Every year, AHA applies for yearly University funding. Today we were approved for our third straight annual budget, to the tune of $64,350.69, making us undoubtedly the highest funded atheist student group in the country. This funding enables us to put on a variety of programs and services, many of which would not be possible without it. So how do we receive this funding? It’s a long story, but bear with me…
Every semester, in addition to our normal tuition, University of Wisconsin-Madison students are required to pay “segregated fees,” which came out to about $1,140 per person last year. These funds are allocated by a committee, the Student Services Finance Committee (SSFC), of our student government, the Associated Students of Madison (ASM). Most of the $32 million segregated fee pool goes towards paying for things like student health services, our unions, WSUM student radio, the Rape Crisis Center, bus passes, student government functions, childcare assistance, and exercise facilities. About 3% of the total segregated fees are distributed to support the hundreds of Registered Student Organizations (RSOs) on campus through a variety of funding streams.
One of these funding streams is the General Student Services Fund, AKA the holy grail of student organization funding. Rather than applying for event/travel/operations grants, GSSF groups receive a single budget to cover all of their services, programming, operating expenses, travel, and paid student staff, making this a system of funding not seen on many other campuses. Thus, the budgets can get pretty large.
AHA’s 2015 – 2016 Budget goes towards, among other things:
- $246 for a yearly subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, containing Photoshop, Illustrator, and a litany of other wonderful software.
- $300 for semesterly “Kickoff Bash” pizza parties.
- $300 to acquire books for our own “Freethought Library”.
- $1,000 for supplies for our office and supplies to help carry out our programs.
- $1,300 to send our officers to the annual SSA Leadership Conference.
- $2,780 to bring in semesterly speakers with our “Freethought Speakers Series.”
- $3,200 on advertising AHA’s events and services in the student newspapers as well as sending out semesterly mass emails to every student on campus.
- $5,000 on printing thousands of AHA flyers, posters, etc to be posted across UW’s campus.
- $16,180 to fund our amazing FREE conference, the Freethought Festival.
- $34,090 for 9 paid staff positions for the AHA officers.
Reflecting on those words two years later, they could not have been more true. We continue to improve as an organization every year, and future is just as bright as ever. We’ve worked very hard for several years to receive budgets like these, and today is another monumental day in AHA’s long history.