Willamette student organizations face funding cuts
- Aubrey Lee, Staff Writer
- 28 minutes ago
- 4 min read
ODP, WEB and Lū‘au among student groups with lowered spring budgets
Disclaimer: As a student organization, The Collegian was also impacted by funding changes. Advocacy efforts remain separate from news coverage.
Willamette’s student organizations are facing significant funding cuts.
In December, the Associated Students of Willamette University (ASWU) senate voted to give the university’s student organizations — the Willamette Events Board (WEB), Outdoor Program (ODP) and The Collegian — $20,000 each as a “tide over” until a consensus could be reached on how best to manage ASWU’s funds moving forward.
“We just don’t have as much money as we used to,” said ASWU Senator and finance board member Peyton Edmunds (’29).
According to ASWU Treasurer Mitch Septoff (’26), one of the reasons for this lack of funding is that post-COVID, there are simply more clubs and organizations making requests during funding rounds, meaning that ASWU does not have the money to grant them all.
Clubs tend to make requests in all three funding rounds for a semester, while organizations typically only request funding in the pre-fall and pre-spring funding rounds.
In the 2026 pre-spring round, ASWU had a budget of $150,000 set aside for organizations, plus an additional $30,000 left from the fall semester that was not put back into the Reserve to help cover this semester’s gap.
However, organizations requested over $220,000.
When it was time for ASWU to vote on pre-spring funding, Septoff said, “The recommendation that the finance board came up with was not well-informed enough for my liking or the liking of other people in the organizations.”
This led Septoff to recommend that the ASWU senate give organizations $20,000. That way, “organizations who needed to make payments and disbursements over winter break would have the ability to do so, without [the senate] making a final decision on funding.”
This decision was also in part, he said, because “all the organizations requested [a minimum of] $30,000, and we know we probably weren’t going to cut below $20,000.”
Complicating matters further, Septoff said, there is no organizational funding precedent for student orgs the way there is for clubs. Organizations are generally larger than clubs, and certain things, like Leadership Awards, can not be cut between fall and spring semesters.
“The organizational precedents, if they ever existed, fell out of use so thoroughly that we actually don't have record of them today,” Septoff said. He added that while the finance board is working to draft a new precedent, without it, the ASWU senate and finance board are left to make “best judgment decisions.”
Septoff said that when making cuts, one of the things that the finance board considers is “discretionary versus mandatory spending,” essentially looking for what can be cut without impacting the quality of the organization.
On Jan. 29, after some deliberation, the ASWU senate voted to confirm the budgets for organizations this spring.
Organizations, clubs respond
ODP provided two possible budgets to ASWU, one was their original ask for $60,000, as well as a reduced ask of $41,000. ASWU voted to fund the reduced budget, meaning that ODP is facing the largest cuts of any of the student organizations this round.
According to Outdoor Program Coordinator Kira Grimes (’26), these cuts “pretty drastically impacted the number of trips and the types of trips that we could run.” Grimes said that ODP is working to “maximize our outdoor programming with the reduced funding that we would be getting in this semester.”
WEB had initially requested around $35,000. In the end, ASWU allocated $30,000 to WEB instead — a roughly 15% cut from their ask.
That total allocation was still thousands over ASWU’s target budget. The ASWU senate voted to pass this allotment with the agreement that WEB will cut another $8,500 in the fall.
“If we had accepted the amount that was originally proposed to us…,” said WEB President Zia Brandstetter (’26), “it would have devastated us as an organization.”
Even then, the budget that was approved this January “cut a lot of stuff,” she said. While WEB does keep the profits from Black Tie in a non-ASWU-affiliated account, Brandstetter shared that the account is “not huge, but it’s sort of supplemental.”
Brandstetter said these budget conversations are never trivial. “Midnight Breakfast can't go away. Black Tie can’t go away again.” She added, “It is a difficult decision for everyone involved, and I do not envy the finance board, or the ASWU treasurer’s position, or ASWU exec at all.”
The Collegian, which also has its own ad revenue, had the lowest reduction out of any student organization — down 5% from its original ask — with expectations to reduce spending further in the fall.
Lū‘au, though it is not technically an organization, is also facing funding cuts, explained President of Hawai‘i Club and co-coordinator of Lū‘au Payton Kawahara (’27). While Hawai‘i Club is funded separately, the Lū‘au funding request was made during the same pre-spring funding round. As of Feb. 19, Kawahara said they are still not funded.
Kawahara said the Lū‘au planning committee originally requested $35,000, which was less than the previous year. However, their requested budget has since been cut down to $21,000, but “it is still not entirely approved.” On Feb. 12, the ASWU senate voted to partially fund Lū‘au to the amount of $5,800.
Kawahara noted that Lū‘au is “cutting a lot of things we normally wouldn’t have thought to cut in the past,” including things like the T-shirts for the dancers and volunteers. Kawahara added that to compensate for the potential funding cuts, they will be holding fundraisers at Panda Express on Feb. 27 and April 3.
“We care about things a lot,” ASWU Senator Edmunds said. “And a lot of the cuts we make, we don’t want to make.”