The Center for Student Engagement is making sure there aren’t duplicate student organizations.
Starting this semester, students must follow more detailed steps, including face-to-face meetings with a committee of students and CSE staff, to start a new student organization. Student leaders said having several groups with similar agendas can strain the Student Association’s budget and CSE resources.
Prospective student organizations now have to meet with CSE staff, draft the group’s constitution, submit an application and a roster with at least 10 members and present the group’s goals and plans to a student and staff committee. That committee will then decide whether or not to approve the proposed group.
Of the 483 active groups on campus, there are currently at least 18 engineering-related student groups at GW, 13 for students interested in international affairs, 14 dance groups, 25 arts groups and 53 advocacy organizations.
Alisa Laufer, the Student Association’s vice president of student activities, said in an email – pre-approved by SA President Andie Dowd and a CSE staffer – that new groups will “spend their first year operating on a provisional status,” meaning at the end of the year they will have to again present in front of the approval committee in order to become an official organization.
New groups can also be approved throughout the semester rather than just during a limited application period, Laufer said.
Laufer, who worked with CSE staff on the new approval process, said they made the changes to “include more student involvement in the approval process and to ensure that we are approving student organizations with potential for longevity at GW.”
She said officials did not support having multiple organizations on campus that “have similar goals and impacts on the GW community.”
“We are not trying to limit involvement, rather we are trying to promote collaboration among student organizations that serve very similar purposes and could benefit from working together,” Laufer said.
Anne Graham, the assistant director of student involvement for the Center for Student Engagement, said the new process will offer more “accountability and support in the year following approval” to make sure new student groups have gotten off the ground.
“The new process will support a stronger and more sustainable community of student organizations and also seeks to avoid formation of new organizations with goals that mimic or closely resemble that of a pre-existing organization,” she said.
Graham said students registered 81 new groups this academic year, and 47 disbanded after they failed to renew their active status.
The number of student organizations on a university’s campus are often included in pitches to prospective students, showing high levels of student involvement and catering to different interests.
Sandra Johnson, the senior vice president for student affairs at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said “every school struggles” with how to sustain interest in student groups to make sure multiple similar organizations don’t exist.
“I remember at one school asking if we have a student organization that is all about the color red, do we really need one talking about the color crimson?” she said.
Johnson said universities need to closely work with student organizations to ensure that students’ interest remains high and resources that they receive, like funding, aren’t wasted.
Each year, the SA finance committee divides a roughly $1 million budget among various student organizations. Paden Gallagher, the chair of the finance committee, said the allocation process would be more efficient if groups were more distinct and requests for funding were not as similar.
Two weeks ago, the finance committee released its preliminary budget for the next fiscal year. Gallagher said 318 organizations requested funding but did not say how many groups were denied funding.
“It is, in fact, a huge strain. The amount of requests we saw that were for similar or the same programming was massive,” he said.
Members of student organizations complained about a lack of funding last year, resulting in a weeks-long debate in the senate. Then-SA President Nick Gumas initially vetoed the budget, which denied funding for more than 50 organizations, but it was later approved by SA President Andie Dowd.
Some student groups complained of a shortage of funds after the finance committee doled out $120,000 less than last year in initial funding, saving more for co-sponsorships throughout the year. About $65,000 was given to 50 student groups in this year’s appeals process.
Gallagher said the Student Association fee may soon have to be raised if the number of organizations keeps increasing. Every student is charged $2.25 per course credit to help fund student groups. The fee is set to increase to $2.50 per credit next academic year, which is gradually increasing to $3.
He said next year’s senate should find ways to reduce the similarity of student groups’ budgets and encourage similar groups to combine events to reduce budget pressures.
“At the end of the day, it could be simply changing bylaws to reflect organizations collaborating more receiving more funding or it could be raising the student fee,” he said. “Whatever it is, the senate should start working on it early.”
