With every new semester, there are many changes that students experience. As of spring 2024, a new budgeting process for student organizations has been added to the list of adjustments. This change, coming from the Office of Student and Community Engagement (SCE), was officially introduced at a meeting on the evening of Jan. 11.
Associate Director of the SCE Kelly Murphy oversaw the development of this new plan being implemented for organizations of campus.
With the budgeting system that has been used in years past, student organizations would have to request the budget for all of their fall semester programming in the summer and submit a request for their spring budget around Thanksgiving.
The new structure requires student organizations to request money for each individual program that they put on, as opposed to requesting one large sum of money.
This method will “hopefully allow for… a little bit more flexibility in the money they can spend because they don’t need to have every single event and program planned prior to the semester,” said Murphy. “They can plan more as they go.”
The ultimate goal is to avoid student organization budget cuts, which limited budgets last semester due to a surplus of organizations requesting large amounts of funding.
Executive members of organizations on campus are both excited and apprehensive about this semester’s changes.
The eSports League’s vice president Mackenzie Howard described the group as a “community for gamers… casual or competitive.” They host weekly game nights every Friday, complete with food and drinks, and two gaming tournaments per semester: Smash and Mario Kart.
Regarding the way that the new process will affect her organization, Howard said “it is going to be a bit more work for the treasurers” and “it’s going to be a learning curve.”
Caitlyn Arheit, a junior psychology student, is the president of House Plant Club, which spends a substantial amount of their budget on trips to greenhouses and giveaways.
“Our budget has been slashed in half before which is really pretty detrimental to the events that we have pre-planned. So this kind of just ensures that we get the money that we need for our events,” said Arheit.
Another reason for the change “was because at the end of the semester, we have organizations that maybe don’t spend their whole budget and that money has been tied up with that organization all semester so nobody else can use it,” Murphy said.
Now, if an organization requests a budget and does not spend the whole amount, the money they do not spend will be accessible by any organization at any point throughout the semester.
The hope is that this flexibility will “allow for more large scale programming and more frequent programming,” said Murphy.
If students are interested in starting a new organization on campus, there is an interest form found under the “Organizations” section on Engage. To register a new organization, there must be five members, a constitution and a faculty/staff advisor. There is a template students can follow to create their constitution.
Once this form is completed, the students involved must meet with Murphy to go over the student organization policies and procedures to ensure that everyone in the group understands and complies with the university’s standards.
If there are further questions regarding the new budgeting process, creation of student organizations or the policies that must be followed, contact Kelly Murphy in the SCE at kmurphy46@capital.edu.
