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The Harvard Undergraduate Association voted to allocate an additional $10,500 to Senior Week from the Finance Team budget and to reserve funds for future years of the Summer Storage program at a meeting Monday night.
Senior Week, a celebration of the graduating Harvard College class, takes place between finals period and Commencement and features a number of social events. The $10,500 in funds will be used to fully subsidize 72 tickets for seniors and comes in addition to last week’s $5,000 allocation, which reduced the cost of tickets from $175 to $165 for all seniors.
“This funding is specifically directed at students who are unable to obtain SEF tickets, despite also being low income, and this funding is conditional on the usage of the funds, fully subsidizing 60 tickets for 60 students,” HUA Finance Officer Corbin C. Lubianski ’24 said, referring to Student Events Fund tickets that allow eligible students on financial aid to acquire tickets at no cost.
“We wish to allocate these funds to organizations that will actually utilize them for the benefit of students,” he added.
Students will apply for their ticket to be subsidized through a Google Form, where they will disclose their level of financial need, according to HUA President John S. Cooke ’25. Winners will be determined via a lottery system in which students receiving a larger amount of financial aid are more likely to be selected.
In addition, the HUA unanimously approved the allocation of $52,524 in unspent student activity fee funds that had been left over from the Undergraduate Council — the College’s previous student government — to future years’ Summer Storage programs.
Unless explicitly allocated, budget surpluses are not carried over into the next year but instead returned to the Dean of Students’ Office. A failure to spend the entire allotted budget results in budget cuts to the HUA in future years.
“If we did not allocate this explicitly towards future programs, I think the DSO might have been kind of cautious, and could have taken that out of our budget next year, which is probably not a good thing,” Lubianski said.
The HUA’s annual Summer Storage program, which is conducted by the organization’s Residential Life Team, spends roughly $18,000 of the team’s $23,000 budget, according to Lubianski’s estimates during the meeting. By shifting these funds to future years, the HUA can utilize future Residential Life Team spending for later projects.
“This would essentially lock up these funds such that they can only be spent on future storage programs, and this would alleviate future Residential Life funds to go towards other programs and initiatives,” Lubianski said.
Correction: October 1, 2023
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the HUA unanimously approved the allocation of $2,524 in unspent student activity fee funds. In fact, the HUA approved the allocation of $52,524 in unspent funds.
—Staff writer Natalie K Bandura can be reached at natalie.bandura@thecrimson.com.
—Staff writer Jonah C. Karafiol can be reached at jonah.karafiol@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @jonahkarafiol.
