The IU Funding Board is unable to provide student organizations with adequate funding after IU allowed the account to overdraft, president of the board and IU senior Larry McDowell told the Indiana Daily Student.
IU Funding Board is an organization run by students that provides money to student organizations on campus for events and general activities, according to its website.
Last year, it allocated over $1.2 million to student organizations and supported over 400 events. However, McDowell said this year it will only be able to support about 100 events, providing a maximum $2,000 to each student organization.
McDowell said IU Funding Board is a University Supported Organization, and as such its financial accounts are managed by the university. The student leaders of the Funding Board must ask their advisors to reach out to the Office of Finance in order to receive updates on the account.
“At the beginning of the spring semester, and three more times throughout the course of the spring semester, Funding Board leadership requested numbers on what was in our account and what we would be looking at for the duration of last semester, and that information was never given,” McDowell said.
Unbeknownst to the students on Funding Board, McDowell said they had given out more money to student organizations than they held in their reserves. The account was overdrafted by $220,000 by the end of the spring semester.
When asked why the Funding Board continued giving out money if they were unsure how much they had to give, McDowell explained they closed the application for funding mid-semester. He says this was “unprecedented.” But the Board’s policy is to approve all applications as long as they follow the group’s bylaws, so they needed to process the applications they already had and get an update on the amount of money in their account before taking more.
“The assumption was that we would not be anywhere near the end of the account because we would have been notified well before then (by the university),” McDowell said.
“I have asked my team to increase the level of communication with the Funding Board moving forward to avoid this situation reoccurring in the future,” Lamar Hylton, the Vice Provost for Student Life, said in a statement provided to the IDS.
McDowell said he decided to spend some of the money allocated to the 2024-25 academic year in the spring to pay off the overdraft. Many of the organizations who had received those $220,000 in funds had already hosted their events and were relying on reimbursement from the Funding Board, so he felt it was unfair to withhold those funds.
McDowell said the student body needs $1.1 million in funding this year to meet all of their needs. The Funding Board is simply unable to offer that support.
“The university is the steward of our money,” McDowell said. “And poor stewardship will get you in these situations every single time.”
"The pressure should be on the university”
McDowell released a press release Sept. 18 explaining the situation to the student body. He said IU administration was “very angry” that he decided to release a statement at all.
“They (IU administration) have the capacity and the ability to resolve this problem,” McDowell said. “The pressure should be on the university at this point in time to reallocate their own money to ensure that the student body is thriving.”
McDowell said he has tried to meet with Hylton to discuss possible solutions but all attempts to do so have been unsuccessful.
“This is someone that in the past, I could get a meeting with at the drop of a hat,” he said. “I could go in and stop by and say, ‘Hey can you get me on a schedule?’ And my meeting with them has been canceled four times in a row.”
In an emailed statement, Hylton told the IDS, “My two initial meetings with Larry had to be rescheduled due to circumstances beyond my control. My staff and I have shared with Larry directly that we want (to) meet with him. The offer to meet still stands.”
But McDowell says students on the Funding Board have been left to figure out what to do.
“It kinda gives me the perspective that it’s like ‘OK, we're not interested in solving this problem. We’re interested in ignoring it and putting it on the students to figure out,’” McDowell said.
Less money from the Committee for Fee Review
Adding to the problem, the IU Funding Board received less money from the Committee for Fee Review for this academic year, McDowell said. The committee, which convenes every two years, decides how to allocate money generated from student activity fees.
When the committee last met in 2022, McDowell said it decided to give less money to the board. CFR wanted to see more diversity in the leadership of the Funding Board and wanted concrete information about the impact of the money given to student organizations, McDowell said. The committee also noted that Funding Board had $600,000 in cash reserves during the 2022-23 school year, much of it being money left over from years marked by the COVID-19 pandemic when student organizations operated with fewer events.
“The Funding Board should not be punished for this, but the CFR believes the current cash reserves should be exhausted first...” the CFR wrote in a letter to the Funding Board regarding money allocated for 2024 and 2025. “In the meanwhile, student fee money should be allocated to other purposes which directly impact current students.”
“They were asking (us) to completely spend down that money before they even considered giving us the same amount of money as previous years,” McDowell said.
McDowell made it a goal to reduce the Funding Board reserves. The Funding Board began meeting for two sessions a week rather than one, in order to review more funding applications and grant more money.
This plan would have allowed the Funding Board to spend its reserves on important student initiatives and then ask for more money from the CFR for this year, McDowell said, if not for the mismanagement by the university. The overdrafting of the account left the board scrambling for solutions.
Student organizations struggle to maintain operation
Ultimately, the loss of money for the Funding Board hurts student organizations, McDowell said.
“A lot of organizations are suffering financially, and some are even completely unable to operate, because the Funding Board is unable to provide any amount of money that would be significant to them,” McDowell said.
University Players is a student-led theater production company on IU’s campus that relies on Funding Board to finance their shows each year.
Members of the University Players are pictured September 2023. The group has relied on the IU Funding Board to finance their shows each year.
According to Evan Anderson, IU student and the managing director of UP, productions are not cheap to put on. Scripts and rights to the shows can be anywhere from $700 to $1,300. Costumes and sets are an additional cost to every production, along with annual expenses, such as a storage unit. One show can cost $3,000 in total to put on, and they usually present around four shows a year.
In the past, UP would submit a budget request to Funding Board and would get reimbursed in full or almost in full, Anderson said. Anything not covered by the reimbursement would be covered through fundraising.
Now, with the Funding Board unable to provide as much money to organizations, UP is left to fundraise all the money required on their own.
“They didn’t announce this before we had already started planning our budget and starting our season,” Anderson said. “We have already spent more than $2,000 because we didn’t know that money wasn’t going to be there.”
Now, UP is one of many other organizations on campus trying to come up with plans to fund their projects, Anderson said. They have taken to Instagram to do digital fundraisers and are coming up with more ideas for what comes next.
Another option UP has considered is taking a more minimalist approach to their productions.
“It is a shame that we wouldn’t be able to be as creative or let our designers have as much fun with what they want to do with the show,” Anderson said. “It’s always cool for them to have a vision be realized on the stage, and it would be sad to have that aspect be taken away for every single design aspect.”
The Filipino American Association also depends on funds from Funding Board to keep their club running. President Jona Rivera explained that the organization hosts a large end-of-year event called Filipino Culture Night.
“We have heavily relied on IU Funding Board for that event specifically; it’s almost completely funded by them,” she said.
Rivera said that their event costs much more than the new $2,000 limit imposed on requests to Funding Board for the year. They are left “scrambling” to find new funding options, she said.
“I know a bunch of the cultural organizations on campus rely on IU Funding Board and a lot of big events that usually happen across all the culture orgs might not happen this year because of the new plan,” Rivera said.
IUSG steps in
In response to the loss of funding from the Funding Board, IU Student Government has started a new initiative to offer limited funding to student organizations. Student organizations can apply to receive up to $300 to pay for event and material purchases.
“I encourage all students to apply for funding,” student body president Cooper Tinsley said. “I know at this moment in time, it probably doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s what we could get together quickly.”
To finance the project, IUSG reallocated money from their internal budget. IUSG says this is intended as a temporary solution before long-term solutions can be found.
