We are holding elections in the Fall 2025 semester to fill four open seats on the GEO Organizing Committee. These are 0.5 FTE positions that can be held at the same time as another 0.5, 0.75, or 1.0 FTE position. All dues-paying members, including international students, are eligible (and encouraged!) to run.
We’ll post a timeline for self-nominations and other key election dates as we get closer to the start of the semester. We’ll also post more detailed information about self-nominating and voting.
More about being on the GEO Organizing Committee:
The GEO Organizing Committee is the GEO’s formal leadership. Organizing Committee members take on a variety of tasks, including:
- Talking directly with membership to educate people about the union and encourage people to come to GEO events
- Planning and holding GEO events, including socials, educational events, and protests
- Representing GEO members in the grievance process
- Running the Scholarly Support Fund and Emergency Support Fund
- Bargaining with the university when new issues that affect the GEO arise, or when our contract expires
- Meeting with UMB’s HR department to discuss how their policies impact grad students
Organizing Committee members decide for themselves which projects to take on, so if some of these sounds like things you’d want to do, we’d encourage you to run. This is definitely a position you can tailor to your interests and strengths.
The Organizing Committee meets on zoom for an hour per week during the semester. You should expect to work around 9 hrs per week in this position, but depending on what’s going on with the GEO, some weeks you’ll be working more hours, some weeks fewer.
More about running for the GEO Organizing Committee
GEO elections are relatively short and a low time commitment. Anyone interested in running should self-nominate by submitting evidence they are a dues-paying member and filling out the nomination form, which includes a short statement about themself and why they are running. We’ll send these statements to membership a few weeks ahead of the election.
After that, any campaigning is up to you: you can talk to grad students about the election while at work or at GEO events, put up fliers, send out emails, etc, but there are no further requirements from the GEO for campaigning.
More about voting in GEO elections
All dues-paying members are eligible to vote in GEO elections. If you are already in our records as a dues-paying member, you’ll automatically receive a link to vote in the election via email. If you’re not a dues-paying member yet, please fill out a dues authorization form here.
Voting is done through a blind ballot and is completely anonymous–no one, even the people running the election, will know who you voted for. We use the software electionbuddy for our elections.
Graduate Employee Organization 