Fundraising: Utilizing Your School's Resources

With the new school year upon us, we're all well in the thick of things, planning group discussions, social events, debates, lectures, and publicity. Then, there's the less fun, ever-present question: "How do we pay for it all?"

Although there's a great deal of variation in policies by school, many colleges and universities offer some sort of funding for student organizations. This often takes the form of grants for specific events (say, airfare, lodging, and honorarium for a speaker). Some schools offer annual or semi-annual block grants that student groups can use to finance both project and operational expenses. These can pull in thousands of dollars, so it's well worth your time to go to the office that administers student groups at your school and investigate funding possibilities.

For example, the University of Minnesota collects fees from all full-time students and uses the money to fund recreational sports, health care, legal services, and student organizations. To qualify for this funding, student groups must submit an application detailing the services they offer, the benefits they create for the campus community (even for students who do not participate), and the impact of their programming in the past. Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists (formerly Campus Atheists and Secular Humanists) has received this funding for three years. The application we used to secure funding for our current year is publicly available here. We're hoping it will be a useful resource for other groups that apply for funding from their schools.

Generally, we've relied on a few key arguments to justify our existence to the rest of the campus community:

• [Our university] has [insert (accurate or close approximation!) disproportionately large number] student organizations for religious students, but we're the only group explicitly for nonreligious students.
• Many of our members come from conservative small towns where the church is the center of community life and atheism/agnosticism is taboo and completely closed to discussion. For these people, our group is incredibly valuable-it may be literally their first opportunity to openly express their doubts.
• Our organization contributes a unique perspective to the marketplace of ideas.
• According to a recent study (available here), atheists are America's most unpopular minority. This evidences a need for an organized group to combat stereotypes, misinformation, and prejudice.
• We're not just against religion; we're for science, rationality, open discussion, free inquiry, freedom of conscience, and sound reasoning about ethical issues.
• We frequently cooperate with campus religious groups to co-sponsor forums, debates, dialogues, and social events.
• The flurry of recent bestsellers (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, et al.) demonstrate that people are interested in learning more about atheism, and our group is an excellent educational resource for the university community.