There are over 800 registered student organizations at the University. They all cater to the same student population, share the same University spaces for events and adapt to the same hectic academic schedules. More importantly, all RSOs rely on the same monetary pool for University funding: the Student Org Resource Fee.
The fee — which is billed to all student accounts with more than six credit hours — amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars every school year.
Twice a semester, a student-dominated and volunteer-based board determines how these funds are redistributed to the RSO ecosystem. This spring alone, the SORF board allotted more than $200,000 to petitioning RSOs, from the Cheese Club at UIUC to iRobotics.
Some student communities still feel neglected, despite the board’s neutral approach to SORF allocation.
The Creative Writing Club is one of these groups.
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The club is a student-led organization where members share and discuss original writing pieces while building a supportive space for creative expression and growth as writers.
“It feels like we’re being overlooked,” said Aidan Mueller, senior in LAS and member of the Creative Writing Club. “It seems a little demeaning that something like the Cheese Club of all things can attain their funding while … we’re on an island, and everybody else is a part of a larger networked continent.”
For an RSO to request SORF funding, they must first ensure their applications follow the board’s funding standards.
Funding can be immediately denied for a number of reasons — the largest being if the request does not prove itself essential to the RSO’s established mission.
It is for this reason that the Creative Writing Club struggled to see eye to eye with the board.
Adarsh Krishnan, junior in LAS and treasurer of the Creative Writing Club, said printing zines is key to the club’s mission. Krishnan said printing zines plays a key role in engaging members, allowing the club to publish and share a wide range of creative writing pieces.
The Creative Writing Club applied for the SORF board’s spring 2026 allocation cycle, requesting $160 to cover the costs of printing zines. Despite the board approving their request, SORF ultimately denied their funding after input from the University administration.
After the request was denied, he later learned from another board member that printing costs might have been more likely to receive approval through a separate event funding application.
Krishnan said SORF’s decision was confusing because he had attended SORF office hours prior to submitting the application, and had been advised to submit the request through the standard funding process.
“I don’t think it was an intentional lack of transparency,” Krishnan said. “I think they just genuinely didn’t know the administration had that hard line on printing.”
Krishnan appealed the denial for reconsideration. Yet again, SORF board members unanimously approved the RSO’s request, but administration advised otherwise, and their request was once more rejected.
Administration interference during allocation is a rare occurrence for the board, according to Alex Koscielski, chairperson of the SORF board and senior in LAS. It typically happens when the board fails to notice a violation of funding standards or a logistical error in the application form.
“The administration does not really deny anything,” Koscielski wrote in an email to The Daily Illini. “Administrative notes point out those instances where those rules/guidelines are not applied – and sometimes that means that groups receive funding that the board initially denies, and vice versa.”
For example, the administration stepped in for only 20 out of more than 200 applications submitted to this year’s “Spring 1” SORF allocation meeting, with the majority of its interventions simply correcting such oversights.
However, there are rare instances when the board and administration ultimately disagree on how SORF standards are interpreted, such as the case with the Creative Writing Club.
According to the administration, since printed zines were an end product rather than a tool the Creative Writing Club uses to enable its operations, their prints were deemed unnecessary for the RSO’s core functions.
“We were denied on the basis that the administration doesn’t fund printing, which, I don’t know, feels like a weird place to draw a line,” Krishnan said. “I don’t blame the board members because this was also not something they were aware of, but if the administration is going to stand so strongly against printing, they can make that more clear.”
While Koscielski said he understood why RSOs like the Creative Writing Club may feel mistreated by the administration, he still encourages student organizations to advocate for themselves through the SORF and Student Engagement process. Even if the board and administration may come to rare disagreements on funding requests like they did with the CWC, they are never made without communication.
“It’s not like we’re dealing with some … evil figure in the University who’s trying to stop (RSO funding); they’re just people,” Koscielski said. “It’s just all part of the process to ensure the standards are enforced equally and appropriately. If (a disagreement) ever does happen, we make a point of discussing why … so that we can try and be more unified in our approaches in the future.”
Services like the denial appeal process and the daily SORF office hours are built in for the very purpose of aiding RSOs in this way, Koscielski said.
Nonetheless, other clubs like the Illinois Space Society still struggled to secure funding even after attending office hours.
“My SORF officer was extremely helpful, but their standards were still too complicated,” said Benjamin Litvak, treasurer of ISS and senior in Engineering. “I feel like every time we submitted a request, we were denied for the smallest things … If there was a way to make these minor details more obvious to club treasurers, I think it would help streamline the process much more.”
This spring was the first semester that the ISS received a funding approval from SORF after years of denial, said Litvak.
Like many engineering RSOs on campus, ISS has grown far more reliant on alternative sources of funding such as corporate sponsorships and donations, but Litvak believes that SORF funding would still greatly benefit the club.
“It isn’t great having to consistently prod our members, their friends and their families for donations,” Litvak said. “We’re fortunate enough to have corporate sponsors, but … the extra money (from SORF) could easily help cover our essential expenses. If the SORF board laid out what exactly they needed from RSO treasurers at the beginning of every semester, clubs would be able to get funding more easily.”
Since the SORF board reviews its standards every year, they take such public urgings from the campus community seriously. SORF standards were changed as recently as 2020 to provide for RSOs more effectively.
If standards do change, this could eventually mean a shift in luck for RSOs that are continually rejected due to standards violations and interpretations.
“We always try to be a ‘money in, money out’ operation, because you’re not here to pay the (SORF) so that students in five years eventually get that money … you pay so that you can benefit right now,” Koscielski said. “If the standards are too restrictive and we’re not spending enough, we think about ways to expand … so that students can apply for and get more funding.”
In the meantime, however, the Creative Writing Club and ISS will simply continue to operate with limited funds.
“We just don’t have the ability to grow,” Mueller said. “We would have a lot more opportunities to provide for our community of writers if we had this funding … but without it, we’ve ultimately just (been) regurgitating what we learned in (a creative writing) class.”
