get to see, but it’s very much prevalent and very much there. But I got lucky. I got to hire an awesome team, had great people that I got to work with every day, and got to really build something very special.
So, since you brought it up, can we talk about, like, how it was navigating the [Palestine] protests as Student Body President? How was it managing that? And then, how are you still trying to manage that and mitigate that kind of stuff?
Yeah, absolutely. I was Student Body President-elect when the protests happened, so [I] wasn’t even fully inaugurated into the role. So at the time, there was very little I actually could do. I didn’t have the position, I just kind of had the heart for it. So I reached out in the way that I could. I Instagram DM’d the group that was running it and was like, “Hey, what kind of support can I provide?”. I never ended up getting a response back. However, I did meet the person who ran the Instagram account afterward and we got to have a conversation, which was nice. So, I just committed to being informed. I would do my best to research the issue and try to understand and see both sides. We had a very public group on campus; we also had a silent group, a group that wasn’t out there talking about opinions and perspectives.
One thing about being Student Body President is that I’m a president for all of campus. In my opinion, putting myself out there and promoting one view or one perspective completely disengages a group of people that might disagree with me and actually loses me credibility. What I’ve tried to do instead is be someone who is constantly opening myself up to questions about policies. Specifically, I posted a question box on my Instagram. I had probably 10 to 12 people reach out, and I personally got each of their questions answered and got back to them. I couldn’t make a public statement, [but] I did really want to be able to provide information and help for those students.
That’s really interesting to hear because it is so new. I remember that was right at the end of the year, too. So, just like all this change, and then we left.
And it’s important to have an administrative perspective. I meet with Tim Miller every week, and he’s been a great resource to ask questions. There’s just so much about the university that students can’t even wrap their minds around when it comes to decision-making and policy. Safety is always the university’s number one concern, which I feel doesn’t come up enough in the idea of freedom of expression and freedom of speech. The new policies on campus are the lengths that you sometimes have to go to keep people safe. I think that’s kind of an often-disregarded factor, but one that is really important to me and one that I consistently promote in my answers. If there are a lot of people in a very public space, there are going to be safety concerns and different opinions being quoted around campus. Like, we’re worried about students getting retribution, and so that kind of safety aspect, I think, is really important and something I’ve learned a lot about in this role.
We know what inspired you to run for president, but what inspired you to be so involved at JMU? What was that kind of driving factor during your freshman year?
I feel like we use COVID-19 a lot, but for me, it was definitely COVID-19. I was relatively involved in high school as the drum major of my high school’s marching band. I was also in a couple of different honor societies and some other random clubs. COVID-19 came during the middle of my junior year and took away everything that I worked for. I wasn’t able to have any big leadership positions my senior year like I’d really wanted to, or to invest all the time, energy, and passion that I had into what I was a part of. It left me very apathetic in my college search process; like, criteria number one was to get out of my hometown and go somewhere else. When I got to JMU, the first thing I wanted to do was direct all of that passion and energy into anything here. I got lucky. The MRDs was something I was very passionate about for two years, and I got to put time, energy, patience, and respect into that organization. Then I found Student Ambassadors. I think that was another driving force (besides my high school leadership being kind of shortened by COVID-19) — all the people that I’ve met through Student Ambassadors. Student Ambassadors [was], like, that first group of people that I met who loved everything about this place and made it cool to have school spirit and be involved. That might not be the coolest thing all the time, but for that group it was. It was very nice to see other people that cared and really wanted to create change on campus, and it pushed me to be the best version of myself for myself and for them. It pushed me to be a representative who could really harness all of their energy and trust in me to help others.
What did you play in the MRDs?
I was a mellophone player, which is, like, the least-known instrument in the world, but I played the French horn for 11 years and the mellophone is the marching version of the French horn.
How do you balance everything that comes with being a senior student, being Student Body President, and also just being Brielle?
That is a great question, and I wish that I had a super comprehensive answer. Being the Student Body President is a full-time job. One thing that really helps me is that I do try to restrict most of my work as Student Body President to work hours. So, if I receive an email or a text at 8 p.m. at night, I will always wait to respond until the next morning just because it helps me out a lot. So, I do try to keep it to work hours as much as possible. However, you know, I do have friends reaching out and asking questions kind of at all hours of the day. A lot of people use me as their first step. You know, if you have a personal connection with the Student Body President, like…I love being the first person that people go to with their questions. And so I get a lot of that all the time, but like, work hours-wise, it is, I mean, constant. I have a lot of pretty comprehensive projects that I’m working on at the moment, I think I’m up to, like, six or seven, which all require different groups of people and teams and all of that. And that’s just, like, the personal side of it, like the personal stuff I’m working on.
