Kai Brito, the president of the Student Senate, is full of ideas, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t prioritized what he wants to accomplish.
Brito, who also serves as the President of Wisconsin Student Government, has achieved impressive accomplishments since enrolling at Madison College, making him the perfect candidate. His achievements include being a RISE Men of Excellence Scholar, a copy editor for The Clarion, and a Vice President of Business Professionals of America.
Brito will graduate in May 2025, which gives him a short window to accomplish his goals, but he has a clear timeline in mind.
“I only have a year to make these changes last. That’s why we’re going to make changes to the bylaws. I looked at the process for how to do that, so I really want lasting change. Long-lasting systematic change. That’s what I want,” Brito said.
His number one priority would be creating standard spending guidelines and a plan that sustains the knowledge of spending money year after year.
Because he’s an accounting major, Brito likes delving into the details of financial futures, so it makes perfect sense to him to establish standard spending guidelines. His top priority is to review the school’s financials.
Last April, he proposed a Senate resolution outlining the need for the Student Activities Board to establish bylaws for financial responsibility and expenditures. In the past, the SAB has relied on precedents from previous years. However, as Madison College is a two-year school with a continuous influx of students enrolling and graduating, he believes it is essential for the SAB to dictate standard spending guidelines.
“We need to be modernizing ourselves because we’re getting into these issues about money,” said Brito, “Let’s not fight over money. Let’s just create more. Why aren’t we looking at those options? I want to be proactive.”
While Brito has different ideas about creating money, he often suggests establishing a credit card for all club and organization travel, enabling the college to accumulate credit card points.
Brito’s road to the Senate presidency was anything but linear. In many ways, he credits Mackenzie Carstens for opening his eyes to volunteering.
After stopping at WinterFest and meeting Carstens, a member of the Business Professionals Association, he started attending volunteer service events. He realized he could pick and choose his volunteer time commitments, which led him to realize he cared about many causes.
This discovery cemented his decision to donate his time to environmental, food pantry and trash pick-up events, which led him to create his second goal, a sustainability initiative he wrote and presented to the SAB last April.
Brito mentions that when he came to Madison College, he was a board member of the Sustainable Madison Committee and recognized that the college needed to take charge and be a change leader.
He advocates for a closer examination of the college’s sustainability efforts on campus, including waste initiatives, energy efficiency, net zero energy emissions, renewable energy use in transportation and sustainable finance. He emphasizes that we can only achieve energy sustainability with proper financing.
Brito remembers his journey to the senate presidency and knows he was inspired by meeting people, joining clubs and organizations and attending campus events. He encourages students to do the same, finding their inner motivation to take the initiative and discover what ignites their interest, likening it to a spark turning into an inferno.
As he begins his presidency, he says the most impact he will ever make will be in the next year.
“I will have my failures, but you know me. I think it’s really good that I have this opportunity to fight for our Madison College in this very timeframe,” Brito said.
He refers to a quote he used for last fall’s SAB referendum, which asked students to vote on student fees to boost student programs, activities and campus events.
“Madison College gave me a second chance to do all the things I never thought I could. I never saw myself in high school being a student senate president or president of anything because I didn’t care,” Brito said. “But now I care because there are people I care about. That makes me care about this place overall.”