By Abigail Tetzlaff, Managing Editor

In late October, Augsburg Student Government instituted a new requirement for commissioned organizations, effective immediately.

The requirement, one of many that longestablished organizations must abide in order to secure budgetary funding for the next year, states that student groups must “show how [the] student organization has collaborated with three or more different student organizations or Departments on separate occasions through events, meetings or any other concrete form of gathering or projects.”

The new requirement applies only to commissioned organizations, or student groups that have existed for more than five years and are granted a yearly budget; younger chartered organizations must apply for grants to utilize Student Activities money, and are therefore unaffected by the new rule.

According to Cleo Romain, the Chartering and Commissioning Chairperson in Student Government, the new requirement was created to reflect an already expected behavior happening between student groups.

“The goal of this new requirement for Student Organizations is to promote collaboration between groups. For the few years I have been involved in student organizations at Augsburg, Student Government has always seemed to promote collaboration between organizations. Since collaboration was already encouraged and sort of expected (or at least asked about) during the commissioning process, most folks thought it was reasonable to put it down in writing.”

In the commissioning process, the new collaboration requirement will act as another point of assessment in which the Commissioning Committee determines if a group will be recommissioned for the following year.

“The Commissioning and Re-Commissioning Process includes many requirements student organizations must present to Student Government,” said Romain. “These requirements include the organization’s mission, their contribution to Augsburg, their accomplishments of the past year, their plans for next year, active membership among first-years, its need for an annual budget, and now it’s collaborations. The Chartering and Commissioning Committee evaluates all of these categories for every single organization. Each category is ranked 1–7 on how the organization performed. If an organization is rated poorly in one of these categories, it can hurt their chances of being re-commissioned or commissioned, but that does not necessarily mean that they will not get recommissioned, especially if they did well in all of the other categories.”

In February, when students representing commissioning organizations must present their cases for recommissioning, collaboration and intermingling will not just be encouraged, but expected.

This article first appeared in the Friday, December 1, 2017, Edition of The Echo.