University Funding for RSOs is Severely Inadequate
Ally Marecek—The Santa Clara
If Coronavirus hadn’t canceled our plans, a lack of funding would have
Kevin O’Brien S.J., President of Santa Clara University, announced on Monday, March 16, that classes would be conducted online through the rest of Spring Quarter. This decision effectively sealed the fate of our Registered Student Organizations (RSO) that hoped beyond hope that they would be able to host the events they had worked so hard to prepare. It’s heartbreaking when events students have spent hundreds of hours planning, practicing and preparing for are suddenly cancelled.
Along with commencement ceremonies, proms and in-person classes, RSO events were another victim of the mass coronavirus cancelling spree that struck schools and universities in mid-March. However, what many don’t know is that these events were in jeopardy long before the cancellation of on-campus events. All because of a lack of funding.
Funding for RSOs on campus is severely inadequate. As a member of the Student Affairs Committee (SAC) on Associated Student Government, I aid the committee in distributing a $91,500 discretionary fund to all 180 RSOs on campus. At first, that might seem like a lot of money. Five hundred dollars per RSO sounds like a pretty good deal, especially to a smaller club.
But consider what happens when funding is needed for some of the larger campus events. KSA’s Culture Show: $11,562.53. ISA Student Network’s Bronco Hacks: $27,263.67. Ka Mana'o O Hawai'i’s Luau: $12,766. Native American Coalition for Change’s Powwow: $14,050. Associated General Contractors Regional Competition: $9,278. Barkada’s PCN: $18,000. Already, that adds up to $92,920.20; SAC has run out of money after just six events.
To be fair, those figures represent total expenses—not how much money was requested. As well, SAC rarely fully funds requests. $91,500 could hypothetically be enough if SAC allocated it sparingly, however, it wasn’t sufficient this year. In the span of one week—from Feb. 3 to Feb. 10—26 clubs requested a total of $92,515.94 from ASG. At that point in the year, SAC had already allocated around two thirds of the budget. But even if the requests had come at the beginning of the year, SAC would have still come up short. There were not enough financial resources to support these clubs in the first place.
If SAC can’t even fund the 25 requests that came through that week, how can it expect to fund the hundreds of events that need support throughout an entire year? We can't— It’s an unsolvable dilemma that SAC found itself in and will continue to unless SAC receives more funding from the university.
One could argue that clubs shouldn’t have to rely on university funding to pay for events—that they should fundraise themselves. And that’s precisely what clubs have been doing. Business fraternities have turned into custom apparel companies, and Chinese Student Association is essentially Santa Clara’s on-campus bubble tea shop.
But I know that I didn’t join CSA to sell boba. RSOs should be able to spend their time and energy spreading their mission by event-planning and community-building without being forced to convert into small business fundraising machines.
At the end of the day, events made for students by students define Santa Clara’s student life. We owe it to our students to ensure that inadequate RSO funding doesn't end up replacing Coronavirus’s role in inhibiting student life after the pandemic is over. As a student body, we must find ways to dramatically increase funding to support our student organizations.
ASG can do its part by creating a task force committed to diverting Giving Day efforts to student life and bolstering in-person fundraising efforts, but that will only get us so far. It’s time for the university to give our student organizations the resources they so desperately need by permanently increasing the budget allocated to RSOs.
Justin Chan is a sophomore Accounting major and serves as the Senate Chair for the Associated Student Government of Santa Clara.