“Green, blue and fighting for you!” is the slogan Axel Hawkins used to win the 2024 Student Government Association, or SGA, presidential election.
SGA serves the community by looking into any student concerns and helping to garner a stronger on-campus sense of community. Students can join by enrolling in SGA, and officials, such as the president, are elected yearly.
“My campaign slogan was ‘green, blue and fighting for you,’ and that’s what I’m doing, all the time,” Hawkins said. “I want people to know I represent all 7,200 students, and if any of them have a concern or anything they want done on campus, I can’t guarantee I am always going to agree with them or always be able to get everything done. We are very reliant on working with the administration to implement things. They are not always on our side, but I will always be on the side of students and fighting for them, every hour of the day. I want them to know they can come to me at any time.”
Hawkins is a first-generation college student from McDonough, Georgia. She is majoring in history and minoring in political science.
“Neither of my parents had the opportunity to go to college,” Hawkins said. “Their family situation and personal situation did not allow them to. I was raised being told that I had to. As I got older, I realized that to pursue the career I wanted, I would have to go to college.”
Hawkins has spent her time during college working in roles such as a community organizer, where she worked to combat the housing crisis in Atlanta.
Hawkins has also spent time as a chief of staff intern for the City of Atlanta and worked to help ensure that Senator Raphael Warnock had a successful re-election through phone calls and interacting with the people of his community.
She started her journey with SGA as a student government senator, where she represented the class of 2025. She was then able to become the chair of the Student Emergency Fund.
She has also spent time in the role of SGA treasurer. This is where she learned the ins and outs of how money is allocated to clubs and how to help improve student life on campus.
Through these roles, Hawkins has shown an ability to help the students of GC in more ways than one.
Hawkins is passionate about advocating for the student body of GC and helping them get equal opportunities.
“Something really important to me is increasing opportunities for people to not only have a job on campus but also to make good pay,” Hawkins said. “I’m really passionate about raising the minimum wage at the campus level. Most other USG schools have a minimum wage for student employees ranging from about $9.50 to $15. There is maybe this idea that student workers have an extra job on the side just to pay to go out and buy drinks or shop a little bit. And that’s not true. A lot of our student workers, including myself, pay our bills off of that.”
In May 2023, Hawkins was appointed vice president of SGA. She has spent the last 10 months presiding over the student senate and representing the student body of GC to different committees.
Many are unaware of the different ways SGA has been working to improve student life at GC, and Hawkins wants to get more people involved with SGA.
“We [SGA] allocate money to every single club organization,” Hawkins said. “We also allocate it to all types of things around the university. The Serenity Den they just put up was funded by SGA. We do all these little projects across the campus that just help us to improve people’s lives. The last couple of years, we have not been quite as visible. I want us to get more visible, and I want people to realize that we’re not only here to sit in an office. We are here to do things for them, and we have a lot we could do.”
Hawkins is determined to always put the students first in her new SGA role and improve the GC campus altogether.
