With only a few weeks left in office, Vice President of Finance and Resources Naasir Lakhani submitted legislation to the A.S. Council last night that changed the process by which student organizations receive funding.
Approved unanimously by the council, the plan will increase basic operational funding for student organizations from a maximum of $20 to a maximum of $400 while eliminating the option to request separate funds for travel expenses. The change also eliminates quarterly programming reqests and implements a rolling request process with no limits on the ammount of funding that may be granted.
The council will discuss the second half of the legislation, which seeks to establish a committee of individuals appointed specifically to oversee these funding requests.
The proposed advisory committee would meet once a week during the academic year to consider each funding request, and would then recommend an allocation to the A.S. Council.
This has been a yearlong project for Lakhani, a graduating senior. Peter Benesch, current associate vice president of athletic relations and candidate for Lakhani’s position in 2009-10, worked alongside Lakhani’ in making the revisions.
Lakhani observed the student-organization funding process at other UC campuses to improve the procedure currently used by ASUCSD, which requires organizations to submit funding requests for the following quarter by week five of the previous quarter.
‘The system is clearly broken,’ Lakhani said. ‘Although our system is supposedly objective, it is still biased toward orgs that understand the system. The orgs that know [the process] know which boxes to fill out and get the most funding.’
Both Lakhani and Benesch agree that the changes will benefit both the A.S. Finance Office and the organizations seeking funds, in that neither party will have to worry about specific quarterly deadlines.
‘Right now, 90 percent of requests are done by my position and the AVP Student Orgs position,’ Lakhani said. ‘The finance committee only looks at the most miniscule things, which I think is wrong. The bigger requests need to have more eyes on them. This model allows student orgs to show the merits of their event.’
Readers can contact Connie Shieh at [email protected].