Since the club allocation process finished this September, SGA’s Finance Committee has been reevaluating the rules for club approval. Finance Committee set forth a moratorium to halt the SGA approval and funding of clubs until next semester, due to concern about their swiftly depleting funding budget and the consistent increase of clubs with overlapping goals. The Assembly passed it on Thursday, October 21. Subsequently, the Finance Committee created an Organizational/Club Process Review Task Force to spearhead the club evaluation process on campus.
This does not mean new clubs cannot be created. As outlined in the proposal put forth by the Task Force, clubs are still encouraged to “meet and start planning, talk to the staff members of the Office of Student Engagement and Leadership Education, write a Constitution, put on meetings, get the word out on their group [by] promoting it to the campus, and seek Collegiate Link Status.”
David Collerd ’11, SGA Vice President for Finance, is leading this mission. “When we really look at the rules, we could approve a club that wouldn’t meet the criteria of what a club is. Clubs come in and ask for money. Finance Committee cannot give them the money they want, so they can’t function successfully,” said Collerd in an SGA meeting. “[This year] we saw that we can only allocate 51 percent of what clubs request, and we’d like to give them more. After our deliberations, we felt that the entire process could be improved. We saw a lot of flaws.”
Said Bradley Maykow ’12, a member of both the Task Force and Finance Committee, “In order to fix this process, we felt it was necessary to halt the current process to make a program that fosters the creation of a stronger, and more connected student organization/club program for the future.”
Not everyone is happy.
“I understand the need to reevaluate clubs,” said Amy Smith ’12, president of Dance Team. “The purpose of a club is to promote student involvement and allow students to meet others who share similar interests. However, this reevaluation should have occurred at the end of last year instead of the beginning of this year, after clubs presented their budget proposals in front of the Finance Committee.”
She continued, “In a time when freshmen are just beginning to get their feet on the ground and discover their passions here at Connecticut College, they either don’t have the funding to improve a club, or they can’t start a new club of their own. It’s basically a whole year taken away from clubs – 25 percent of a student’s time here at Conn. It’s both frustrating and disappointing.”
The Task Force will be in evaluation talks until early November, when they will present their thoughts to the SGA Assembly. The Task Force plans to hold an open forum to hear students’ opinions, and eventually meet with all club presidents.
Finalized changes to the club approval process will appear in early December and be voted on by SGA before the end of the semester.
(Image from conncoll.edu)
