Sophia Roldan-Ferreira, the president of the Boston University Belly Dance Society, said her club cannot hire instructors this semester because the Allocations Board, an organization that is in charge of distributing a portion of student tuition to undergraduate student organizations, denied their request of $5,000 club funding.
The Questrom School of Business junior said she does not understand why AB did not allocate her club any money at all — after all, “we are [a] bunch of college students who cannot afford to fund our groups on our own,” she said.
The BU Belly Dance Society is among the hundreds of BU undergraduate student clubs that have received notices from AB since last week. The specific data of how much money each organization got is not yet publicly available, said Taylor Servigny, assistant director of the Student Activities Office.
“Our biggest goal is to most effectively use the students’ money to best serve the broad BU community,” AB President Ethan Meyers said. “We ideally like to focus on events that happen on campus because it usually has the biggest reach and is the most accessible to students.”
In previous years, AB had rolling applications for club funding, but they would always run out of funds because student groups ended up requesting more money than what is available from the Student Services Fee, a mandatory fee on students’ bills, Meyers said.
This year, using the board’s new “Square” policies, all of the funds were allocated at the beginning of the semester, Meyers said.
The Square system separates BU’s undergraduate student organizations into four groups: Bay State, Beacon, Commonwealth and Brookline, according to SAO’s website.
Among them, Bay State groups have $100 in annual funding, but they are not eligible to apply for AB funding. Clubs in the other categories have access to request AB funding, but they are required to go through training and workshops.
To apply for AB funding, each group must submit a request that provides the board with information about the description of the event, the goal of the event and the target audience of the event, Meyers said.
“I think many groups will be satisfied with the amount we allocated to them because in many cases the decisions we made this year are the same decisions we made in the past,” he said. “Obviously given some of the policy changes, some groups will be affected in a non-beneficial way.”
The BU Outing Club is one of the clubs that was “affected in a non-beneficial way,” according to the club’s president Gabriel Messercola. The College of Arts and Sciences senior said he learned Wednesday that his club’s funding was, for the first time, denied.
“We put in a request for $2,100, and that’s the request we have put in for the past few years, which [had] been accepted,” Messercola said AB denied their funding request because, according to the board’s new funding package, the clubs have to benefit people outside of their organization.
Messercola said the new funding requirements are not fair, especially because without the funding, it would be even harder for them to recruit more people and benefit more students.
“Every club is trying to benefit themselves with funding, trying to grow their message, grow their organization, [and] get more students involved,” she said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Not to mention many groups were completely barred from recieving any AB funding which prevents any of their usual programming from happening. The BU Zen club hosts speakers every year for events that are completely open to all members of the BU community. However, we weren’t even given to opportunity to request funding for these events under the new policies, which means they most likely won’t happen. The most efficient way to get funding otherwise is to charge member dues but our club has always been free and open to all. Fundraising can only do so much. The new policies are really unfair.