Student groups are in the "Red Zone."
Faced with an unparalleled financial crisis, the Student Activities Commission (SAC) is left with $25,376.17 of the $415,000 that was allocated to student activities this year. In an 8.5 hour meeting last Thursday, the SAC executive board created the emergency "Red Zone" amendment which implements heavy new restrictions on student group funding in times of budget crisis.
"This is a completely unprecedented situation," said SAC Political Action Liaison Grace Gallick. "The idea of not having money was really not something that was confronted by any other board this close to the beginning of the year."
The amendment, which was emailed to all student group leaders by their respective executive liaison, defines the Red Zone as when the SAC has "less than 1/10 remaining of its annual allocation." Although the emails arrived over a span of several days, with some sent only this week, the policy took effect as of last Thursday. A SAC General Assembly meeting is scheduled for Tuesday to further explain the policy to leaders of the 185 SAC groups on campus.
"We've known [the situation], but it got to the point where we had to do something," Wardlow said. Officers point to the addition of 15-20 new SAC groups last year and a fiscal budget this year that did not increase to accommodate them. Cultural Liaison Jon Groce suggested that the board may have been too lenient in approving some of the earlier proposals, driving them to the Red Zone situation.
The new restrictions on group funding proposals primarily affect Class B groups, which do not have annual budgets and are funded by event. Class B can not request funding prior to September, unlike Class A groups which request annual budgets in April. Funding will no longer be granted for off-campus events "not vital to the function of the group." The caps for hiring speakers and funding food trips have each been cut by 50 percent. Funding for all entertainment, including DJs and dances, has been terminated.
The SAC, chaired by Student Council (StuCo) Treasurer Ben Wardlow, is responsible for delegating finances to all student activities. SAC receives initial annual funding from the office of the Dean of Student Life under the Student Activities Allocation, which is "a lump sum for their [SAC] discretion," Dean of Student Life Susan Boswell said. Money is first directly allocated to StuCo organizations, including the Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium and the Hopkins Organization for Programming. The contingency is given to the SAC to delegate among the remaining 185 SAC groups on campus. Each proposal is reviewed and approved by the SAC executive board, which is made up of eight elected liaisons each responsible for a delegation of student groups.
This year, SAC money went faster than it ever has before. After the $125,000 block allocation to StuCo groups such as the HOP, $210,136.26 was awarded to groups in April at the Annual Allocation for 2003-04. The remaining $79,863.74 that was left to the new board when they took office May 1 already equaled the budget that had lasted until October of the 2002-03 year.
The current board under Wardlow then distributed $32,184.96 to student groups returning in May and another $22,302.61 to groups last month. With under $25,000 left, annual events that have not yet proposed their budgets, such as the Foreign Affairs Symposium and the DSAGA Awareness Days, are scheduled for financial cuts.
Current Board members now lament that they did not have enough money to begin with this fiscal year. However, Boswell noted that the SAC was granted the budget outgoing members requested in March.
"They are saying this now [that the Activites Allocation wasn't enough]," Boswell said. "They didn't say it in March and April when they did budgeting. They felt they had a good budget in place."
Executive board members and Wardlow said that they saw the problem coming, but that they hoped they had the policies in place to delegate the money responsibly. Budget proposals are distributed according to the Blue Book of written SAC policies.
Although the SAC is meant to spend all of its money, the board faced several "new kinds of funding requests that we had never funded before and we didn't realize they could create such a problem," said Grace Gallick, Political Action Liaison.
The Red Zone policies were implemented as a means to stretch the limited funds.
"I think we all knew that it was coming to this point. We didn't have the foresight to cut back on our funding earlier," Groce said. "The SAC had to take a good look at itself and realize that we can't be a money tree. Everyone has to get something in some way, but every group is going to have to make sacrifices. They need to share."
Boswell is unable to give the group more money at this time, but they are anticipating receiving some money back from annual auditing, which is currently underway.
"We've all been spending a lot of time doing the best that we can, really trying to do the best we can for campus life at Hopkins," Gallick said.
