The Student Government Association (SGA) has announced that they have decided to end their mandatory grant workshops. In the past SGA has offered three types of grant workshops: organizational, departmental and travel. Due to lack of money in the budget, SGA has dropped the workshops, and cut organizational grant funding.
“The reasons we eliminated the workshops is because we want to do a more personal approach, one-on-one,” said SGA President Branden Summers. “Online, we have five or six people who are listed with office hours so that a student can come in and speak with them personally. When we go to a workshop and help people, there are still so many open-ended questions that people have. Everybody’s case is different.”
According to Summers, another reason why organizational grants were dropped was because it was not as popular. It was the one least applied for by students. Travel and departmental grants had more money pumped into them, and were being utilized more by students and faculty.
A travel grant will fund $500 for an individual to travel within the country for a conference or convention that will help better the University. For a group of three or more to travel, the grant will offer up to $1,500 for them to attend an event.
“We give out travel grants to organizations, and students, for educational purposes that can help them bring it back to Southeastern,” said Summers. “We reach out to all types of organizations. You don’t even have to be in an organization to apply for the money. If you’re a student looking to go on an educational conference that can somehow benefit us, we ask you to stop in and we can talk more about it.”
A departmental grant can help the instructor of a certain department with the cost of educational projects. SGA wants to help the departments that have given back to the university, and the grant offers $1,800 to a department. This grant, however, is only to fund on-campus projects. Any academic or non-academic department can apply for the grant.
Additionally, the process of applying for a grant has moved online. The applications are on SGA’s website. The workshops have been dropped for a one-on-one meeting with the person applying for the grant and an SGA official.
“In the past [organizational grants] weren’t utilized the most,” said Summers. Our travel grants always ran out of money and departmental cut it close. With organizational grants it was to put on events on campus. And if a particular organization fell under a department they could get the money through a departmental grant.”
For more information on these two types of grants, visit SGA’s website at www.selu.edu/sga. To the left of the page, click the ‘grant’ tab and you can print out the application. There is no deadline to turn in the application, but SGA asks that you fill it out prior to the event you want to attend.