Sebastien Bergeron displays a bottle of Sleeman's at the Grassroots Cafe. (Jacob Zinn photo)

When the Grassroots Cafe got its liquor license, the KSA developed a group to select the beer that would be served in the cafe. That group was the Beer and Girly Drinks Committee.

The reason for the name?

“It was funny. I think that was it,” said John O’Brian, the KSA Cloverdale Assembly Coordinator.

Nathan Griffiths, the KSA Director of Operations and former co-chair of the Beer and Girly Drinks Committee, said, “At this point, it’s just a funny, quirky thing that’s become part of the culture of the society.”

While the group has succeeded in getting sponsorships with Okanagan Spring Brewery, Sleeman Breweries and Dos Equis, there aren’t any “girly drinks” available. The committee is looking into those, but also says that despite the committees name, manly drinks are not excluded.

However, beer and girly drinks aren’t the only concerns that the KSA deemed worth their own oddly-named committee.

When Ashley Fehr realized the abbreviation for the Academic Issues Committee sounded like “ache,” she felt the committee needed a name change. That’s what prompted the strange name of the Friends and Knights Tackling All Scary/Terrifying Issues/Crises.

Abbreviated, that’s FANTASTIC (The “k” in “Knights” is lowercase and the “n” is uppercase.)

“I was like, all the committees should be awesome words,” said Fehr. “That’s why I decided to make mine FANTASTIC, because if you’re a fantastic committee, then hopefully you can do fantastic things.”

As the Director of Academics, Fehr said that despite the change, the KSA still tackles important academic issues.

“It was not meant to say academic issues aren’t serious,” she said. “We just wanted to do something fun, lighten the mood a bit because before it sounded like ‘ache’ and that’s not very inspiring.”

FANTASTIC will soon go through another name change as the group will become a student senate. One member from each academic and social club will become a member of the senate and they will hold discussions on academic issues.

“The student senate, in my opinion, in my vision, would still talk about those issues as well,” said Fehr. “It would just have a broader scope of what other students think about it instead of just council members who generally are like-minded individuals.”