Budgets released beyond Student Activities’ April 10 deadline, leaving student organizations little time to prepare appeals

Samuel Casey

News Editor

Saeed Husain

News Editor

On Monday, April 22, Allocations Committee began to disburse budgets in small waves to each of the student groups on campus that sought funding, according to Co-Chair Isaac Weiss ’20, treasurer for the Student Government Association. The Allocations Committee is run by Campus Council (CC) and is tasked with allocating the student activity fees to every student organization that applied and is eligible. The Committee is made up of seven people, including co-chairs Weiss and Halen Gifford ’21, budget chair for Campus Council, as well as five other student members, who are kept anonymous.

According to Weiss, the review process starts by randomly selecting budgets to limit any potential for bias. Then, the Committee carefully reads the information provided within a group’s proposed budget and closely follows the budget guidelines to make the right decisions while occasionally expanding on rules in order to make cuts to be under budget.

When asked about what issues the group faces, Weiss explained, “One of the things I heard a lot about, before I became co-chair, is that Allocations Committee suffers a lot from lack of consistency from year to year. I’m happy that [Campus Council’s Budget Committee] and I have spent a lot of time to ensure that the budget guidelines are more understandable to ensure more consistency.” 

Weiss added that this year’s process was very similar to last year with the only difference being that the Committee spent more time analyzing each budget. While the proposed deadline for allocations was April 10, this was not met by the Committee, which took over 10 days more before budgets were sent out, following approval by the CC General Assembly meeting on Thursday, April 18. Some student leaders of campus groups voiced their concern with the delay and some of the drawbacks it has for their clubs.

“Not getting the budget back on time really sets things back and makes it harder on student organizations,” said Nashmia Khan ’20, president of South Asia Committee (SAC). “SAC has events planned for September and collaboration that we will have no time to figure out before this semester is over. Furthermore, the delay means we got the budget very close to finals which once again makes it harder to plan stuff when everyone is busy with end of semester deadlines.”

Linden Taylor ’19, outgoing president of WOODs, agreed with this sentiment. “As soon as we received our budget for WOODs for 2019-2020, we decided to make an appeal for a section in our budget,” she said. “It was difficult to plan for this appeal in the second to last week of classes, but we are now prepared for it. A week earlier may have helped us develop our case more clearly, so we could have had two meetings as a leadership board; one to discuss the appeal plan and one to finalize it before presenting it.”

Addressing those concerns, Weiss stated, “While this did mean that we had to spend more time reading budgets, we feel that it is more important for us to do a good job than it is for budget to be disbursed at an incredible speed. We only spent one more week than we had planned for. In all, we spent more than 30 hours reading every single budget carefully.” 

Weiss said he understood that there will be concerns from groups, but there is only so much the Committee can do. “People work really hard on these budgets, so it’s natural to be angry when you have it cut,” Weiss acknowledged. “[But] we had nearly a million dollars in requests, and we simply cannot fund everything. I think that given what we had, we made the right and best choices.”

Khan also commented that though the budget was late, SAC was fairly allocated. “Besides being late I think SAC was fairly allocated,” Khan said. “They didn’t fund one of our biggest events, Diwali, which is an important religious and cultural event, but we appealed.”