At last night’s annual funding meeting, Georgetown University Student Association President Pat Dowd (SFS ’09) and Vice President James Kelly’s (COL ’09) proposed GUSA Summer Fellows program was allocated $10,820.35—$29,000 less than they had requested. Representatives from GUSA, the Student Activities Commission, the Georgetown Programming Board, the Center for Social Justice, the Performing Arts Activities Commission, the Advisory Board for Club Sports and Media Board divvied up next year’s $310,000 Student Activity Fees. In addition to detailing their funding requests, many of the boards discussed plans for reducing their reserve funds, which cumulatively total more than $800,000.
Dowd and Kelly had hoped to use $40,000 of the $44,050 excess Student Activity Fees from last year to provide free summer housing for as many as 20 students. With the funding they received, they will be able to house five students for this summer.
“I’ve got to tell you, I am absolutely thrilled about this,” Dowd said. “We’re going to be working really hard to make their experience good.”
Dowd’s proposal prompted a vigorous debate during the meeting, with some of the other funding board representatives questioning whether the program was a proper use of the Student Activities Fee, since the Summer Fellows Program would only impact a limited number of students and would only be open to students who are on financial aid.
“Someone who’s not on financial aid would be paying for someone else’s program,” Molly Koegh (SFS ’08), chair of the Center for Social Justice, said.
The representatives also questioned how the program would affect its participants’ financial aid packages and wondered whether it was too late to start the program, suggesting that most students who had summer internships had already made housing plans. Steve Santulli (COL ‘08), who represents the Media Board, asked if the program was a form of merit-based aid, which he said Georgetown does not give out.
Dowd said the funding board “can rest assured that there will be answers to those questions” as he and Kelly work on the details of the program. He says he expects to have an application out no later than next Monday.
Eden Schiffmann (COL ’08), Speaker of the GUSA Senate also requested $20,000 for a GUSA Student Club Fund, but the representatives on the funding board will have to reconvene because they did not come to a decision about the fund during their meeting. The fund would be a second option for organizations who “fall between the cracks of the existing structure,” according to GUSA Senator Zach Bluestone (SFS ’09).
The meeting came shortly after articles were published in the Voice and the Hoya about the $800,000 that student advisory boards have in reserve funds that are not earning interest. Each board’s funding request required them to detail how much was in their reserve account and how they planned on using it.
Keogh said that the CSJ planned to spend down $25,000 of their $140,630 reserve fund. The Media Board requested $12,600 less than they did last year, with the intention of dipping into their $220,122.
SAC, whose $210,006 reserve fund is the second largest, set the target for their reserve fund at $100,000, citing a renovation of the club rooms on the fourth floor of the Leavey Center as a possible way to spend the excess funds.
“[The $100,000 target] just sounded good, there was no science behind it,” SAC Chair Sophia Behnia (COL ’09) said. “I would love not to touch our reserves, to be quite frank. I came into this meeting expecting to be ripped apart.”
Club Sport’s $15,441 reserve fund is by far the smallest. Representative Nicholas Calta (COL ‘10) explained that Club Sports is only able to cover 30 percent of its groups’ expenses, requiring groups to fundraise or pay out of pocket to attend tournaments. Club Sports was allocated $96,750, an increase of $27,750 from last year. Calta said he thought the 30 percent coverage rate made a big impression on his fellow funding board representatives.
“I’m not sure if they’d ever seen a statistic like that before,” Calta said. “We ended up getting way more than we expected. I’m personally pretty ecstatic about it.”
