Follow the Money: A Look at Society Funding
By Sean Colligan
Before deciding to embark on the process of writing this article, I had never much thought of how Queen’s various clubs and societies were able to finance themselves. Everyone has at least heard of the SU’s grant system, but I’m sure the cynical view of funds being embezzled by shameless committee members on the sly is not an uncommon one among those on the outside looking in. If you’re not in the know, it’s easy to think the SU could be granting stipend after stipend to societies just for the head honchoes to traipse down to the pub for a merry pissup, with the paltry membership fees—a pound or two a head in most cases—maybe allowing for a few bags of bacon fries to top off their corruption. Not to mention the perceived disparity between sporting clubs and societies: surely the rowers and hockey players and footballers must be able to live it large, fine dining at the Merchant and the works, while everyone else only gets to blow committee money on £4.50 doubles in the Union?
The reality is quite different. The problem is not in allocation, which is handled very fairly and calculated from a range of factors, including total membership, how much they’re requesting, and a score tallied up from answers submitted during the application process. It is how the societies themselves use their money that is the problem, with underspend becoming a chronic problem in recent years. While the SU has made great efforts to tackle this, introducing a system where unspent funds are pooled and then redistributed to other less affluent societies, it still remains that several of the larger ones—namely Scrubs and Law—are sitting on balances of at least £5,000 in their accounts. Sports clubs are the ones in dire need of money, with fees for things like equipment, venue hire, and insurance incurring heavy costs that would obviously be avoided with a group like DragonSlayers.
Funding for them, while assisted by the SU during the application process, is mostly handled by the very much separate Queen’s Sport. The top five clubs are the elite of the elite, each having their own ‘Academy’ which helps enable them to “excel at their chosen sport and further build the proud sporting heritage of the Queen’s University” [1] through enhanced coaching and ultimately more money. Rowing, Gaelic football, soccer, hockey, and rugby are the five sports who benefit from this as the vanguard of Queen’s portfolio of sporting excellence. Everyone else either fits into the development team category—stuff like athletics and basketball, those who compete professionally but aren’t quite to the standard of the famous five—or are so-called ‘active’ clubs, more recreational and hobbyist-based. Clubs are able to move up the rankings if they demonstrate that they meet the necessary requirements, namely evidence of good athlete development, evidence of professional competition and efforts made in the interests of inclusivity for groups like international or mature students.
There is an argument to be made, however, that it is surely harder for a grassroots club to shoot up the development pathway and become an institution at Queen’s if it receives less aid because it’s smaller or more recreational, with the recently burgeoning tennis club a prime example. The hire of the courts at Belfast Boat Club should naturally net them more funding to help offset the expensive costs, but because tennis is not tied to the commercial interests of Queen’s, it is not afforded the same amount of attention or care as something like rugby’s influential lobby. Clubs are at the mercy of the forces of capital, in the way that the likes of the Rubber Duck society (who remembers them?) are unfettered by and are free to do whatever they want with the aid of how much money they actually need. Meanwhile, the likes of tennis and plenty of other societies will only come to the forefront of Queen’s in possibly the next few years—or potentially never. It all depends on what the top brass at the university thinks is best for its image, presumably mentoring the next generation of Roman galley slaves so that they can unseat Oxbridge’s tough rowers.
This article does not attempt to point any fingers at anyone. Queen’s are well within their right to act strategically and to act prudently with their money so that they don’t end up losing everything on trying to make hobby horsing a thing, and the SU have been more than transparent with how they operate their funding system and truly go above and beyond for all the weird and wonderful societies that provide students with a sense of craic and camaraderie. The issue of society funding is a very minor issue when we have students trying to grapple with the cost-of-living crisis, wondering whether or not to heat or eat, or how to fill their car up when prices are exploding at the pump, but it is interesting in of itself as a sign of the times. The balancing of society books is like a microcosm of the current economic situation—as governments worldwide see their budgets shrink and debt rise, coffers running dangerously dry, how do we decide who draws the short straw?
References
- “Sports Academies.” Queen’s University Belfast. https://www.qub.ac.uk/alumni/QueensUniversityofBelfastFoundation/StudentExperience/Sport/SportsAcademies/
