Envisioning her role as ASSU president, Chioke Borgelt-Mose said she wants students to come up and tell her, “My food is terrible in FloMo” and ask what she can do to make that change. She hopes that by increasing ASSU visibility around campus and connecting personally with students, she’ll have similar chance encounters leading to grassroots ideas.

Borgelt-Mose and Kory Vargas Caro, both sophomores, said the key to their platform is outreach. They want a jump in arts visibility, more focus on diversity and they would like more interaction with student-group leaders.

Borgelt-Mose just became involved with the ASSU this year, sitting on the Nominations Commission.

“Before, [the ASSU] was kind of this thing that I knew it was there but I didn’t quite know what it did,” she said. “We want to make outreach for the ASSU a priority, so that freshmen right away when they come in know what the ASSU does.”

Both candidates have some experience with outreach through the community centers and the Career Development Center. Borgelt-Mose works at the Black Community Service Center, focusing on programming. Vargas Caro is a multicultural affairs coordinator at the CDC and is active in El Centro Chicano.

Their work at the community centers and with other students has led the candidates to focus not just on reaching out, but also on connecting communities.

“Diversity can only be achieved when communities start collaborating with one another,” they said in an e-mail addressing their platform.

“There’s a lot of overlap on this campus and that comes from communities not working together, being timid or shy about going to communities that don’t exactly look like them or aren’t in the same kind of genre,” Borgelt-Mose said. “A lot of times that can work.”

Borgelt-Mose, an African and African-American studies major, explained that being biracial is an important part of her life. Vargas Caro, a cultural and social anthropology major, is from Maryland but lived in Bolivia — his father’s home country — for six years, has worked on multicultural affairs and is co-president of the Class of ’06’s Latino Council.

But the two candidates don’t want to be limited to working within certain communities or just for certain groups, they said.

“We consider everyone a special group,” Vargas Caro said.

“Whether or not people realize it, they fall into a certain niche, and within that certain niche they have special issues,” Borgelt-Mose explained.

Their campaign, titled “Let’s Get Real,” aims to inform students about a different issue each day, six issues total. On Saturday, they distributed fliers describing how they will address sexual awareness and arts visibility, and later in the week they plan on tackling cost of living, Absolute Fun and student space.

Sophomore Nneka Chike-Obi, who is working on their campaign — and in The Daily’s advertising department — explained that she supports the two of them because they will make good leaders. She said that Vargas Caro had stood up at the large MEChA meeting after the group’s special-fees rejection and presented a number of comprehensive ideas for how to regain funding.

“I was impressed with his leadership ability,” she said.

Chike-Obi also explained that Borgelt-Mose would make a good leader because she’s accessible.

“She doesn’t take herself too seriously,” Chike-Obi said. “She’s not ostentatious. She really knows what she’s doing.”

One thing that sets their platform apart is its focus on Absolute Fun. Borgelt-Mose and Vargas Caro explained that they would make Absolute Fun a voluntary student organization and take the burden for running it out of the ASSU’s hands. This would fix the “small inefficiencies of the program this past year,” they said.

As with the other candidates, Borgelt-Mose and Vargas Caro plan on spending much of their time addressing special-fees issues. They want to increase funding for campus arts initiatives and LGBT interest groups. They also want to explore ways to coordinate between groups, reducing the cost of renting spaces for events and searching for alternative funding for ethnic groups after the loss of MEChA’s special fees.

Borgelt-Mose and Vargas Caro said they are being careful only to suggest as many changes and events as they can feasibly accomplish.

“Our close partnership with the current administration allows us to improve their programming without suffering from their pitfalls,” they said in an e-mail to The Daily.

They also said that while they wanted votes based on their platform, people should place more emphasis on their personal leadership ability.

“We both come into this campaign not as politicians, but as students who are running because we truly care about Stanford,” Borgelt-Mose said. “We keep it real.”