Updated: Dec. 12, 2023, at 5:50 p.m.
The Student Association Senate unanimously approved general allocations for student organizations in the upcoming spring semester during their meeting Monday.
Nathan Nguyen, the director of the Legislative Budget Office, said the SA fulfilled 39 percent of student groups’ requests for funds for the spring semester, compared to the 36 percent approval rate for the fall semester. Nguyen said organizations requested a total of $1,383,316 from the SA for the spring semester, but the SA only had $265,787 to disperse among all the groups.
There was a $1,117,529 gap between the total amount of funding that all student organizations cumulatively requested and the total amount of funds that the senate approved for the spring semester — a gap that has shrunk by roughly $150,000 since the fall semester.
“So slight downtrend on that gap again, but that gap is still over a million dollars of unmet need,” Nguyen said.
Nguyen said the SA received 267 applications for the spring, 13 fewer requests than the 280 the senate received in the fall. He said the senate’s change of the club sports budget in February that gave the Club Sports Council — a separate governing body with a representative from each club sport — the power to allocate funds to the teams once a year in the fall may be the source of the decline.
Among the approved allocation requests, the Muslim Students’ Association and the Emergency Medical Response Group received the most funding, securing $9,000 and $7,100 respectively. Nine student organizations received none of the funding they requested, including The GW Student Nurses’ Association and the Asian American Student Association, who did not attend a required meeting to receive funds, according to SA Sen. Ethan Lynne (CCAS-U).
Nguyen said the SA tries to fund organizations based on how much money is needed to “preserve their existence.”
Nguyen said during this fiscal year, the LBO changed the language of the bylaws to simplify the funding request process for students and worked to increase their outreach to student organizations about funding, which has received in positive feedback from students. He also said students have said the SA’s change from line items — where organizations had to specify what they would be purchasing with the allocations — to more broad categories has also been beneficial.
This post was updated to clarify the following:
The Hatchet updated this post to clarify that a senator later said organizations who did not receive any of the funds they requested did not attend a required meeting.
