When I ran my college atheist group, it was a triumph when we brought in one awesome speaker.

When I heard that the Atheists, Humanists, & Agnostics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were running their own conference, I thought that was about as good as it could get.

But they keep one-upping themselves.

Now, for the third straight year, they’ve received in excess of $60,000 in funding from their university. Unbelievable.

One of these funding streams [for groups on campus] is the General Student Services Fund, AKA the holy grail of student organization funding. Rather than applying for event/travel/operations grants, GSSF groups receive a single budget to cover all of their services, programming, operating expenses, travel, and paid student staff, making this a system of funding not seen on many other campuses. Thus, the budgets can get pretty large.

Only 14 of the 900 student groups on campus received this sort of budget and the money includes 9 paid staff positions to be filled by the AHA officers.

They’ve put on incredible events with the money over the past couple of years; nice to know the school is giving them the support they need to keep it all going.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)



