The Student Services Finance Committee met Monday to hear the Student Leadership Program present its proposed 2023 budget.
This year, the program seeks to focus its budget on in-person programming, something it didn’t have access to last year because of the pandemic. Specifically, SLP asked for the approval of the reallocation of funds from underused resources to priorities.
Though the budget proposes no overall increase or decrease compared to last year’s, SLP is looking to rearrange money from between budget areas to those the group prioritizes.
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According to SLP Financial Coordinator Sarah McLeod, SLP returned 30.51% of its budget last year due to COVID-19.
Last year, the SLP’s coordinating team moved $3,500 of excess money around to support the organizational management summit, which previously went unfunded.
At the 2021 summit, Speaker Ebone Bell provided an in-depth workshop on how to accomplish goals for diversity without participating in tokenization — the event yielded a higher attendee turnout than ever before.
“We want to continue allowing this program to prosper in order to promote positive student-led development change on campus and in the community as well, but we no longer have those unspent funds to pull from and we are unable to ask for a budget increase,” McLeod said.
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Proposed changes to the budget from last year include decreasing investments in printing, summer salaries and financial specialist summer salaries.
The money removed from these sectors will go into events like the group’s Organizational Management Summit. The event takes place over half a day off-campus, providing an insightful look into a certain topic SLP is focusing on in a given year.
According to the presentation, the program’s Organizational Management Summit had six attendees in 2019, zero in 2020 because it was canceled and 40 in 2021.
“Last year our coordinators had enough excess funds to move funding into the Organizational Management Summit and hire a speaker and this increased attendance by 566%,” McLeod said.
One theme for this year for the group is leadership in times of transition, McLeod said. This is especially significant to the past year. Last year’s events also inspired the program to focus on mental health and expand diversity efforts.
The SSFC will vote on SLP’s budget at a later meeting. SSFC meets again Thursday at 5:00 p.m. on zoom.
