She made her point!
A Hunter College student’s argument for a bill at the recent Model New York State Senate Session at the Capitol in Albany carried the day — the bill passed!
Hunter senior Carla Sanchez assumed the role of real State Senator Daniel G. Stec (R–Glens Falls) to argue for Daniel’s Law, which passed last year. The statute established a task force to ensure that individuals experiencing mental-health crises are met by public-health responders rather than police.
The Model Senate Session in which Sanchez participated was developed in 1997 by CUNY and the Puerto Rican and Hispanic Task Force of the New York State Legislature. It attracts students from across CUNY to the annual SOMOS Conference in Albany, which brings together the state’s Latino community and policy makers.
Sanchez, who is majoring in Human-Computer Interaction through a CUNY BA program, hopes to attend graduate school to study the ethical implications and implementation of technology. She said she benefited greatly from attending SOMOS and participating in the model Senate, which taught her crucial lessons.
“Public speaking is storytelling,” Sanchez said. “As someone who’s been studying mostly math and science, I’ve had some practice with data, and I have a love for it. But I had the immature understanding that the numbers could speak for themselves. I learned that, instead, a story should be told with numbers acting as a supplement to the plot.”
As part of the Model Senate program, students receive an intensive, two-week training each spring to develop their leadership ability and undergo a crash course on New York government. Designed to teach future leaders about policy, politics, the legislative process, and advocacy, the program features seminars and lectures from leading New Yorkers.
Left to right: Rosa Cruz Cordero, Governor Kathy Hochul, and Jorge R. Soldevila Irizarry posed at SOMOS.
“I wanted to know more about politics and policy because I hope that my future work will assist legislators,” she said.
CENTRO, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, helps draft the annual SOMOS report and has a lively presence at the conference. CENTRO Director of Public Policy, External and Media Relations, and Development Carlos Varga-Ramos, Outreach and Partnerships Manager Rosa Cruz Cordero, and Research Assistant Jorge R. Soldevila Irizarry represented Hunter at SOMOS. CENTRO received $20 million from the governor last year to reunite its administrative offices with its Library & Archives at Hunter’s Silberman School of School Work in East Harlem.
