In last week’s Senate elections, Campus Y, Emergency Support Team (EST) and Uncle Joe’s received block funding for their budget proposals, while the Student Sustainability Fund (SSF) did not.

In a 1,082-574 vote, the SSF failed to receive the two-thirds majority necessary to secure block funding. If only 13 “no” votes had changed to “yes” votes, the SSF would have been granted funding. The group also failed to receive block funding last spring, though it did receive block funding the previous year.

The three student organizations successful in securing block funds did so by gaining around 90 percent of the vote.

The groups learned only in October that they would have to prepare their proposals nearly five months early. Block funding normally appears on the spring election ballot, but this year, Student Union held a special election to amend its constitution to allow the early vote.

The change will allow senior and SU Vice President of Finance Ammar Karimjee to propose a general budget in February instead of letting his successor allocate the budget as in the past.

Karimjee said he was pleased with the voter turnout this year, around 32 percent of the student body. The turnout was down from around 40 percent last spring, an almost unprecedented amount for SU elections, though Karimjee said the decrease was expected.

“All the groups mentioned that they thought the smaller timeline would not allow them to advertise in the way that they wanted to,” Karimjee said. “The ones that passed passed so substantially that I think that shows there was enough time.”

Senior and President of Campus Y Colleen Rhoades said the change put significant extra pressure on her group to have its proposal ready in time.

“We had established a marketing plan for the whole year. Finding out that [the election] was pushed up significantly really changed that,” Rhoades said. “It was a lot of work for all of us to do at once. So that was tough, just to try to do so much in such a little amount of time to really get the word out.”

Campus Y enlisted the help of its six executive board members and 55 program leaders to get the necessary 1,000 petition signatures to appear on the election ballot and encourage as many students as possible to vote.

“We definitely benefit from the size of the group and having different people connected to so many different aspects of campus that we can really network that way,” Rhoades said.

Amanda Elder, senior and co-director of Uncle Joe’s, said the group also felt pressure under the shortened timeline to submit its proposal.

“The worry of not getting block funding is pretty huge when we’re so used to having it, so we didn’t want to be complacent,” she said. “I think a lot of people recognize that Uncle Joe’s is much needed and we weren’t asking for too much money. We were being reasonable and we stayed pretty consistent.”

SSF member and junior Jake Lyonfields said the compressed timeline was particularly difficult on his group, which has far fewer members than some of the other groups seeking block funding.

“They did an amazing job with just four or five people gathering as many signatures as they could,” Lyonfields said. “It was definitely a community effort, but they also really took the reins and got things going.”

He attributed the group’s falling short in votes to a communication issue.

“One of the issues we had was if you looked at the actual ballot, we didn’t have an itemized budget,” Lyonfields said. “That probably brought us down a little bit. Perhaps a better option is…[to] provide an example budget for previous years. That might really help people understand better what SSF does with the money it’s allocated.”

Senior Sara Elster voted to fund each of the four groups’ proposals and expressed disappointment that the SSF did not succeed in securing block funds.

“Being a senior and seeing how much we’ve grown in terms of sustainability on campus, I think we’ve grown a lot and I’d love to see it grow further,” Elster said.

With additional reporting by Parker Chang and Michael Tabb.