Extracurricular clubs are a core part of the college experience, and Brandeis has no shortage of them. The official list online touts over 200 unique student-run organizations covering just about every subject an undergraduate could hope for. Running a club isn’t cheap, though, and it seems that yearly budgets just keep going down. Student leaders are right to be stressed, but there’s a great deal of information that people don’t know about. What’s really happening here?
Most of the money clubs fund their events with comes out of the Student Activities Fund (SAF), a large pool of money comprising a small cut of every enrolled undergraduate’s tuition and any unspent SAF money from the previous school year. Every spring, clubs apply for money they expect to spend in the following school year during the annual “club marathon.” Those requests go to the Student Union’s Allocations board, the body responsible for organizing the marathon and, as the name implies, distributing budgets pulled from the SAF.
“We’ve put in a lot of work over the past few years to get [A-board] in a spot where people can understand our processes better,” said Marley Wilson, head of the A-board.
This year’s allocated total is less than the previous year’s. The drop is the most recent in a steady decline in SAF totals starting after the Covid-19 pandemic. The quarantines saw clubs unable to spend their budgets, leaving an entire financial year of unspent SAF money that rolled over to the next year. The A-board was left at that point with a massive excess that they weren’t sure how to spend. Ideally, the rollover money from a previous year should be no more than $1 million, but the actual amount from last year is close to $1.2 million, down from $1.4 million the year before and $1.8 million before that.
Another major reason for budget shrinkage is the sheer number of clubs that Brandeis has. The quantity of clubs is a source of pride for our university, but the large list stretches the SAF thin. With so many clubs, it’s hard to determine which are most unique and deserving of money. The A-board follows certain criteria surrounding service to students.
”Service to students is essentially just the resources and visibility a club can provide,” Wilson said. “We measure this by things like ‘how many events are they having per year?’ ‘How many people are going to these events?’”
Unfortunately, clubs will need to be more conservative with their plans if they wish to maximize budgets. Student Union Vice President Daniel Shin advises focusing on funding events that are most valuable to the club and its identity using the priority listing in applications forms.
”Personally, since I’m also part of e-boards of clubs, I think about prioritizing events more carefully,” Shin said. “It’s making sure that A-board can fund your events that are high priority.”
