The More for Less campaign got a little louder Tuesday.

Members of the campaign headed to Jefferson City to personally deliver more than 6,000 letters from students and staff opposing Missouri’s proposed cuts to higher education. About 2,000 of those were addressed to Gov. Jay Nixon, who proposed the cuts.

Zach Toombs, Missouri Students Association Director of Communications and former Maneater staff member, said he thought the trip was successful.

“Our meetings with the state legislators were very productive,” he said.

The group met with Rep. Chris Kelly, Sen. Kurt Schaefer, Rep. Mary Still, House Speaker Steven Tilley and House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Ryan Silvey.

“We wanted to get feedback from them about where they saw this movement going, what kind of advice they had,” Toombs said.

More for Less discussed reaching out to alumni and parents to further the movement.

“That’s going to be one step that we’d take over the next few weeks here,” Toombs said.

Toombs made the trip with MSA President Xavier Billingsley, MSA Academic Affairs chairman Ben Levin, Chief of Staff and former Maneater staff member Steven Dickherber and Rachel Herndon, representative for Associated Students of the University of Missouri.

Levin said meeting with Nixon’s education liaison Michael Nietzel was the most discouraging moment of the trip. He said Nietzel avoided questions about expanding revenue to soften the funding blow to higher education.

“What we wanted to know was if the governor would be open to those possibilities (of cutting funds elsewhere),” Toombs said. “We didn’t get a lot of solid answers to a lot of our questions (for the governor’s education liaison), but I think we got the message out there and we highlighted some facts that we wanted to highlight.”

Last year, Kelly and Schafer were able to find other areas where the state could cut funding to protect education funds, Toombs said. More for Less is hoping for something similar this year.

Toombs said, at the very least, the letters raised awareness.

“Especially after meeting with all these people, it’s obvious that the letters students signed really have made a difference, and they have reached a lot of representatives who maybe didn’t know as much about the issue,” he said

Billingsley said he thinks More for Less has been successful with state legislators, but it’s time to channel the campaign’s momentum toward Nixon.

“(The problem) is more of a governor thing right now,” he said.

Legislators are going through the budget to find additional funds, Billingsley said. But once that’s done, it’s up to Missourians to push it through.

“It’s going to be our duty as students and alumni and staff to contact the governor as soon as the budget is done, on his desk, and ask him to sign and go with it,” he said.