The Residence Hall Association and HallCrew are planning to simplify their meeting structure and improve programming for the student body through a new organization in fall 2013.

The new organization, the Hall Crew Association, will work to improve the number and quality of housing related events, sophomore Residence Hall Association president Lakota Cheek wrote in an email.

The HallCrew, formed in August 2012, has worked with RHA on hall programming, Brad Thompson, the adviser for HallCrew, said. However, the different functions of each group made them seem segmented.

“We were all working together to achieve the same thing, but it was really fragmented and it didn’t make a lot of sense for the student experience,” Christina Coovert, the adviser for RHA, said.

RHA is an organization on many college campuses that serves the legislative and programming needs of the residence halls, Coovert said.

TCU residence halls are in good condition, so there is not as much of a need for RHA legislation because most legislation at TCU goes through Student Government Association, she said.

In January 2013, Thompson and Coovert began to communicate with student executives in both organizations to see what each group wanted to accomplish, Coovert said.

“We had conversations about values, what we want to see as organizations and what is important to us. We realized that there is a lot of overlap, so we decided this would be a good opportunity for us to come together around building the community,” Thompson said.

This collaboration led to the development of the Hall Crew Association. This is not a new concept but rather a representation of both organizations, Coovert said.

Coovert and Thompson said they plan to serve as advisers for the new organization together.

“The students from both organizations came together in a very organic fashion to engender an organization that is better tailored to the needs of the students of TCU’s campus,” Cheek wrote in an email.

The main goal of the Hall Crew Association is to provide students with an experience in the residence halls that will make them feel at home, Coovert said.

Because RHA will no longer exist with the formation of the Hall Crew Association, the organization’s regional affiliation with the Southwest Association of College & University Housing Officers will end, Coovert said.

“The students decided that SWACUHO, for the programming side of things, was not as impactful as it could have been, and they just want to explore their options and attend some other conferences,” Coovert said.

In the future, TCU’s National Residence Hall Honorary is scheduled to maintain the regional affiliation with SWACUHO.