Student Assembly

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This page contains comments posted by members of the Cornell community pertaining to Finance Commission (SAFC) in the Student Assembly. Before posting to this forum, please read the comments below to make sure that the information you are providing is pertinent to the discussion. Comments are especially valuable if they add new information or points of view.

Initial Findings

The Student Assembly Finance Committee (SAFC) is a committee of the Student Assembly. It maintains considerable autonomy, and it is responsible for electing its own executive board. The SAFC recruits, trains, and monitors its own membership, and new members are confirmed each semester by the full Student Assembly.

The SAFC is one of the most public instruments of the Student Assembly. The nature of its responsibility places it under considerable scrutiny. Concerns with the SAFC include its complicated process for receiving funding that often leaves some groups without their full budgetary requests.

While hundreds of organizations navigate the SAFC’s funding process without concern each semester, some organizations continue to bring valuable insight to the SAFC and the Student Assembly by pointing out inconsistencies in our system. Recent concerns include incorrect information being provided, on limited occasions, to organizations by SAFC commissioners. Some organizations describe the President and Treasurers’ (P&T) Handbook as being too complicated and unclear. The Student Assembly recognizes that the SAFC must continue to respond to these concerns, and it must be prepared to provide all available resources to assist in its efforts to improve.

The SAFC is currently under the extremely able leadership of Jack Castle ‘09 and Taylor Mulherin ‘09. Jack and Taylor remain committed to providing a complete and accurate assessment of the SAFC and improving its weaknesses in both the short term and the long term.

Working with Jack and Taylor, the Student Assembly is committed to reevaluating its role in the SAFC’s funding process. The Student Assembly must ensure that its members understand the SAFC’s funding process, too, in order to most appropriately rule on appeals brought before the full Student Assembly. Lastly, the Student Assembly and the SAFC must ensure the warm working relationship between the two bodies; something that has often been overlooked by past executive boards of the organizations.

As there will never be sufficient funds to provide for all organizations at their full request, the criteria being used to evaluate organizations must be as clear, concise, and transparent as possible.

Potential Solutions

1. The leadership of the SAFC must begin a complete overhaul of its P&T Handbook to ensure that the process is perceived as less bureaucratic. The SAFC should include Student Assembly representatives and community members in its reevaluation. When leadership is turned over to a new executive board in 2009, all efforts must be made to ensure that the overhaul continues and a new handbook is implemented as soon as possible.
2. The SAFC must strike a balance between remaining objective on the nature of the organization and subjective on the outcome of the funding process. To do this, the SAFC must create a mechanism that allows it to reevaluate a decision of its committee before an appeal is brought before the Student Assembly. By allowing the executive board of the SAFC to overhaul an unfavorable decision of the SAFC before its appeal reaches the Student Assembly, the SAFC will be able to maintain autonomy while self-correcting for organizations that might get lost in the funding process.
3. The Student Assembly must clearly define its role when hearing and ruling upon an SAFC appeal. Whether the Student Assembly wants to remain strictly objective or partially subjective in its decisions, the Student Assembly must ensure that its representatives are acting under the same assumptions when making a ruling.
4. The SAFC’s online budget application must be overhauled to ensure that it is more straightforward.
5. New commissioners must continue to be thoroughly trained before being permitted to speak on behalf of the SAFC to a student organization. New commissioners must not be permitted to speak on behalf of the SAFC for the first semester on the SAFC unless supervised by a more experienced commissioner. A senior member of the committee should provide guidance and mentorship for junior members during their first semester.

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« Representativeness of the Assembly | 2008Spring | Internal Budget »