Running the Student Government Association in this organization is also crazy. I have 13 people who report directly to me, so I’m answering their questions and helping them along. And they’re all overseeing anywhere from, like, eight to 15 people themselves. So any questions that they have just move all the way up, [which] takes a while. I’m also taking 13 credits; I’m a full-time student, which is a blessing and a blast. I don’t talk about my academics enough, but I love my major. I love public administration, my classes, and my teachers. Unfortunately, this year, it hasn’t gotten the attention it should. Everybody told me coming to this role, like, you’re a student first, you’re a student first. I was like, of course, I’m a student first, like, I’ve always been a student first, like, I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine. I didn’t realize how hard it would be. It is definitely very challenging, but it’s been good. I have lots of accommodating teachers this semester, which is nice.
As far as managing it, that I’m still working on. I keep a meticulous calendar down to the minute of what I do every day. I work with my calendar and my Outlook for time management, but it also really is just a lot of experience. I’ve had lots of jobs in the past. I realized recently that I have definitely scaffolded myself out properly. I did minor leadership positions to, like, semi-major to major. So I really did work my way up from the bottom, which has helped me tremendously in just understanding, like, what time looks like, what my schedule looks like, and what I need. So that’s been really helpful; I did a good job with good trajectory and good time.
What’s the most rewarding part of being in Student Government, and what have you seen come out of being president so far?
For sure it’ll always be the growth of other people. I am a huge personal and professional developer. I love to help people get better at their job, get better at being themselves, or whatever it is that they’re working toward. It started, like, when I was an Alternative Spring Break leader. I did that two years in a row, and getting to bring a team of people to a whole new place and teach them about that area and the ethics of the problem that we’re working toward was really rewarding. I got to teach others how to be conscious volunteers and just got to see them, even in a one-week span, really grow from where they started into more conscious citizens. And then moving into the OPA role, and even just in, like, one day, helping students to feel more confident at JMU, to make friends, and to learn more about where they’re going. And, I mean, it’s just one day, but it really does help you to feel much more connected to campus and much more sure of where you’re going. So I went from helping in that way to being a FROG this year and getting to spend a little over two weeks with my students. I still get texts from my students to this day and see them all over the place across campus. The most rewarding outcome of anything I do is getting people to grow. Like I said, I oversee 13 people and, I mean, it’s been a month and it’s already been kind of night and day with some people in terms of how they carry themselves and how they manage projects and time. I think they all have such a capacity for growth. So, yeah, that development opportunity and getting to see growth and change in others will always be the number one benefit.
I was told to ask you about your cat, George.
This is perfect, I love to talk about George. So, I got George when I was eight. He was my family’s cat. I actually adopted his sister, Jenny, and my twin brother got George. [He] was absolutely my rock, …during my worst moments, George will just pop up with his little face and his perfectly scratchable head, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, you’re just the cutest guy ever.” All through high school he was there and all through COVID-19 he was there; through everything that happened, George was always there. When I moved in freshman year, I looked at every possible way that I could find to bring him to campus with me. Probably the thing I talked to my mom about the most was checking in on George; seeing how he was doing, saying that I missed him. And then finally, [when] I moved off campus, he moved in with me on the first day. He’s perfect. He’s orange, and he’s just like the friendliest little guy you’ll ever meet. He took to my roommates [and] immediately took to the house. He loves being a college cat, and he is just the most perfect little baby in the world. Behind every strong woman is a cat, like, that’s my little guy.
Vocelli Pizza decided they wanted to know, does pineapple belong on pizza?
I’m so glad they were interested, and I’m sure they’d be happy to know that I do personally believe pineapple belongs on pizza. I know that might not be the most popular opinion. It’s not what I would order immediately. I’m a cheese girl through and through. But if someone got a pineapple, or, like, a pineapple, mushroom, and green pepper pizza? That would be for Brielle.
You sent an email about Sustain JMU. Can you tell me about that?
Absolutely. One big project that I got to work on last year as an SGA member was something called the “Sustainability Bill of Opinion”. And so basically, that was us looking at JMU and realizing that we are not doing the most we can to academically prepare students in terms of sustainability. We’ve got lots of great clubs, we’ve got a really awesome office, but in terms of, like, academic in-the-classroom time, students are not being exposed to sustainability enough. We have like 80-something classes that are tagged as sustainability classes. We don’t have a sustainability major or minor. We have different majors or minors that could kind of fit into sustainability, but lots of other schools in our area have full-on major or minor programs for sustainability.
