ASM Spring goals: funding
[This is part of my series of ASM goals for Spring Semester. Read them all here]
Finish the Housing/Tenant Services RFP. I’ve written about this a lot already, so I won’t go into it in much detail. My goal is to have it out to the Dept of Administration before the end of April. It’s going to take a ton of bureaucracy navigation with the UW to get it happen.
Finish the guidelines for the Creative Works fund and get them approved with the Finance Committee. My plan is to write a first draft, and then kick it to Finance and let them polish.
ASM should continue to diversify its funding streams. This is something Alex Gallagher wrote about last spring in a post that everyone should read twice. In particular, I want to bring his “Centers funding stream” to life. Here’s what he wrote:
“Centers: CWC, LGBTCC (when it was a group), Wunk Sheek, MEChA, and WCSU look similar in that they provide safe space and programming around issues of underrepresented minorities. I think that you could capitalize on this similarity and create a stream which could provide funding for their unique needs. Rather than pretending that they look like GUTS or ALPS, this will allow them to be treated like centers. You can use the exact same budgets as you do for GSSF groups, if you want, but you can change the criteria to fit these particular types of services.”
We’d create it this funding stream this spring, with applications starting in Fall of 2010, for funding to start in July of 2011. It will actually probably save money, because right now in order to be a GSSF group you actually have to provide services. With a centers fund, groups wouldn’t have to screw around with that and could focus on their center aspect, which means they can ask for less money. To keep the growth from going crazy, maybe we cap the total fund, but that’s tricky to do in a viewpoint-neutral fashion.
I don’t know that we’ll get this done this year
In another funding stream, it’s time to think about the future of newspapers. UW System policy allows for seg fees to pay for newspapers, but currently the GSSF explicitly disallows publications as a service.
Now, both the Daily Cardinal and the Badger Herald swear up and down that they’d never take a dime of money from ASM, but I’d rather design a system when they don’t need the money, so if the day comes that they do really need the money they can decide how important it really is to not take ASM money. Broadly, here’s what I’m thinking:
- ASM won’t fund the entire costs. We’d fund maybe 50%, with a cap of say $200,000, and a minimum of $25,000 (which means that a paper has to be able to raise at least $25000 before we’ll take them serious).
- You have to be a real paper. Published at least once a week during the semester, some print minimum (5000 copies?). I’d like to put some minimum, like 25% news coverage, but that’s probably too tricky to get right.
- You have to print. Online only is the wave of the future and all that, and we should eventually think about how to fund online only, but for now an online-only org could get started for much cheaper than a print version – probably cheap enough that it doesn’t need any assistance.
- We need to protect editorial control. Student papers risk enough criticizing the administration, which controls their grades. It’d be even harder to serve as the watchdog for student government knowing that the student government also controls your funding. I think a newspaper would still probably apply to the SSFC, but there would also be a review by a committee of outsiders, from the journalism world (hopefully we could draft some faculty from the J-School, and the local press) to review any denials of funding, looking to ensure it wasn’t because the paper criticized the student government.
- The students and university should get something out of the deal, too. If you take ASM money, the UW should get a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide license to all of the content of the paper that allows them to store the archives and display it in any form for any and all comers. (Maybe only what’s published while under the deal, but it’d be nice to have the complete archives of the papers that go back for decades.)
In full disclosure, it’s no secret that I write for the Badger Herald, though it is not a paid gig. I hope to graduate before this funding became available, but even so we’d put in some language that said anyone who votes for the creation of this funding stream can’t be a regular contributor to a publication receiving funding.
The newspaper fund isn’t likely to get done this year, but I wanted to at least ask the SSFC to think about it.
