Arman Sharif: Creating a common funding application would help UCLA student groups

SOOF, CPC, CAC, PAB, ASUCLA, USA, SGA, GSA, SWC and even TGIF. As two-year director of an on-campus youth mentorship organization, I still find myself lost in the sea of UCLA funding acronyms.

Parsing through different UCLA funds and fund-granting committees is a daunting step – whenever I need to apply for large annual allocations or minor retreat expenses, I have to sift through these funding opportunities.

To explore these resources, a roughly seven-page, 11-point font, single-spaced packet with 26 detailed explainers is available for students to pick up in the Student Organizations, Leadership & Engagement office in Kerckhoff Hall. These funding bodies and committees are almost entirely student-run, and allocate from millions of dollars in student fees to organizations for specific causes, like outreach to disadvantaged communities or Hill programming. TGIF, for example, is The Green Initiative Fund, earmarked specifically for sustainability projects.

Most committees will advise students to diversify their funding sources, apply broadly and hope for the best. For UCLA student-run programs and the 1,000-and-counting organizations on campus, the system is confusing, time-consuming and can be outright inaccessible without assistance from multiple advisers.

But a lot of these hoops students must currently jump through can be eliminated by implementing a “common application” for all financial needs. UCLA institutions and committees like the Program Activities Board, Residential Life, the SOLE office or Associated Students UCLA should collaborate to make this centralized process a reality and increase funding accessibility for students.

One of the biggest problems these campus institutions need to address is student awareness of the sheer amount of funding avenues available, which remains difficult in the status quo. Although those applying for money would ideally seek out SOLE office advisers with their programming ideas, many returning organization leaders are still not aware of some of the funding opportunities. SOLE assistant director Kris Kaupalolo said that a common app idea is a concept that the staff has already proposed.

Bogged down by the large amount of options, students must also keep track of the different deadlines for every fund, as well as specific rules and guidelines that each office establishes. For those who don’t research or are only accustomed to applying for certain funds, they may not know other funds even exist.

And even if students are aware of all the different options on campus, board members must learn how to fill out different applications or train their co-members to do so. For example, while I worked on my organization’s Community Activities Committee application last year, one of my other board members undertook the Student Organizations Operational Fund application simply because at that point in the quarter I felt I didn’t have sufficient time to best familiarize myself with the ins and outs of that second application process.

In the past, students have also attempted to “play” the system by trying different methods to secure more funding, such as attempts to make events relevant to more demographics. Some students have haphazardly added different components to their events – busing in high school students to campus, for example – in order to be eligible for other allocations and receive more funding, according to Kaupalolo.

A true overhaul via a common app system would help students submit a standardized application with their proposals and tag relevant categories like “retreat” or “on-campus event.” These tags would indicate whether they’re interested in operating an event or obtaining general funding for their organization.

A centralized application could also cut down the number of deadlines and timetables. Each fund has its own deadline – meaning some recurring funds have deadlines for each quarter – and these deadlines are scattered throughout different websites, varying year to year. However, reviewing apps on a rolling basis with easy-to-remember absolute deadlines – such as mid-August for fall, or the end of week 10 for winter – could eliminate deadline confusion.

But this structure of UCLA funding applications is hard to shift. Reform in the form of this common app would involve administrators across many departments and a wide variety of funding bodies with broad, diverse missions like Residential Life or the Program Activities Board, which oversees both campus programs and community activities. While these organizations may have collaborative programming in some instances, these campus institutions have differing overall missions in the demographic they target, be it Hill residents, disadvantaged communities or the entire UCLA student body. There would need to be a long-term endeavor of collaboration involving meetings between some of the largest institutions on campus that process millions of dollars that students pay every quarter.

This might seem to add more work for the committees, but resources can be pooled toward educating all students on how to fill out one app. The Student Government Accounting office has showcases in Kerckhoff with detailed steps on how to fill out funding requisition forms – “are you a wreck over your req?” – and offers extensive office hours. Campaigns like this are geared toward making students lives’ easier in filling out the apps, but efforts could be consolidated and specific just to this common app.

The time and energy that these efforts would save for student leaders could ultimately let them focus more on their schoolwork and be students. With a current system that’s relatively tough to follow and utilize, a consolidated application provides a more accessible, streamlined option for all parties involved, whether committee chairs or students in a fledgling new student organization.

The fruits of our fund-allocators’ collaborative labor could be historically significant for UCLA organizations. Hopefully, future student leaders that come after me won’t have to keep 10 application acronyms straight or pore over 26 explainers. Soliciting funding – a source of stress for nearly every organization on campus today – could turn into just a seamless step of student programming and organizing.