General Comment:
Thank you to all students who exerted tremendous effort submitting annual budget requests to UFB this year! We know how much planning went into each and every single budget, and are inspired by the ambition and vibrancy of student activities in our community. We saw groups aiming to continue long held traditions, as well as groups aiming to create new ones. As much as we wanted to allocate funding to each diligently devised endeavor, there more more than UFB had funds to allocate to. While the Student Activities Fee revenue is expected to be approximately $2,100,000 for FY24, UFB received over $3,000,000 of requests through our annual budgeting process. In addition to directly funding groups’ annual budgets, UFB must also reserve funding for 2023-2024 supplemental requests and expenses such as media services, Event Support Equipment/Facilities, or Event Support Services/DPS/Crowd Management to enable events to occur. As such, many budget requests could not be funded, or could not be funded in full, if UFB was to ensure that equitable funding could be provided for all 400+ student groups. This was compounded by the fact that UFB spent the surplus accrued prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in the years immediately following the hight of it. The Board deemed it to be crucial to use the surplus to stimulate student activities in this critical trial period in which many groups faced the question whether they would be able to survive the pandemic related dearth of activity and community or not. Now, since the pandemic, we have seen more student groups flourish on campus than ever before. Finally, even though the annual student activities fee was increased from $286 to $300 for the upcoming year, this amount is unfortunately not able to keep up with the inflation we have experienced since the last time the fee was increased. The compounding of these factors resulted in requests far exceeding the funds available for allocation. The partial funding of budgets that UFB was previously able to, and would have liked to, fund in full is what directly allowed UFB to, when possible, allocate at least partial funding to a greater number of groups. Throughout this annual budgeting cycle, UFB’s funding decisions were thus shaped primarily by the objective to keep as many groups financially afloat as possible, despite the undeniable lack of funding compared to the sizable demand. Arriving at funding decisions for each group was far from simple and caused the budgeting process to take much longer than anticipated. I speak for the entire Board when I thank financial signatories and group leaders for your patience as we concluded the Spring ‘23 semester. The primary reason the process took so much longer, until the very last day of the semester, was the following: at the time of initial annual budget submissions, UFB’s existing policies allowed for more funding to be allocated, i.e. more budgets to be approved, than UFB de facto had funding for. Therefore, UFB had to rework its policy framework, established over the course of years and years, within a few short weeks as to still enable the equitable allocation of objectively insufficient funding. Had we correctly anticipated the total amount of requests UFB would receive, UFB would have been able to better prepare groups for potential outcomes of the annual budgeting cycle, and we would have worked with you much more closely in advance of the budgeting period. Again, I speak on behalf of the Board when expressing that rectifying this lack of communication at an important moment in time is the Board’s top priority in the coming years, so that annual budgeting truly becomes the useful and reliable, instead of confusing and unpredictable, process that it absolutely must be. Nonetheless, with the funding allocations UFB was able to make, we hope to have laid the groundwork for a successful, exciting, and fulfilling year of student activities and look forward to working with you in 2023-2024. You can reach out to ufb@brown.edu with more specific questions and find the most recent group-based breakdown of funding allocations here
Amienne Spencer-Blume, UFB Chair 2022-2023
Cultural and Ethnic or Religious and Spiritual Life Groups:
Due to the budgetary constraints that UFB had to take into consideration when making funding allocations, the Board decided to fund groups with the designations Cultural and Ethnic or Religious and Spiritual Life on the basis of lump sums instead of individual line items. The lump sum allocated to a given cultural or religious group is based on a given group’s request compared to its historical allocations, while taking into account budgetary constraints across all funding categories. Lump sums are for the full academic year, 2023-2024. Whatever funds are unused in the fall will be available in the spring; unused funds at the end of the spring are returned to UFB. By allocating lump sums instead of individual line items, UFB hopes Cultural and Ethnic and Religious and Spiritual Life groups can have more autonomy over deciding what is or is not relevant to you, decisions that UFB believes you should be free to make given your particular mission statement. We apologize that this was not determined before the logistics of annual budgeting began, and thank you for your understanding.
A Cappella Groups:
Due to the budgetary constraints that UFB had to take into consideration when making funding allocations, the Board was unfortunately unable to fund A Cappella groups using the funding guidelines we arrived at earlier this year. This is in part because UFB’s policies have never before allowed UFB to fund A Cappella groups to the extent that we sought to in 2022-2023, and in light of funding shortages, we were not able to take on as large of a new expense as hoped. UFB therefore decided to fund groups with the designation A Cappella on the basis of lump sums instead of individual line items. The lump sum allocated to a given group is calculated by the number of members (indicated on the annual budgeting request submission) times $56. Lump sums are for the full academic year, 2023-2024. Whatever funds are unused in the fall will be available in the spring; unused funds at the end of the spring are returned to UFB. By allocating lump sums instead of individual line items, UFB sought to fund A Cappella as equitably as possible, despite funding constraints. We regret that this was not determined before the logistics of annual budgeting began, since at that point in time UFB did not yet know what the total value of requests would amount to.