Tuesday night’s Associated Students of NMU meeting was cancelled, which gave the board plenty of time to brainstorm ideas for recruiting new members.

At the start of the new semester, ASNMU lost four members for various reasons. According to Drew Janego, vice president of ASNMU, the main reason so many members left was time conflict with classes.

“Trying to keep people on the board with changing schedules is hard,” Janego said.

The board, which is supposed to have 24 representatives in all, is currently down to nine. However, according to Janego, this week there were four scheduled interviews which could conceivably bring the general assembly count up to 13 members.

Along with working over summer and putting up posters to increase the number of recruits, members of ASNMU plan setting up shop in the lobby of some dorms.

“It’s a way in to get the word out about our organization,” Janego said.

With all the turnover that ASNMU has, Janego came up with an incentive program for the representatives. The program, which is still in the planning stages, would allow the members to count their work with ASNMU as a credit.

“I thought it would be a good idea to offer something like a class credit or discount to motivate members to stay on the board,” Janego said.

In previous years the members of the executive board received pay for the hours they put in; today, however ,there are no “perks” for the executive board or general assembly.

“I’m hoping that this will eventually work into the system for future boards,” Janego said. “So there isn’t so much turnover and the members of the board won’t have to build the assembly back up in the middle of the year, like we’re doing right now.”

Along with the program to keep members on the board the current members are putting together representative binders that house everything a new member would need.

“Having these binders would make the transition for new members seamless,” Janego said.

According to Janego, the binders will have things like the constitution and bylaws, any helpful people to contact while working on a project, as well as information about ASNMU for those who inquire about it.

When interviewing for a position on the board, Janego and three other representatives ask questions like, “why you want to be involved with student government” and “if you’ve had any other leadership roles in previous projects.” Janego said it’s a fairly easy process.

“We’ll be back next week and hopefully we will be appointing new members to the board,” Janego said.