SAC funding guidelines undergo changes

The funding process for Student Activities Council-funded groups has undergone changes.

This budget cycle, groups applying for funding from SAC faced a new set of funding guidelines. These new guidelines, instituted in January of this year, include changes to travel and printing funds.

The guidelines govern the rules on several categories of funding that groups can receive SAC money for, including allocation of travel funds, honoraria allotments and security funds.

This year, allocation for travel funds was cut by 5 percent. Groups that use the travel funds for going to conferences and doing performances include the International Affairs Association and Penn Masala.

Those groups, according to SAC Chair and College junior Jen Chaquette said in an email, “also brought in revenue [for themselves], usually from hosting conferences or tournaments … and after conversations with a number of them, [we found] they’d be able to cover that additional 5 percent cost.”

Another change to the regulations includes less money for the “Photocopies, Printing and Publicity” fund. Each group who applies for funds under this label is now capped at $100, $50 less than in the past.

Chaquette attributed this to the growing ease of Internet advertisement. “We found that groups weren’t using all of their PPP money because paper flyers are less common with all of the social media tools available on the Internet,” she said.

This year, the budget process has gone smoothly. Only a few groups filed appeals to SAC after budgets were released to each group on April 1.

Part of the story of the easy budget process may be attributable to the push for alternative funding sources.

Alternative sources have been a large part of the dialogue in student government since the budget meetings in the Undergraduate Assembly in March, but the Alternative Funding Guide put out by SAC was started in 2007.

The guide outlines a number of different avenues student groups can receive funds from, from the UA Contingency Fund, which many leaders in the UA have wanted to increase the visibility of, to academic departments. The document also, in line with the views of the new UA treasurer and Wharton junior Tiffany Zhu, encourages “simple fundraising.”

UA Technology Director and College junior Nikolai Zapertov helped update the guide this year. In an email, he said that the Alternative Funding Guide “will hopefully help many student groups, especially nascent ones that are not SAC recognized, to find funding sources in the interim moratorium period with much greater ease.”

Chaquette does not identify the changes in the guidelines as having anything to do with the moratorium. “The funding guidelines were in existence before the moratorium,” she said.

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