Lyndon,
Last year, I had the pleasure of serving this community as the 2019-20 SGA Financial Controller and leading the fight to keep our institutions open and thriving. While we have succeeded in the effort of keeping our institutions running, we have failed to keep campus life thriving. It has been extremely disheartening to watch the same SGA that I served on last year dismantle so many clubs in recent months due to lack of participation and COVID roadblocks. Last year, it seemed like, every SGA meeting until we left for quarantine, we were either approving new clubs to be added to the SGA family or allocating funds to help support clubs and their activities. During this we were able to keep a healthy SGA budget and bring back clubs that we had originally thought wouldn’t make it through the year.
This is why I am calling on the SGA to pass its own form of a stimulus to support campus life and help prevent the further dismantlement of clubs and organizations. I am calling on SGA to provide every single club, regardless of financial standing, a minimum of $500 as a stimulus to help prop up clubs financially and provide them with the resources to increase the number of in-person and virtual events. I also ask that SGA prevent the further dismantlement of any more clubs until the fall semester. Now is not the time to follow the constitution to a T due to the unprecedented challenges that COVID has caused. We must come together as a community and provide a stimulus that supports clubs and encourages them to increase events with the hope that more students will attend them.
I understand that this seems like a lot of money to be giving out but not every club will use all the funds they would be given, so at the end of the semester, it would simply go right back into the SGA general fund per the SGA constitution. Now is the time to take the risks and to confront these challenges, not to be conservative in our actions. The SGA fund is plentiful and we should use this resource to support our campus.
We must be bold in these trying times just as we were last spring when we faced the challenge of our school closure. When we come together as one NVU community, we can accomplish much more than meets the eye and we can overcome so much.
Sincerely,
Patrick Wickstrom
Feature Photo courtesy of NVU-Lyndon SGA || Patrick Wickstrom delivers an update on the financial status of the NVU-Lyndon SGA general fund at the September 29, 2019 meeting.