Student Association leaders said they revamped the University-Wide Programs Fund this fall following its pilot year when the fund ran dry three months before the end of the spring semester, leaving students unable to fund large events.
SA Sen. Simon Patmore-Zarcone (Law-G) and SA Sen. Ethan Fitzgerald (CCAS-U) — two of the SA’s representatives on the UWPF committee — said the committee has spent about 70 percent of its $219,176.33 budget this academic year to fund fall and some spring semester events. They said this year, the committee reserved funding for specific heritage celebrations, relaxed the 350-guest requirement and stopped requiring organizations to return half of the profits from their event to the fund if members sold tickets at the door.
Some student organization leaders said they felt that there was a lack of communication after they submitted requests for funding to the UWPF committee and desired more transparency about the status of their applications.
The UWPF is a joint fund between GW and the SA designated for primarily large-scale and multicultural events, dispersed by a committee of three SA members and three University administrators. The University donates 50 cents for each credit hour a student takes to subsidize the fund.
Patmore-Zarcone said the UWPF committee was “cognizant” of the need to reserve funding for specific heritage celebrations they were unable to fund last year. He said the fund earmarked $20,000 for the six heritage celebrations the GW recognizes this year, including the Latin Heritage Celebration, Native American Heritage Month, Black History Month, South Asian History Month and Asian American Pacific Islander History Month.
“We approach those requests with a mindset of we should be more willing to give them funding to the extent that it’s under this $20,000 limit,” Patmore-Zarcone said.
This is a departure from the previous year where there was no “overarching plan,” meaning the committee allocated requests on a first-come, first-served basis and did not reserve funds for particular causes, Patmore-Zarcone said.
Patmore-Zarcone added that the committee has also been more lenient with enforcing the requirement that events using UWPF funds have more than 350 attendees, but the committee is more likely to fund events with cultural significance.
Fitzgerald said the fund has a finite amount of resources, so the committee will ask University officials to help lower the costs of renting organization spaces on campus or ask them to direct student organizations to apply for funding from different bodies like the SA Finance Committee, which may be more suited to fund requests that aren’t culturally based.
“Everything is important, but we just don’t have enough money,” Fitzgerald said. “So we’re trying to make sure to look at ‘Okay, you need this money now, how can we help you get that?’”
Krissy Cralle, the director of Law Revue — a student organization that organizes an annual law student talent show for about 400 people — requested $29,487.89 from the fund and received $10,000. She said the UWPF’s creation took $24,000 away from the Student Bar Association’s budget and made it harder to guarantee that their event would be funded because money previously reserved for law students became eligible for use by all students.
She said there was “no discussion” from the committee on the process of approving funds or potential opportunities to appear before the UWPF committee to negotiate their allocation amount.
“Since its creation, there is an added level of uncertainty and frustration that funds have been removed from a pool designated to law students and into a fund which is for all students,” Cralle said in an email.
The SA Senate passed the University-Wide Programs Fund Improvement Act in May, which aimed to make UWPF more inclusive and more accessible for graduate students by making a member of the UWPF committee share and deliver updates on the committee’s allocations. In the senate’s 14 meetings since the passage, the committee has not delivered updates.
Nick Anmahian, the president of GW Jazz Orchestra, said he applied to the fund for the first time this fall to fund the organization’s annual winter concert. He said he applied for funding five weeks in advance of the event but did not receive an answer from the committee until he reached out to ask the status of his application because of his hard deadline.
“I don’t like being pushed off week after week and then not told what’s actually happening,” Anmahian said. “For money, that’s pretty crucial. I had to schedule an event.”
Anmahian said the UWPF committee then told him that the SA Finance Committee had taken over his request but was not told why. He said he had to take a “gamble” with planning his event and had to hope that he got the money he needed to put on the performance.
After the SA Finance Committee took over his request, Anmahian said he heard nothing until he reached out again to the finance team. He said he received an email back soon after stating they had reviewed the funds but had forgotten to press submit.
“I was waiting for three weeks for something that had been decided already,” Anmahian said.
Anmahian said the Jazz Orchestra received $1,990 of the $3,342.30 he requested, but he is unsure if the SA Finance Committee or the UWPF funded the request. Since the committee doesn’t update its public tracker on the website, there is no way of certifying what fund it was allocated from, he said.
Prerna Polepally, the vice president of the GW South Asian Society, said the fund has been helpful in supporting events, but the organization has noticed a lack of communication from the committee as their application for funds moves through the approval process.
“It would be great if there was some way to update us on where things are and how much money is left in the fund because right now it is done through speculation and word of mouth, which isn’t reliable,” Polepally said.
GW SAS received $55,850 of the $110,150 they requested between their four events, according to the funding allocation record. Polepally said after she had applied to the fund, she was unaware of the status of her application and whether her application had been reviewed by the committee because she didn’t receive any updates. Polepally said she hopes the committee keeps organizations up to date about how much money remains in the fund.
