ASMSU called an emergency meeting Friday to discuss and vote on the allocation of $300,000 into an endowment fund, which would be used to award scholarships to MSU students demonstrating outstanding leadership qualities.
After much debate, the endowment was approved and will be sent to the Board of Trustees on Jan. 11 for approval.
The leadership scholarship, which was first introduced by Vice President Jessica Leacher, would award no less than six students who meet the requirements. The details of the scholarship, including the amount of the award and the number of recipients, is to be determined next semester.
Leacher said during the meeting that the scholarship is the best way ASMSU can give back to students.
The emergency meeting was called due to the time sensitivity of the endowment fund. If the allocation of the money was not approved by the end of the semester, it would not be able to be approved by the Board of Trustees until April, significantly reducing the amount of interest the endowment fund would collect.
The interest collected on the funds allocated will be used as scholarship money. Without time for the fund to gather interest, thousands of dollars that would have been awarded to students would be lost.
But a handful of representatives opposed pushing the initiative through because of a lack of review by the ASMSU finance committee.
“It’s good to get the money in sooner and build interest quicker,” representative Christopher Baldwin said during the meeting. “But we should not kicking it through without making sure we cross our T’s and dot our I’s and send it back to the committee and work on this responsibly.”
With the $300,000 allocated to a new endowment fund, ASMSU President Evan Martinak said that more than $200,000 is now left in the special projects fund for ASMSU.
Unlike previous scholarships, Martinak said this leadership award will have recipients selected by a committee consisting mostly of ASMSU members. Provisions in the scholarship bar current ASMSU members from receiving the scholarship.
“This is not going to be a money pit ASMSU dumps money into. We are going to see these recipients every year,” Martinak said. “ASMSU will have a real hand in selecting recipients, and celebrating our peers doing good work. (This approval) commits the funds and allows us to establish an endowment, but it (the scholarship) is just bones right now.”
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