Thanks to a new SGA spending bill, students and Registered Student Organizations seeking financial allocations for events, projects or travel expenses to attend research conferences will see an increase in the available funds beginning July 1.
The new bill aims to increase funding for more students and their academic undertakings, according to senate Conference, Registration and Travel Committee Chair Joseph Cubow.
“What really motivated me to put a lot of work behind this was making sure we could spend more money on more people and putting more support towards our academic endeavors,” Cubow said.
SGA was able to increase funding for research by reducing funding for seminar and networking events, which are intended for job search but usually have low attendance rates, Cubow said.
The new bill has also added academic competition as a separate category for funding. SGA is hoping that the allocation of funding for this new category will encourage more students to engage in competitions, because students invest a lot in these competitions, Cubow said.
“We were missing a lot of opportunities because people didn’t know they could get money for something and we didn’t know if we could really fund it, but by creating this competition tier we could actually see other encouraging competitions,” Cubow said.
Funding for research will increase from $250 to $400 for individual students and from $3000 to $4000 for RSO’s, according to Cubow.
Cubow conducted research by talking to students and RSO’s before proposing these changes, he said. Extensive research was done by both Cubow and FAO chairman David Sidhom to insure more students get funding, said Student Body President-Elect Josh Bolona.
“Everything we pass is to achieve the ultimate goal to benefit more students,” Bolona said.
Students can request quick allocations for smaller amounts of funds, larger requests for funding by RSO’s are done through a bill which takes about three weeks to process, Cubow said. Funding requests can be done through the Knight Connect website.
Over the course of next year, the SGA intends to monitor the progress of this bill’s impact by collecting data to make sure it’s helping more students and will make changes accordingly, Cubow said.
“I love seeing change in the SGA, I’m really happy to be part of this … I think we need to embrace change, but do it carefully,” Cubow said.
