TO THE EDITOR:
It’s time to talk about SAFO.
When you pay your $39 student organization fee each semester, it goes into a bank account held by the University. When Student Congress or GPSF allocates money, the Student Activities Fund Office (SAFO) processes that transaction and keeps a record of it. This ensures that student fees are used in a legal and accountable way.
SAFO now consumes more than 20 percent of the student organization fee. A 2012 report from the Foundation Center found that administrative expenses of grantmaking foundations with two to three full-time staff averaged 6 percent. For those foundations giving less than $3 million per year in grants, overhead costs were 7.6 percent on average. This study was based on a sample of more than 1,000 organizations.
The cost to manage student fee allocations through SAFO is three times the average of similar organizations. This is especially astounding when you consider that members of Student Congress and GPSF are providing hundreds of hours of labor each year at no cost.
To make matters worse, SAFO misreported the amount of money available for allocation last year.
This led Student Congress to overspend by tens of thousands of dollars. This deficit is now being made up by fees from current students.
The SAFO employee responsible was forced to resign, but the system is still in place.
I admit that student fee allocation is not exactly like a traditional foundation, but we owe it to ourselves to investigate other ways of processing and recording these transactions.
