In anticipation of the challenges of a largely virtual semester, Student Union made significant changes to its budgeting process for the fall 2020 semester, including switching to an appeals-based funding process and suspending the 90% rule.

The rule required that student groups spent over 90% of their allocated budget in order to receive the same amount of funding from SU the following semester. For example, a student group would have to spend 90% of its budget for the fall 2018 semester in order to justify receiving the same amount for the fall 2019 semester.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this model became unfeasible for the foreseeable future. The lack of programming options for student groups during a largely virtual semester meant that student groups simply could not use their SU funding in the same way that they could before.

“In-person programming is essentially gone for good,” Speaker of the Treasury senior Zach Sorensen said. “If you think about any of the performances and competitions and shows and rehearsals from performance groups, a cappella groups, sports groups, et cetera, none of that is happening…I think every group has been really, really affected, and there’s just very few ways to spend money.”

For China Forum, a student group dedicated to facilitating discussions about Chinese politics and culture, its typical programming of guest speakers and panel discussions can no longer be held in person. Although China Forum has still been hosting a number of different events over Zoom with speakers from all over the world, the financial cost of hosting a Zoom meeting is fairly minimal compared to a physical meeting.

“There’s definitely a drop in terms of the conventional expenses you are talking about,” China Forum President Serena Wu said. “For events, we no longer need to buy food for the audience… we don’t need travel expenses and other miscellaneous expenditures like that.”

Wu mentioned that new expenses such as paying for zoom’s webinar function and obtaining software for collecting admissions fees had arisen, but were still manageable.

In anticipation of these drastic changes for the fall semester, Treasury nixed its planned budget for fall 2020 and switched over to a more flexible and smaller appeals-based process.

“Basically, there’s no funding that’s happening through budgets this semester,” Sorensen said. “It’s all appeals. And we’ve got about $35,000 that we have for that because we also cut the student activities fee to $50 from around $280. Basically, Budget Committee spent 60 hours budgeting, but then we realized it was not going to be viable to do that. It just didn’t make sense because all the programming plans people had are not going forward.”

Sorensen said that the Treasury only received a single appeal for over $1000 in funding during the first six weeks of the semester, indicating SU’s usual spending of over $1 million on student groups would not have been necessary.

According to VP of Finance senior Alexa Jochims, many of the changes caused by the COVID pandemic were already underway as part of SU’s financial overhaul, which was scheduled to kick in for the spring 2021 semester.

“We knew that the 90% rule was going to be gone as soon as we were sent home in March, just because…there was going to be no way to figure out exactly how much groups [would have] spent in spring 2020 and hold them accountable for a pandemic that they had no control over,” Jochims said. “It’s a blessing and a curse that it’s falling right in line with the implementation of this financial restructure.”

The restructure also included plans to switch from semester-long budgets to case by case appeals for funding in most cases. This transition simply took place a semester earlier than planned, with the flexibility of the new process being more suited to a semester with a higher degree of uncertainty.

“It’s really stressful to have to submit a budget eight months in advance and not know exactly what you’re going to need and then it feels like you’re locked in,” Jochims said. “We’re hoping that this new structure will streamline a lot of that. It will free up money more quickly so that we don’t have to worry about things like funding percentages and the 90% rule and running out of money before some of our most important events happen on campus.”

China Forum has also rolled with the pandemic’s punches, taking advantage of the virtual format of their events to diversify their speaker catalogue while also saving money in travel expenses. Wu said that the digital format allowed them to host a larger number of attendees and book faculty from universities such as Peking University, Tsinghua University and Singapore University.

“We actually got to be more flexible this semester because now we no longer face a limitation of booking rooms and also getting speakers from abroad or overseas,” Wu said. “I think that opened up our perspective a lot.”