For the second funding period of the semester, the Point Park’s student government allocated $15,194 of a requested $26,375 to 36 clubs at Monday’s legislative body meeting.
The United Student Government (USG) allocated the Society for Intelligence and National Security the largest budget of $3,000 for one event, the Gathering, while Confluence came in with the second largest budget of $1,425 for a research conference and blanket and coat drive.
Throughout the process of budget allocations, each senator in the legislative body assumed a role in the Finance Committee. By doing this, USG eliminated the possibility of members in a club working with the specific budget. For this half of the semester, the budgets for each club were worked on for two days, Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, and were completed in approximately six hours total.
To create the budgets, USG receives a portion of money from the activity funds portion of Point Park student tuition. This year, USG was allotted $50,000 for the semester, which is 11% of the Activity Fund.
Of the $50,000, during the first half of the semester, $25,625 was allocated to clubs (this number includes $8,400 for an internal USG budget), leaving $24,375 for the second half of the semester. However, for this funding period, clubs requested $26,375.
“This time around, I had the Finance Committee go through all the budgets and we did it based on priority; who turned theirs in first?” Treasurer of USG, Amber Mole, said.
Treasurer Mole and the Finance Committee took care to reach out to clubs throughout the entirety of the budgeting process for clarifications.
“I had them [the Finance Committee] reach out to clubs on Wednesday and we gave them 24 hours to reply back and a lot of clubs were on it and said, ‘hey, this is what we meant,’” Mole said.
By clarifying specifics of budgets, members of the Finance Committee are better prepared and educated in allocating funds as senator Melinda Harrison-Laster thought.
“A lot of the clubs included a lot of details which helped us a lot with proposing new totals,” Harrison-Laster said.
Clubs unhappy with their fund allocations have the chance to request an appeal for more money.
In reference to last week’s meeting, senator Bobby Bertha spoke of the progress he’s made with the Condom Initiative. Since last week, he’s spoken to the nurse’s staff on different containers in which condoms can be held inside of.
“Hopefully we can have this Initiative in full effect by the second week of November,” Bertha said during the meeting.
Additionally, senator Amedea Baldoni has continued her work with finding a working time for Hug-a-Hound by posting and sharing a link on Facebook to a Survey Monkey with questions regarding best possible availability times throughout the week and if students would want it more than once a month.
USG also reflected on the Mocktail Mix-Off held last Monday which was a success with about 100-150 people participating in the event throughout the night.
