Boasting a surplus of over $40,000 in its savings fund, it seems like the only organization at Whitman not affected by the recession is the Associated Students of Whitman College (ASWC).

The money in the savings fund is recovered from groups’ unused funds each year.  

Technically, ASWC has had a surplus for several years; it is allowed to tap into its savings fund when it matures at around $20,000. Due to the lack of a unified will regarding how the money should be spent, it has remained in the savings fund.  

This year, ASWC is choosing to use some of its money to form the Student Development Fund, meant to help finance student-driven projects. Many students have already applied for funding and a few projects have been accepted.

“A couple of students are going to El Salvador to observe their elections,” said ASWC President, senior Elliot Okantey. “We also gave a grant to the cycling team to afford to go to nationals. The money is being spent on things that students like to do and things that we’d like to help students do but that we normally don’t have the money to fund.”

According to Okantey, the fund has been extremely useful with the recession taking such a big toll on the college’s ability to fund student projects.

“It’s coming in handy now that the Dean of Students and the President’s offices do not have the sort of surpluses that they used to fund projects like these out of,” said Okantey. “We’re happy to be able to do that for them.”

The fund is temporarily offered and student access will end sometime this spring. ASWC is choosing to offer the student development fund for only one semester as there is no procedure detailing how to carry over the funds to the next year.  

 “We want to fund things that are happening now and we tend to distribute all that money this year because things get tricky when we try to carry things over,” said Okantey. “We don’t have any by-law or protocol that would frame how we would use it if this money carried on to the next fiscal year.”

 ASWC is also looking to form an emergency fund that would be used to help students who are struggling financially due to unforeseen circumstances, such as the death of a parent. Usually, such situations are handled by the Dean of Students’ Office but the economic downturn has made that unfeasible.  

“The economic downturn is making it such that every department is being told to curb spending, so there’s no surplus money to speak of,” said Okantey. “This made us realize that we would hate for a student’s Whitman experience to be diminished by his own personal discomfort at not being to attend to a death in the family or something like that. So we’re working on ways to set up an endowed fund that would every year produce a certain amount of money that students with need, meeting certain economic requirements, can access.”

Students looking to learn more about either fund can go to the ASWC Web site.