Cryptic and legal jargon make requesting financial help from the ASUO a daunting and time consuming task for student groups. That’s why student groups looking to make special requests from the ASUO Senate start with an uphill battle — the complexities of the special request forms they have to fill out are intimidating, to say the least.
“At first I was really nervous going into it, but after getting some of my questions answered, it became a littler easier,” Iris Tian said, the vice president of the student publication HuaFeng. Her magazine had recently approached the senate to request $4,000 for production purposes.
The special request form is the application that has to be filled out before a student group can present its case as to why it needs financial assistance. Whether a group is looking to go to a conference or it needs to buy a new printer, all student groups fill out the same form, which makes the questions on the form both too general and specific at the same time.
Riddled with legal language, Tian found the special request application process to be a little more daunting than expected when she began working on the form. The publication’s request was delayed due to the application process, but after getting some help from some ASUO members, she was able to finish the application process and have her request accepted.
“It’s pretty cryptic and it’s not easy to fill out for the groups,” ASUO Senate President Matthew Miyamoto said. “I definitely want to rebuild the request form they use.”
The pool used to fund these requests is currently sitting around $302,000, making this year one of the largest surplus amounts the senate has ever had. Some senators along with Miyamoto are looking to make the process less daunting, but they haven’t made too much progress on rebuilding the process yet.
“My understanding is that the update to the forms in the future will be able to give us more information than the previous system,” Sen. Taylor Allison said. “There will be separate special request forms for conferences, events, retreats, et cetera and it’ll hopefully make our meetings more efficient, so that the forms give us a better understanding ahead of time of what exactly their request entails.”
Even with talks about the new process, the senate will still be looking at all requests carefully to make sure that they’re giving to the groups that need it the most.
“There is a part under Section A (in the special request form) that asks the groups, ‘What other funding options have you exhausted, and what were the results?’” ASUO Senate Treasurer Marita Maffit said. “This can mean anything from asking academic departments or other programs for financial support. I think a lot of the times groups that come to Senate asking for requests are not always aware of all of the other options, so it would be good to have a page that actually explains all of those.”
According to Maffit, there isn’t a current timeline on when the new process will come about.