Undergraduate Council Earmarks Event Funding

The Undergraduate Council voted last night to allocate $10,000 for the spring semester to help student groups sponsor more events in large on- and off-campus venues, green-lighting a pilot program that will remove some of the largest financial barriers to hosting campus-wide events.

According to UC Finance Committee Chair Luis A. Martinez ’12, the Council hopes to fund about 10 events next semester.

But he added that the policies regulating the new fund will be flexible and depend on the nature of the events groups propose.

The UC will prioritize collaborations between different student organizations proposing non-traditional events open to the entire campus, Martinez said.

The Council does not normally fund off-campus events and provides a maximum of $200 to help groups cover the cost of renting locations on campus, such as dining halls or Sanders Theatre. Martinez said that many student group leaders have pointed to the financial burden of increased rent, deposits, and security fees as major deterrents from throwing large-scale parties.

“In the past, if we’ve wanted to throw large events by ourselves, we would bear all the financial costs,” Chinese Student Association Co-President Allen Yang ’11 said. “One easy way for us to deal with this is to charge, but the problem is that it puts us at risk because we don’t know how many tickets we can sell.”

UC Vice President Eric N. Hysen ’11 said the UC wants to encourage student groups to create original programs that may be too expensive to fund through normal UC policies.

“They were either not holding these events or were scaling them down,” Hysen said. “It was hurting student life and it was hurting student groups.”

The policies for the new large-venue grants will be available by Nov. 15, and student groups will be able to submit proposals until Feb. 1.

Also at last night’s meeting, the Council approved the second half of the new “Hack Harvard” initiative to encourage innovative campus web applications and other new services for students. Last week, the UC voted to allocate $1,000 to create an “incubator program” to develop promising Computer Science 50 final projects into web applications.

This legislation will set aside an additional $4,000 to add a new set of prizes to the I3 Harvard College Innovation Challenge—an entrepreneurship competition that helps fund new independent ventures and Harvard Student Agencies businesses—for new campus programs or web applications that benefit Harvard students but do not fit the existing criteria for I3 prizes.

—Staff writer Stephanie B. Garlock can be reached at sgarlock@college.harvard.edu