Written by Kylie Akins
This month, the Roosevelt Institution celebrated its fifth year of encouraging student conversation and active policy writing from the minds of the next American generation. In 2007, Harding students created a local chapter for students interested in public policy as solutions to political issues across the world.
The Roosevelt Institution is the first national student-run policy research group in the U.S. The think tank works to encourage college students to research and propose public policies over a wide range of focuses that provide inventive solutions to relevant political issues. The Harding chapter has grown since its founding two years ago and divided into three policy centers: education, social justice and energy.
Recently, Harding’s chapter of the Roosevelt Institution has given attention to the benefits of natural gas with plans to develop a future policy and invited Chesapeake Energy to campus. The company sent two representatives, senior engineering advisor Tom Burnett and director of corporate development in Arkansas Danny Games, to meet and educate the group on the subject Oct. 30.
“These two men both seemed very eager to meet with us and get involved with everything we are doing at Harding,” said Amy Littleton, Harding sophomore and member of the Roosevelt Institution. “They were excited about the passion our organization seems to have toward natural gas.”
Burnett and Games discussed the uses of natural gas as a sustainable economic and environmentally friendly energy source. Burnett presented the history of Chesapeake Energy and recommendations for future policy writing, and the Roosevelt Institution members were also given a tour of an oil rig site in White County.
“We accomplished a very basic relationship with this company and were educated as an organization about the ins and outs of natural gas,” Littleton said. “It was a great meeting.”
Several members, including Littleton, Daniel Burnett, Brittany McMahan and Leah Crowder, planned to take this information to a southern regional conference the weekend after in Atlanta, Ga., to educate and discuss the natural energy situation with others at the conference. They also hoped to create a policy to be published in the Roosevelt’s Institution’s National 10 Ideas Journal.
