The Undergraduate Finance Board continued discussions about use of its budget surplus, which was first revealed in the Board’s public funding disclosure statement released last year.
With the exception of the latter half of the summer semester, student groups in the 2020-21 school year were unable to plan in-person events or meetings, said UFB Chair Akilesh Raman ’22. As a result, student groups requested funding at a lower rate than in prior years, he added.
“COVID was a block of time (when) everything changed, so the amount we were funding was very different and oftentimes lower,” Raman said.
After the University relaxed restrictions on group gatherings during the summer semester, student groups began to request funding once again for in-person events and activities. But as part of the University’s new temporary restrictions implemented Monday, student group activities must take place entirely virtually for the time being.
Over the last year, most of the funding requests were “website hosting costs and basic online maintenance, not really many capital improvements because we weren’t doing any of that and no in-person events, obviously,” said UFB Vice Chair Claire Brown ’22.
In typical years, UFB considers the amount of funding a group received in the previous year when determining how much to allocate to that group in the current year, according to Raman. But due to the unusual funding needs of groups during the pandemic, the Board will use the 2019-20 school year as a baseline when making funding decisions this year.
“We’re very unlikely to fund at a level below” that of the 2019-20 school year, Raman added.
The Board will begin meeting with student groups to go over funding requests for the current semester on Sept. 21.
Apart from beginning to fund in-person events and working on allocations, the Board is also in the process of deciding how to proceed with its budget surplus, which currently totals approximately $1.2 million, according to Raman.
In April 2020, UFB published its historical funding records dating back to 2008-09, which revealed a surplus of unused funds that sat at just over $1 million. The surplus had accumulated over years without the Board’s knowledge, The Herald previously reported.
“We didn’t dip too much into the surplus during COVID just because we wanted to make sure that we were providing an increase in funding to groups when we were back and they’re able to operate in their full capacity,” Raman said.
The Board has discussed utilizing the surplus to increase the baseline funding that is available to student groups independent of additional funding requests.
Depending on their categorization with the Student Activities Office, student groups have access to different amounts of baseline funding. Under the current structure, Category I groups have access to $100 of baseline funding, while Category II and III groups have access to $200, according to Brown.
If the Board were to increase baseline funding for groups, it would “dip pretty decently into the surplus,” she added.
The Board is also discussing using the surplus funds to cover media services for outdoor events this year, which it envisions there will be more of than in prior years due to the decreased risk of viral spread outdoors, Brown said. In previous years, the Board has only funded media services for indoor events.
When making decisions about utilizing the surplus, the Board is hoping to create a long-term spending plan that allows it to increase funding activity without having to increase the student activities fee in the near future. The $286 student activities fee is a part of the annual tuition amount charged to undergraduates and is where UFB derives the majority of its annual budget.
“We don’t want to increase tuition, so we want to make sure that the surplus is something that we spread out over a period of time,” Raman said.
If baseline funding amounts were to increase, it would be “an increased cost forever,” which, if paired with a stagnant student activities fee, would steadily deplete the surplus, he added.
Another change student groups can expect for this upcoming year is the potential for UFB to fund a larger variety of activities.
In March 2020, just before campus was evacuated due to COVID-19, UFB changed the wording of one of its policies to require that funded groups either directly or indirectly benefit the undergraduate student body — a change made in order to better meet the requests of service groups by allowing UFB to fund more service group activities, The Herald previously reported.
Since the change, UFB “hasn’t seen huge volumes of requests from service groups” due to the pandemic, Raman said. But, “we made progress with the wording and hopefully we can actualize that” this year, he added.
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