In conversations with students across campus, Johanna Ajayi kept hearing the same quiet frustration: leadership rarely looked like the students it served. She decided to change that.
Ajayi, Texas State’s first Black woman student government president and finance junior, saw representation in positions of power as non-negotiable and thought she could fill the gap she was seeing. She created the Bobcats in Bloom campaign with Keller Hammack, Student Government vice president and accounting senior, to elevate the voices of every group at Texas State.
Ajayi and Hammack built a campaign around the phrase “Texas State: Where every voice blossoms.” They plan to accomplish that goal by filling their cabinet with people from as many walks of life as possible.
“One of the things that I want to accomplish by the end of the school year, or even with my cabinet specifically, is for students to look up and see themselves in these leadership positions,” Ajayi said.
Ajayi was previously a senator at large, which represents students through legislation. As a senator, she aimed to streamline Texas State transportation services and food insecurity programs. She said as president, many of her goals will stay the same, and she will build on them based on her cabinet’s suggestions.
“As a senator, I passed legislation about transportation to basically give them more support,” Ajayi said. “I actually talked to them even while I was campaigning to figure out what we could do in order to make this system better.”
Ajayi also plans to expand Texas State programming for men’s mental health after a student took his own life this past school year. She said that with a university as big as Texas State, it can be overwhelming to try to make connections, and she hopes the programs she implements will bring people together across the board.
“It’s sometimes hard to find that community here at Texas State,” Ajayi said. “We want to have that desegregation this school year where people from different cultures and ethnicities are meeting each other and becoming friends because you never know who you could become friends with.”
Bobcats in Bloom won the student government election with 61.17% of the vote (1,572 votes) due to the sheer number of endorsements from minority clubs and organizations as well as broad student support. Naomi Umeh, president of Genius Girls and a biochemistry junior, said the way Ajayi approached her as an individual and the details of her campaign were what made the difference in whether she decided to propose endorsing Bobcats in Bloom to Genius Girls.
“She was like, ‘I know I’m not going to ask you to endorse me because that’s your decision, but I do want to tell you about my campaign,’” Umeh said. “She just literally talked to me for hours about her campaign and what she was trying to do, and I could tell she was being very genuine.”
Though their victory was undeniable, the Bobcats in Bloom team had a few bumps along the way. Anaysa Guerra, student government chief of staff and a public administration sophomore, said that, as the campaign manager, securing endorsements from as many organizations as they did was not easy because they didn’t always have a connection that would let them into the room.
“It was very hard for [organizations] to allow us into those rooms without us already having someone that we knew in the organization,” Guerra wrote in an email to The Star. “We relied heavily on word of mouth of our friends to get us in contact with the executive boards.”
Bobcats in Bloom aims to be the voice of the students towards the administration throughout the next year. Esteban Puzon, accounting junior, said the student government was never really on his radar until Ajayi began to make it more accessible to every college student.
“From someone who didn’t really even know we had a student government, it speaks volumes that I wanted to learn more about their campaign,” Puzon said. “It looks like [Bobcats in Bloom] will really represent the students.”
Ajayi and Guerra said they hope to leave student government and Texas State as a whole better than they found it.
“The legacy that I would love to leave is holding the student government to a certain standard that the next student government would have to reach and exceed,” Ajayi said.
To learn more about student government, visit its website at Student Government : Texas State University