So, I went out and put together this bill with a bunch of facts and different things about why I thought it was really important that students learn about sustainability. For all the readers, sustainability has three components, even though most people think it’s just one. Environmental sustainability is the most well-known component, but financial sustainability and social sustainability are the other two components, and all three of them are required to have a full understanding of sustainability. So, even thinking about, like, how JMU doesn’t really have a great personal finance program for students could be considered kind of an issue of sustainability. So I went out and I talked to a whole bunch of students; I had a Google Form that I was having them fill out with their experiences surrounding sustainability in the classroom and what they thought about it. I also traveled to a bunch of different classrooms. [About] 500 students were like, “We have not seen enough sustainability, and we want to see more. We agree and we are on board.” I took that to our General Education Council and gave them those reports.
[In] that process I learned a lot about what it takes to impact the Gen Ed program, because it had been my goal to put it into a Gen Ed class somehow. But the general education program is pretty strictly state-mandated; it covers lots of different things. There are so many teachers who teach in the department, and if I wanted them to properly integrate sustainability into their coursework, I’d obviously have to pay them, as you would if you were asking anybody to put in extra work. …What I’ve decided to do is, rather than just saying, “Hey, students want this; do something about it.”, take it into my own hands and do something on my end.
So, two friends and I started a club called Sustain JMU, a sustainability club that is specifically focused on academics. There are lots of sustainability clubs that are service-based or that are just kind of, like, general learning about sustainability. Sustain JMU is full-on giving students the opportunity to learn and create research presentations and papers about sustainability. They get to present at different conferences, share their work with others, and get peer-review opportunities. The idea is to put more people out into the world who are knowledgeable and have real work experience with sustainability. That’s what we are lacking at JMU, those real things that you can talk to employers about, put on your resume, and use as work experience. Right now, if they were to go into the workforce, we don’t really have that program here at JMU. So, the club is kind of intended to give them a step-up; we try not [to] push them toward sustainability-oriented jobs, but instead give them the opportunity to do that if they want to with a little bit more advantage and experience.
What has been your favorite thing you’ve done as president so far, or maybe some behind-the-scenes work that people don’t know about?
Probably my favorite thing that I’ve gotten to be a part of is our Okanagan Charter working group through the President’s Council for Health and Well-Being. I did not run on a platform of health and wellness. It was not something I ever thought that I would be interested in. But I got to work for Dr. Kristina Byler this summer and learned about how important health and wellness are and also how integrated they are into student success and sustainability (which is a huge passion of mine). We’re adopting the charter in October, and it basically includes guiding principles and a framework for how to promote health on your campus as much as possible. It looks at lots of different metrics and statistics, and the team had been working on it for two years before I joined them. I’ve just kind of hopped on as part of their events team, helping them plan for the actual event that’s happening in October. But I’ve just learned so much, and really gotten to be very knowledgeable about health and wellness. This has been so exciting, and now it’s one of those things where I’m like, “Oh, I could go into community health, I could totally do health promotion on a larger scale.” It’s just so interesting and so vital. So, that’s been really exciting. And that’s also been a good administrative thing to work on and see how the university handles different topics. I’m the only student in that working group, and it’s exciting to bring a student’s perspective to that space.
In terms of Student Government, we just had our new member application cycle and around 40 new members joined the organization. That has just been such a rewarding process. I got to see that start with applications going out all the way until conducting three full days of interviews. I’m proud to announce that I do know everyone’s first and last name, and make a point to really learn people’s names and faces and answer every question that they have or could possibly have. So, just to be at the forefront of building their experience and giving them a club that is going to lead them to new friends and make their college experiences exciting is very, very rewarding.
What are your plans for your term as president? What are you hoping to bring to JMU?
I ran on a platform of sustainability, community engagement and student awareness, and support resources. I have done a really good job of making sure that all of my projects so far kind of align with one of those three things. So, as far as sustainability, getting that Okanagan Charter adopted in October is going to be awesome, and getting Sustain JMU off the ground as, like, a legitimate organization that can prosper for years to come. There’s also community engagement; I got to speak at Block Party in the ‘Burg, which was, like, the most exciting thing ever. That’s my favorite Weeks of Welcome event. I’m also bringing back the Homecoming Parade, which falls into that category and has been so much fun. That was the parade that used to happen on campus up until a little bit before COVID-19, then kind of died off and just went down. But I’m really excited about that, and we’re entering the stage where we’re doing a lot of community promotion to get community members to come to campus, engage with student organizations, and feel the spirit of Homecoming. We forget that Harrisonburg is really essential to people’s experiences at JMU, and so giving people coming back as much exposure to, like, campus and downtown. We’re also currently working on designing stickers for alumni-owned businesses that we can give out, so people at a glance can see, “Oh, a JMU alum owns this business,” which hopefully will kind of bring that Homecoming spirit to downtown as well.
