With $30,000 left over from last year, Student Government President Mark Lombardi-Nelson said he could have purchased new golf carts, a printer or furniture for his new offices.
Instead, he plans to leave its spending at the discretion of students—if their ideas are good enough.
With the Presidential Initiative Fund, Lombardi-Nelson put his faith in students to step up and plan their own initiatives, services and traditions. And with number of students living on campus increasing by more than half, the SG president thinks new ideas are more important than ever.
“This is an initiative and an opportunity for any student to get involved,” he said. “If they don’t… someone cannot call me out and say I did not provide students an opportunity, a voice and an interest in on-campus organizations.”
Students seeking to fund a project must submit project ideas for evaluation, with information about who it will impact, how it will impact them, how the idea will be implemented, who will support it, the cost, and what SG will be required to provide, among other details. Though SG is evaluating the ideas, Lombardi-Nelson said the goal is not to “just come up with an idea and just put it on us.”
“We’re giving every student the opportunity to represent their interests and what they think would be awesome by doing the research, doing the prep work, and saying ‘here’s the golden ticket, we have it all done, we just need money,’ ” he said.
A committee of five people appointed by the president—which Lombardi-Nelson said will include a member of Harborside Activities Board, The Crow’s Nest and himself—will meet monthly to evaluate suggestions. The SG president was candid about the potential to stack the committee to serve his own interests but said he was not “that person.”
Beginning with ideas planned for October, the committee will allocate a maximum of $5,000 per month, with any excess funding rolling over to the next month. More money will be allocated in February with ideas related to April’s USF Day in mind.
Traditionally, clubs and Harborside have planned events and other initiatives on campus, and SG has a $20,000 budget to go toward clubs, organizations and events. The SG Senate usually distributes this money after a voting process.
“When you look at that, it almost looks like the power of the senate is being undermined, and it’s a big issue to deal with,” Lombardi-Nelson said.
But the SG president said that it’s a great idea from the student perspective, since the money cannot be caught up in the “micromanagement” and “lack of execution” that he said has prevented SG from operating efficiently in the past.
Lombardi-Nelson said he got the idea working as a student orientation leader when incoming freshmen—many of whom will live in the new residence hall—shared their interest in starting new things around campus.
“This is a game changer and our university is going to change,” he said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen with the new students living on campus.”
