The Tufts Community Union Senate confirmed the 2025–26 school year budget for student organizations to be roughly $3 million at its budget meeting on April 20. The budget set is slightly higher than the budget of $2.9 million for the 2024–25 school year.
The budget increase comes from an internal reallocation of resources and the continued surplus funding from the COVID-19 pandemic that paused most on-campus activities, according to rising senior Dhruv Sampat, the 2024–25 TCU treasurer and incoming TCU president.
“That change is reflective of growing student programming, record level of activities on campus and a growing number of clubs that we have on campus,” Sampat said.
Sampat explained how the TCU Treasury prioritized understanding club needs by using data from the Office of Campus Life to see the attendance and participation levels of clubs’ meetings and events, which informed whether an organization might need increased budget.
Student organizations are broken down into councils that focus on specific themes, such as preprofessional groups or publications. Each council receives a budget that is allocated to all of the clubs within that council. Councils 1 and 2, the cultural and engineering councils, saw the largest increase, about 10–15%, a response to rising interest in engineering clubs and a continued desire to expand community spaces for Tufts students.
With increased budgets for certain councils, other councils remained steady, barring slight increases to adjust for inflation.
However, with reallocation of funds across all organizations, Sampat emphasized his desire to support smaller and newer clubs. “The hope with newer organizations is that they have started because they have identified something here at Tufts that is missing, right? Whether that’s a culture, whether that’s a community, whether that’s a pre-professional group,” Sampat said.
“For newer organizations, it’s very important to realize that, just because they’re new, doesn’t mean that they don’t have the same passion and the same vision that some of our existing and preexisting organizations have had.”
Rising junior Amelia Farrar, a 2024–25 associate treasurer, oversaw Council 3, the media and publications council, which saw a $5,000 increase to its budget from this year. When dividing the budget, Farrar focused on providing each club with enough to be able to achieve their mission statement. “My goal was, if they wanted to have more [publications] or production in their clubs and more activity in their clubs, to do my very best to get them that,” Farrar said.
The Treasury surpassed its usual supplementary funding budget this semester, primarily due to bookmarks, a type of funding request that organizations can submit. Bookmarks are costs that are expected to be incurred but that don’t have a specific cost, such as hotel rooms or plane tickets.
According to Farrar, there was a high number of bookmarks that led to unforeseen costs. “We were seeing a lot of clubs last year that had quite a few bookmarks that we thought they could have reasonably estimated during the budgeting process or that our Allocations Board members could have had them estimate, but that never happened.”
The Treasury proposed a soft cap of two to three bookmarks per organization to avoid unexpected spending for next year.
Rising junior Brendan French, the other 2024–25 associate treasurer, will be the TCU treasurer for the next school year following Sampat’s uncontested election for TCU president on April 28. French proposed several priorities for the upcoming year, particularly focused on simplifying and supporting student organizations in the budgeting process.
One issue French saw was information gaps that formed during leadership changes in clubs. “There [aren’t] necessarily always robust systems in place within clubs to help with that transition of power, especially for the Treasury,” French said. “A good amount of the treasurers they’re meeting with are new — they don’t really know too much about the Treasury and the budgeting process.”
Sampat shared that the budgeting process is always evolving. “I also would like to acknowledge that it is an imperfect process,” Sampat said. “We try to be more cognizant and more transparent by sharing meeting notes with [the] Senate and with [Allocations Board] members. But you know, it is a very complex and intricate process that sometimes can feel a little bit overwhelming.”
A major long-term project for the Treasury is to digitize the budget request process for student organizations. The goal with this change is to make the process clearer and more intuitive for student leaders.
“What I hope is that we are able to streamline some of the Treasury processes,” Sampat said. “We’re trying to work with student organizations to constantly improve and reinvent ourselves. And it is always our intention to try and better ourselves, even if something has not worked out in the best way that it’s supposed to.”