And then, right before this, actually, I had a meeting with one of the Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance interns, and we are working on a very cool student-centered project to [get] Harrisburg citizens onto campus and JMU students out into the Harrisonburg community. So [I] can’t quite reveal the details of that project, because it’s still in the very early developmental planning stages, [but] we did nail down exactly what we’re doing and a good long-term game plan today. So, I’m really excited; that’s going to be an awesome way to get students downtown and just get them more integrated with the community.
I am also entering the end of my term as a teacher. I’m teaching a first-year class right now, which has been awesome. I’m co-teaching alongside Dr. Paul Mabrey, who works in assessment. The course is called University Studies 160, and it is just all about JMU (essentially, JMU 101). We’ve talked through a lot of different important stuff like campus buses, study spaces in the libraries, time management skills, close reading, and just a whole bunch of different stuff trying to get them as prepped as possible. Once that class ends, all of the information that I shared with my class will be going out in the form of social media posts. I’ve spent many an hour on Canva at this point, creating lesson plans and work-throughs for the students in the first-year seminar class to be translated over to social media. And then, also in that category, I’m just trying to be in as many places as possible, to really put myself out there. I try to engage with as many campus offices as possible and see as many students as possible every day. I’ve taken lots of requests to show up places, to speak at different things; anything like that that comes my way becomes a priority.
And then, I’ll share one more abstract kind of goal, too. I feel like right now, people don’t have a lot of faith in government at all. And that’s fair, I’ve definitely felt that before too. So, just showing students what a leader who works for them looks like, what a representative leader looks like, and what, you know, what they should feel like when they’re voting and looking for what they want to see in a leader, or see from, you know, their mayor or their city council person all the way up to, say, what they want to see in their president. It’s important to me that I just show them that there are people out there that want to work for them, want to hear their voices. And [to] change their environment, even if it’s just as small as the campus that they live on to better suit them, I think is really important to me. Every action that I do is driven by a responsibility I feel as their most local and straight-down representative.
Is there anything else that you would want to share that we haven’t touched on?
I would love [for] people to reach out to me. My favorite thing, the thing that makes my day, is when I get an email from someone being like, “Hey, my organization registration says it’s still pending but I’m pretty sure I submitted the form. What do I do now?” I know everybody, so I will connect you to somebody and get you the help that you need. It’s my favorite thing when I see a question from a student; that’s, like, the best news in the whole world.
And then also, I really have been emphasizing Student Government as a resource a lot. I think that’s the best part of my job. I don’t publicize it as much on my Instagram, just because there are so many people working toward it and we have an SG Instagram. So, I feel like people don’t see that side of my job as much, but a really large amount of my time is spent making sure that our student leaders are the best they can possibly be to represent you, serve you, and inform you. Our Senate meetings are on Tuesdays at 6:15 p.m. in Madison Union 256, and they are open to the public. We love to have people come in and listen to what we’re doing, to engage with us. Come talk to any of us afterward; all of your elected officials stick around and try to be there for community members who want to show up and chat. Anything that’s going on that you have questions about, like, that kind of stuff, is a little bit harder for me to answer off the dome. This is just because it’s typically, like, a really complicated process, but I will absolutely get you an answer. I have the UPC chair on speed-email; I’ve got you.
I’d love to say, like, give everyone who works here a little bit of grace. I think that it’s really easy to look at administrators at this university and think that they know everything and have it all together. And I think that students are like this, too. As they grow up, like, you never really understand what’s going on or know what to do all the time. I mean, everyone we have here as a university leader has incredible ideas, passion, and drive, but they also make mistakes just like students do. So just give everybody grace and recognize that being in charge of big things is really hard. Do your best to engage, too; if someone asks you for feedback at this university, please give it! If you are asked for feedback and you don’t give it, you can’t be upset when the things you want aren’t done. And you can put that up to, you know, as big a scale as the presidential election. Like, if you don’t cast your vote, and you don’t engage with things that are happening in your community, then you can’t be upset when things don’t work for you. That’s the thing I’ve learned in this role, especially as someone who solicits student feedback all the time. Like, please tell me when things don’t work and when they do work. Give compliments too!
You can reach Brielle at @briellesaysgodukes on Instagram or email her at lacroibs@jmu.edu!