Got problems with the Facilitators for Allocating Student Taxes (FAST)? So do we. Do you want to make FAST work better for all students? That’s exactly what our coalition of student government representatives, from the Williams Student Union (WSU); the Gargoyle Society, an honors society composed of student leaders aiming to improve College life; the Advisory Board for Lobbying Elections (TABLE); and FAST itself, are trying to do.
At the end of this piece, we’re going to ask for your signature on a petition to change the FAST Constitution. Right now, we’re looking for input to determine what changes you want to see from FAST. Your voice will help our coalition gauge interest in our proposed changes, reshaping FAST’s constitutional language.
FAST controls around $400,000 every year. That money comes from your student activities fee and funds nearly every part of campus life outside the classroom. However, since its inception, FAST has consistently polled near the bottom of the Record’s yearly opinion survey. We believe this is because of issues with transparency and equity. Our coalition of students in WSU, FAST, TABLE, and the Gargoyle Society is pushing a petition on a package of proposed constitutional amendments and extensive internal reforms this May. Here’s what it could do:
The first reform we’re gauging interest in is to abolish fixed sector allocations. Right now, the Student Activities Fund is carved up into six fixed buckets. All Campus Entertainment gets 28 percent. Competitive teams like debate, chess club, and robotics get 26 percent, and groups in the at-large category get 19.5 percent. Meanwhile, MinCo and WOC — two groups extremely central to campus life — only get ten percent and seven percent, respectively. Clubs can only request money from their assigned bucket. If that bucket runs out, the club is out of luck for further funding, even if other sectors have money sitting unused. This made sense on paper when it was designed, but shifts in interest and club designation since then have created funding imbalances.
Because the proportion of the student tax money awarded to each bucket is directly written into the FAST Constitution, the buckets cannot be adjusted to reflect the actual clubs on campus today. As a result, some buckets have clubs that fiercely compete for funding, while in other buckets, funding is unusually easy to secure. For example, based on data from FAST’s master spreadsheet, the average team in the “competitive” bucket received $6,388.86 this year. Meanwhile, “performance groups” received on average $2,551.62, and everyone else in the “at-large” bucket received, on average, just $1,143.24. Under the current system, a club’s ability to get funded depends less on what it’s doing for the community and more on which category it happens to fall into. Abolishing sector allocations would pool all available funds into a single bucket from which every eligible organization can receive funding. In this way funding could follow need, rather than arbitrary categories.
In addition to inequitable funding allocations, FAST also struggles with transparency. FAST’s public website currently does not list a schedule for FAST’s open office hours.
Additionally, FAST has not published its required self-audits since 2023, despite a requirement to do so annually in the FAST Constitution. FAST is currently working with Alhambra to make changes to its website for increased transparency.
On April 17, the Gargoyle Society reached out to FAST and requested some internal budget records, invoking the disclosure requirements in the FAST Constitution. Cailin McGowan, the Office of Student Life and Leadership financial and administrative coordinator and FAST advisor, provided us with the master FAST spreadsheet that includes a breakdown of each category of funding and each RSO’s supplemental budget requests. However, getting access to individual records often required working directly with FAST members and obtaining additional Google Drive permissions, leading to a cumbersome process for students wishing to see these records. These factors made it clear to us that FAST requires additional transparency.
Thus, we want to ask for your vote on our petition to then trigger a constitutional referendum on creating a mandatory, annual audit of FAST, conducted by WSU and TABLE, to be emailed to the student body upon completion.
When it comes to voting, the FAST Constitution currently allows FAST to nominate its own members to run FAST’s elections, potentially including FAST members set to be on the ballot. In practice, other student government bodies have stepped in to run FAST’s elections due to a perceived conflict of interest. This amendment would make the constitution reflect precedent.
Under our proposal, WSU would formally take over the Election Supervisory Panel for FAST elections, and the completion deadline would move from April 1 to May 1 to give adequate time after spring break.
We also want to address the status of All-Campus Entertainment (ACE). ACE currently receives 28 percent of all FAST funding, according to the FAST Constitution. This year, that was $136,029.18.
According to the FAST Constitution, ACE is guaranteed its entire budget every year and is not held to the same standards of accountability as other student organizations. According to Dylan Safai ’26, co-president of Williams Student Union (WSU), WSU reached out to ACE hoping to review its budget. While staff administrators from the Office of Campus Events met with WSU, no student member of ACE attended the meeting.
ACE submitted just one budget document for review to FAST this year: a four-line budget, reproduced below.
General Events . .$20,000
Concerts . . . . . . . $65,000
Stressbusters . . . $11,250
Pub Nights . . . . . $11,250
Our coalition reached out to ACE to get more information on how it was spending its tax money. We received a reply and more detailed documents from ACE’s advisor, the Office of Student Life and Leadership Student Involvement and Events Assistant Bri Rousseau. This document showed that ahead of Spring Fling, ACE expected to spend about $94,666, over 70 percent of its total budget of $136,029.18. The amount they expected to spend was also 45 percent over the Spring Fling budget it submitted to FAST. FAST confirmed that it received only the four-line budget above at the beginning of the year and not the more detailed budget document that Rousseau provided.
In the current FAST Constitution, ACE enjoys privileges afforded to no other club on campus. ACE is not required to submit audits or budgets as a condition for funding and it is allowed to set its own rules for spending. We believe that an organization spending 28 percent of our student taxes should be held to the same transparency requirements as everybody else.
We recognize requiring more transparency from ACE may result in finding that ACE could be more efficient with its current spending. Currently, ACE is constitutionally guaranteed its entire 28 percent allocation, no matter how much it needs or how efficiently it spends its money. Therefore, we are proposing that FAST have oversight to increase or decrease this amount as deemed necessary. We believe that meaningful ACE funding transparency requires this change.
Ultimately, we urge a minimum of 225 of you to sign the petition here to trigger a campus referendum!
Emerald Dar ’26 (WSU, Gargoyle Society), Devon Pawlak ’27.5 (Gargoyle Society), Vania Gautam ‘26 (Gargoyle Society, TABLE), Manuel Lemus ’26 (Gargoyle Society), Dylan Safai ’26 (WSU), Charles Hughes ’28 (WSU, TABLE), Leo Margolies ‘26 (FAST), Jezebiel ‘JJ’ Gonzalez ’26 (FAST), and Elijah Adu ’27 (FAST)
