A proposal to increase the Student Activity Fee (SAF) by $4 was passed on Nov. 5 with overwhelming support from student voters. This increase, which will set the SAF to $288 for the 2022-2023 academic year, benefits the Common Goods Resource Center, a project aiming to provide low-income students with dignified access to centralized material and funding resources.
The Common Goods Resource Center, a student-led project overseen by the Office for Student Engagement (OSE) and the Center for the Environment, Ecological Design and Sustainability (CEEDS), was established earlier this year.
Carrie Weil ’22 and Emma Ryan ’23J, who worked as interns for CEEDS during the summer of 2021, led the early stages of this project. For Ryan, Common Goods was a way to “open other conversations about what is available on campus, and what we have to give each other all the time.” In an interview last year, Weil also mentioned that the center aimed to be a place where students can feel supported by their peers.
Tamra Bates, director of Student Engagement, added that though similar initiatives have existed before, this project aims to centralize access to material resources.
Before, she said, “if you were an international student, you would work with the International Students Office to get hats, coats, and base layers. Multicultural affairs did the same thing for students of color.” While these initiatives were successful, their scope was smaller than what Common Goods, a campus-wide initiative, aimed to do: provide students with basic-needs items free of charge, no questions asked.
In the pilot phase of the program, a partnership with Smithcycle, the sustainable move-out program managed by CEEDS, equipped Common Goods with 1.5 tons of clothing, bedding, and school supplies. In addition to this, a $10,000 Innovation Challenge grant written by Katie McGarry AC ’21 secured the program’s budget for the 2021-2022 school year.
Still, the program lacked a recurring base budget for the following years. At the beginning of the 2021 academic year, new members of the Common Goods Resource Center began to research funding options for the future, and turned to the SGA for support.
In an email from Oct. 27, the SGA restated its commitment to fund “all student-centric, non-academic programming: funding for clubs, money for organizations, all-campus student events, and house activities.”
SGA’s annual budget comes from the SAF, a $284 portion of the tuition payment which is covered by Smith student’s financial aid packages. Hannah Hensen AC ’22, SGA VP of Finance, said that the SAF also ensures that student activities are autonomous, accessible, and equitable. It grants students freedom, she said, to “create initiatives and choose how they gather together.”
When the SGA Senate first voted on the proposal to increase the SAF, it received overwhelming positive support. This mirrors the results of the campus-wide SAF election, held earlier this November.
Out of the total 763 voters, there were 93.8% votes in favor of the increase, 5.5% against, and 0.65% abstentions.
For Tamra Bates, these results highlight the value students see in the Common Goods project.
“Especially for students who don’t receive financial aid,” she said, “to say ‘yes, this [project] is important’ says a lot about students’ desire to support one another.”
