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SABRC funds campus projects

After a marathon weekend of deliberation, student organization funding for the spring semester has been reached. The Student Activities Budget Review Committee allocated $120,000 of the $177,972 available for student organizations during its fall funding weekend.

There were 57 requests submitted from student organizations. Leaders of these organizations, however, said there are some struggles that come with searching for funding.

“Our organization is renewing itself, and we have plans to run events outside of the SABRC fund,” president of Brave Sound Entertainment Hana Becker said. “We appreciate SABRC immensely, but it can be difficult to be so dependent on their funding, especially since we spend an entire semester planning shows, specifying budgets, talking to artists and agents, etc. We really want to do the best we can to entertain and benefit students and the local community through our organization.”
The struggles, however, are felt on both sides of the process.

“It is really hard to please everyone,” SABRC chairperson Kendra Warren said. “Our mission is to bring a variety of events to campus that educate and entertain students. We have a lot of factors to take into consideration—benefit to students, diversity, etc. Some groups think we say no simply because we don’t like them. That is not the case.”

According to Assistant Director of Student Activities Lauren Smetana, bigger student organizations sometime have a natural advantage because of their larger workforces.

“Big organizations don’t necessarily mean automatic funding,” Smetana said. “What I’ve seen in organizations that tend to have more members is that your workload is distributed more.”

According to Smetana, a larger number of members can provide a wider range of perspectives and less of a workload on just a few people, increasing that organization’s presentation quality.

Like the members of these organizations, SABRC is also made up of students. The committee judges the presentations on several criteria such as preparation, quality and whether there are already similar events.
Student organizations presented their ideas to SABRC and had to present for three minutes and respond to any questions in two minutes.

To help prevent bias, students on an executive board of a student organization who were also on SABRC weren’t allowed to discuss their organizations or vote on their funding.

This year there were a few changes in the voting process as well.

“This year was quite different than in past years, in so many great ways,” SABRC chairperson Kendra Warren said. “Nick Clark was the vice-chairperson this year and is a computer genius. He redid the entire funding application process. Everything was through Google [Forms]. It saved Lauren and Tom so much time. Before they would manually go through each application and passing groups presentation times.”

After all of the deliberation, the proposal was sent to Student Senate to be approved. The budget was approved during the Nov. 24 General Assembly meeting.

The remaining funds that weren’t allocated to organizations will go to the SABRC general fund, which supplies events that are not planned at this time. Alternately, if a student organization wants to appeal their final SABRC funding allotment, they can go to the Student Arbitration Board.

“I think it went very well,” Smetana said. “It went very smoothly; students were very constructive. There was a lot of constructive criticism about the events and a really careful evaluation of all the events. They were very thorough, so I think we had a lot of great discussion and are going to fund a lot of good events for the spring semester because of that.”

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