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The Harvard Undergraduate Association passed five proposals at its first general meeting of the spring term on Monday evening.
The proposals included instituting a new summer storage partnership with Harvard Student Agencies and funding an Eritrean and Ethiopian Student Association feast later this month.
Under the new summer storage partnership, the HUA will reallocate $19,000 of funding — which originally supported a proposed storage program model with Five Star Movers — to subsidize a new partnership with HSA instead. HSA will utilize its own storage provider, and the HUA will partially subsidize each unit of storage a student purchases, lowering the cost from $22.50 to $19.50.
HUA’s Residential Life Team cited reliability issues with Five Star Movers and the importance of having support outside of the HUA for the summer storage program as it moves away from the original storage partnership.
The HUA launched its first summer storage program with Five Star Movers in 2019 to provide students with a storage option in between academic years.
During the Monday meeting, HUA co-President John S. Cooke ’25 said this proposal marked the “next step in moving it outside of a student government program.”
In particular, Cooke emphasized the importance of “getting more and more groups involved that actually have the reach and the staffing — the financial backing — to keep the program going in a low-cost way for the next couple of years.”
In another proposal, Lily Liu ’25, the co-supreme cupid of Datamatch — a matchmaking platform founded at Harvard that pairs college students on Valentine’s Day — requested $6,000 in HUA funding to cover internal data service fees and the cost of reimbursing dates.
The amount of funding requested was based on the 1,250 dates requested at Harvard last year and Datamatch’s goal to “expand our restaurant offering and implement a more open system,” Liu said.
“We’re working with our business teams to try to increase date utilization in the upcoming year, registered number of users, and date options,” Liu added.
Liu also pointed to the Covid-19 pandemic and “rising inflation” as factors driving up the cost of dates.
EESA — a cultural organization on campus that promotes Ethiopian and Eritrean culture across Harvard and the greater Boston area — requested $1,000 in HUA funding for its annual feast held in collaboration with other Ivy League schools. This year’s event will be held at Columbia University on Feb. 17 and will feature a dance performance, cultural fashion show, and a student mixer before the feast.
The HUA’s funding will go towards providing food and lodging for Harvard students attending the event.
In one of its two proposals, the HUA’s Social Life Team proposed funding for four Super Bowl watch parties — one in each upper-class housing neighborhood — for this year’s Super Bowl LVIII on Feb. 11. The $1,500 allocation will go towards providing food, drink, and decorations.
“I want to make sure that other students across campus have a place where they can go to get food, watch together, feel some sort of school spirit,” Social Life Team Officer Jonathan Haileselassie ’26 said.
The Social Life Team also proposed increasing the HUA’s F.U.N. fund. The F.U.N. fund — an initiative started last year to provide groups between three and 10 students funding for a social outing — will now be raised from $10 to $15 per student. This year, the fund will award up to $2,000 to groups on a first-come, first-serve basis.
After the meeting, Cooke said he was pleased with the proposals that the HUA passed and was “very happy about the turnout in the event.”
—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.
—Staff writer William Y. Tan can be reached at william.tan@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @william_y_tan.
