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Harvard Undergraduate Association co-president Caleb N. Thompson ’27 said at the HUA’s Sunday meeting that its Student Activities Fee allocation “will almost surely go up significantly next year” after the College raised the fee to $450.
The fee, which was previously an optional $200, will now be mandatory and will be partially used to offset the cost of making laundry free for undergraduates. Thompson’s remarks on Sunday indicate that the HUA expects to receive significantly more funding, which will be passed on to student organizations, under the new model.
“Next year, going forward into the future, we’ll have a lot more funds,” Thompson said.
The SAF’s current optional structure has periodically left the HUA short on cash, with a high rate of opt-outs in 2024 leading the Dean of Students Office to provide a supplemental $43,000 to the student government. This year, however, the number of opt-outs subsided, resulting in a $71,000 increase in the total pool of SAF funding for recipients to share.
The anticipated increase in SAF payments follows the College’s creation of an additional stream of funding available to student organizations through the Office of Culture and Community. The OCC recently finalized a student advisory board that will have the capacity to distribute the funding pool, which is drawn from the DSO budget and does not come from SAF payments.
The HUA on Sunday also voted to revive two funds run by the Social Life Team under previous HUA administrations. The Fun Fund, which the HUA approved a $3,000 allocation for, is designed to support groups of three to 10 students looking to engage in activities up to $15 per person. The Crimson Cohesion Fund, meant to support organizations looking to host events for more than 200 people, received a $2,000 allocation.
In the third vote of the afternoon meeting, the HUA revived another previous initiative: Community Conversations. HUA members allocated $900, split evenly between the Well-Being and Inclusion Teams, “aimed to create a space for candid and intimate conversations surrounding experiences, uncertainties, and changes on campus.”
The HUA also approved a proposal from the Extracurricular Team to launch a Club Common App Hackathon — a competition to create a centralized application for students seeking to join campus organizations — with an allocation of $2,500.
“We want to create a website that sort of functions as a common app for club applications,” Extracurricular Team Officer Joshua M. Schulzter ’28 said. “So, at the start of the year, instead of needing to go to 10 separate websites and find 10 separate links, you can find them all in one place.”
“The idea is that for this website, we’re gonna be holding a hackathon where students can participate in teams of one to two to help and create this website, and then we’ll choose the one that we think is the best, and that team will get prizes,” he added.
Thompson also discussed an upcoming election this week for the HUA’s Sports Team Officer role, which has remained vacant since no candidates ran for it in the spring elections when the rest of the HUA leadership was elected.
Campaigning for the position will begin Nov. 10, according to Thompson.
The group also announced the first round of allocations from the Helping Hands Grant, a $30,000 fund given to student groups to host inclusivity- and well-being-related initiatives.
The two student organizations receiving funds thus far are the Society of Arab Students and the Harvard College Pakistani Students Association. Representatives from both groups spoke at Sunday’s meeting about how they plan to use the funds.
SAS used Helping Hands funds to support its annual Sufra gathering, meant to celebrate Arab cultures, on Saturday. The PSA plans to use Helping Hands funding to hold its Mock Mehndi — a faux wedding celebration — on Friday.
“We have presentations on what’s happening to be transparent about where the fund is going to and also uplift the work that cultural orgs are doing on campus,” Well-Being Team Officer Joshua T. Eneji ’28 said at the meeting.
—Staff writer Claire L. Simon can be reached at claire.simon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @ClaireSimon.
—Staff writer Nina A. Ejindu can be reached at nina.ejindu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @nina_ejindu.
