Student Government now has a different way for students to request and receive funding for student organizations after USC's student senate implemented new finance codes and had its budget increased by $154,000 for the 2024-2025 fiscal year.
The recent changes include clearer language in the financial codes, improvements to the treasurers' workshop and clearer roles for the finance committee. New guidelines were also established for travel, including hotel bookings and travel rate limits, and sports organizations received more support for acquiring items for their meetings.
The new finance codes and increased student budget are due to combined efforts from Student Body Treasurer Jacob Vaught, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee Camden Kaye, Chairman of the Finance Committee William Wenzel, Former Speaker of the student senate Cameron Eubanks, the 116th senate and the ad hoc committee.
Student Government has run out of funding for the past two years, and funds for last spring ran out before the first semester ended. But now the goal is to run out of funds closer to the end of the school year, Vaught said.
"If our budget doesn't get used, it gets reabsorbed into the university, so students orgs don't get to use it, Student Government doesn't get to use it — it just disappears basically," Vaught said. "We really want to make sure we use that to its entirety, but we want to make sure we're not using it so quickly that orgs can't get the funding for events."
The new way to request funds
The process for student organizations to request funding is now much easier, Vaught said.
Student Government now has a finance website which includes the live budget — both internal and external — allowing anyone to view the remainder of the budget and and how much has been requested. The platform also highlights which student organizations' funding applications have been approved or denied and provides instructions for submitting requests.
There is also a completely new treasurers manual, which is more comprehensive and easier to understand than it has been in previous years. Additionally, the treasurer's workshop has shifted to a more visually focused format rather than being text-heavy.
Vaught and Wenzel in the spring noticed a disconnect between the first half of the process run by the treasurer's branch and the second half going into the finance committee and then into the reimbursement progress, Wenzel said. To address this, they worked to simplify both the submission and committee processes to make things easier for student organizations
Vaught said this year Student Government is taking complete control of the reimbursement process to minimize the back-and-forth communication between administrators and students, which can often causes delays.
"For example, Datatown, one of the engineering organizations, their (funding) request has been going on since the middle of last semester, and they still have not gotten reimbursed yet," Vaught said. "That's how bad it was, that's how slow the system could be. We're stepping in to help expedite this kind of process so that organizations' reimbursement is as simple, easy as possible.
Student Government has seen the largest number of student organizations attend treasurer's workshops already, Vaught said. There has also been an increase in the number of organizations requesting funds.
Kaye said Student Government has already exceeded how much money has been spent and requested last year and it will not run out of money by December.
Kaye said since the budget is split between two semesters. So if Student Government spent the entire fall semester's budget, there will still be another half for the spring. The other half will always be reserved for spring events so people don't feel cheated, he said.
"We're going to be able to fund more events, bigger events, better events. We're going to be able to do it more often, with more frequency," Kaye said. "We've built in the protections to ensure that when this money does get distributed, it's done so as equitably as possible. Is it going to be perfect? ... I doubt it, but I wish. We've built it to be about as good as I think we can. There's not a lot of actions that we could take to make it any better. And I think with all of the protections in place, we really have made it better for students."
'There were a lot of gray areas'
Kaye said there was no immediate explanation for why Student Government ran out of funds for two years in a row but only guesses. It wanted to get to the heart of the problem and go on from there.
"What we came up with was there were two major issues — one being ... the student activity fund was incredibly small, despite its size," Kaye said. "For most people ... when you're looking at $180,000, you think that's a lot of money, but when you're funding 300 organizations, that's not nearly that much."
Some events, such as Tiger burn, could cost up to $20,000, Kaye said.
The other major issue is that some organizations were consuming large amounts of the budget. There were a lot of organizations asking for money and Student Government could not give it all out, and a few organizations were asking for significantly more than others, Kaye said.
"We did a giant analysis. We kind of began to notice these patterns. ... This is not just an issue of there's too many hands reaching into the pot. Some people are double dipping," Kaye said. "We need to go build out a system that can kind of fix that or bring light to it when it happens, just to avoid in the future, to make it more equitably distributed."
The codes are also now in a more readable format and easier to understand, Wenzel said. He said that it was very easy to get lost while reading the old codes, especially for student organizations trying to understand the instructions.
"There were a lot of gray areas, I'd say, that we wanted to specify within the codes and ensure they they were accounted for, things that the finance committee just had to make a judgement call on," Wenzel said. "We wanted to actually have something written in the codes that could address it. So that was a big thing (the ad hoc committee) worked on was trying to make sure the situations we were encountering were being accounted for in the codes as well.
Addressing the need for more money
The ad hoc committee reviewed lots of data during its investigation. They looked at inflation, average cost per org, enrollment numbers and number of student orgs and then put those together to come up with a general estimate. This led to the financial budget increase.
Kaye said that Eubanks played a crucial role in initiating discussions about the financial budget increase. He said that they engaged with Vice President of Student Affairs Rex Tolliver and other budget stakeholders, including Anna Edwards, the Chief of Staff for Student Affairs and Academic Support, to explain their position.
Kaye said that Student Government had to present statistical evidence to the administration to show that their funds were insufficient. One claim was that if the funding requests remained constant throughout the year, they would need just over $300,000. Ultimately, Student Government secured a budget of $340,000.
"The ad hoc committee was formed last term to get the data behind the code writing, which was a big group effort across many people in senate last term," Wenzel said. "From there, a lot of input was thrown in from a lot of different individuals, even that weren't from that committee, to make sure that the code changes were good."
Additional things changed in the codes include specifics on traveling, specifics on hotels, what the limit was for the travel rate, storage and being able to get usable items for sports organizations for recurring meetings.
Vaught and Kaye rewrote most of the codes. The previous student body treasurer and the previous student body president looked over the new codes, as well as Edwards and a few senators.
"We're still continuing to advocate for more funding from administrators because we think it's very important for student organizations to have as much funding as possible," Vaught said. "We don't really want to limit what funds they have, but because we have a limited budget, we do have to consider those things."