SLU Clubs Face Tough Competition for Budgets

Clubs all over campus are finalizing their budget proposals as the deadline to submit budgetary proposals to Thelmo nears. Clubs around campus will begin to submit their budget proposals for the next semester. This can be a stressful time for people in the clubs, as many will be wondering if they will get the funds that they request. “One of the things we’re going to start spending a lot more money on is we’re gonna take trips to RIT and Gallaudet for cultural awareness.” said Olivia Omar, a first year and treasurer for the Club of American Sign Language at St. Lawrence, or CASL. “So you have to like travel to DC, stay there for two nights, you have to feed people, you have to, you know, gas money…stuff like that.” Clubs like CASL will have to attempt and get a piece of the pie that is the allocated budget for clubs. Connor Giltz, Vice President of senate affairs for Thelmo, stated that “$392 of what every student pays to go to St. Lawrence goes into the student activities fund. That creates a fund of about just over $900,000.” Giltz goes on to describe that “$55,000 is set aside for senior week, and $80,000 is set aside for contingency for Thelmo.” An online spreadsheet is on the Thelmo Sakai site that showcases what each club received during their last budget run. ACE got the biggest slug of money by far, as it received over $300,000 in its last budgetary run. Other large beneficiaries included Thelmo itself, The Outing Club and The Hill News, although none of them came close to ACE’s number. The majority of the clubs were received less than $10,000. The amount of money that is put into the pot for clubs has not increased recently because of the nature of how the money is collected. Giltz remarked that “I don’t see it increasing drastically…the only time I would see it increasing, for example, is if we had a big class size, or if we had more students paying into that for some reason. I don’t think their needs to be a cap, as its sort of self-policing.” Clubs will be required to have their budgetary proposals in by the 13^th of April. Some clubs are bound to get turned down to at least an extent, as the amount of money available, as stated above, has not significantly increased. With more clubs asking for more money, there will likely be less to go around. This means that competitions will potentially be very stiff. “Once they have organizational status, they can submit a budget…so we have seven clubs that have come in for organizational status this semester. So every club that has a budget has gone through that process” says Giltz. “So, take a random club, if you are trying to plan an event for the next year, all of the aspects of the costs for that.” He also goes on to state that “Usually large budget increases aren’t considered, but it depends on the club.” Club budgets are largely self-regulating thanks to the way that Thelmo actually gets the required money, so a massive budgetary increase for clubs seems unlikely. Giltz states that “any increase in that total of the $900,000 would be something that would have to go through the individual students and would probably require an increase in the cost.” It will definitely be interesting to see how many of these clubs actually get the funds that they are looking for, but the cap will limit some of these. “Clubs should have to justify if they need a large amount of money,” said Abby Seward, `22. Budget increases and cuts would both be interesting to look out for, and with more clubs joining the fray, the competition to receive the money that is being requested will be stiffer than ever. Either way, many clubs will be competing to get the money that they want, or need, to operate for the coming months. It will be interesting to see what happens as the date to submit the budgets is drawing closer and closer with every passing day.