ASG focuses on risk management in new website

Students with questions about financial and legal safety will soon be able to consult a new informational website.

The UNC Association of Student Governments is creating the website with the help of administrators and volunteers at East Carolina University.

The website, which will organize videos about topics such as general safety, financial awareness and legal information, is a way for the association to give back to students, said ASG President Atul Bhula.

Students will be able to log in to the portal and view the videos.

ASG decided to team up with ECU because of the infrastructure that the staff at the university’s College of Health and Human Performance have in place, Bhula said.

Because volunteers are working on the portal, the association is not paying anything to develop it, and students will be able to access it for free, he said.

In addition to working on the website, volunteers are also making the videos.

ASG, which is made up of student delegates from all 17 UNC-system schools, plans to collaborate with law and business schools in the system for content.

Bhula and the association have partnered with Peter Romary, director of ECU’s Student Legal Services, who has worked extensively with risk management and safety.

Romary founded the N.C. Higher Education Safety Symposium, which is “a collaborative effort from schools around the system” to promote safety training and education, he wrote in an email.

Romary received the 2010 John Sanders Award for Student Advocacy, an award given to him by ASG for his dedication to student safety.

He will help generate content for the website.

“I will call on experts from around North Carolina and the nation to provide input,” Romary said.

He said he will also be leading trainings on threat management.

“I applaud the ASG for taking the lead on this and am very proud to be part of it,” Romary said.

Bhula said the portal, which is expected to go live in three to four weeks, has been taking shape since February.

The long-term goal is for the videos to be made “for the students, by the students,” allowing for the portal to have elements of a peer-mentoring site, Bhula said.

But UNC student Justin Tsao, a senior economics major, said he wasn’t interested in the initiative.

“I probably wouldn’t use it,” he said.

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