Updated: May 28th, 2020
Occupy Pomona’s Emergency Fund is a stop-gap resource that meets students’ needs that are not covered by the College’s specific resources. As a communal resource, our financials are publicly available at www.tinyurl.com/OccupyPomonaFinances. Our funds are managed by the staff accountant of Associated Students of Pomona College, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
In the past two months alone, Occupy Pomona’s Emergency Fund has:
As a communal resource, we uphold the highest standards of transparency, accountability, and integrity. This page explains our accounting, allocation process, and relationship to College institutional resources. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].
We are a stopgap resource to Pomona’s own systems of student support. During the Spring 2020 semester, our application form walked students through every institutional resource at Pomona College, and asked them to confirm that the expenses they requested from the Emergency Fund could not be met by an existing resource. For example:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/WQYO0xNS-5hobdry4V_v-QsH1OIixWSlBlR6BHtgZwsyT7dkCCXZ6Wto2n4jYcmKpoh6jow5Vyh4Eb7on5Xr92PXO5EDbjQFEqS0-N7yi5tzNkEmV9HfusPLP2gARYRC5wTcVzun
As such, we only cover expenses that Pomona College do not, or cannot meet. Such expenses have included immediate housing expenses, costs of living for the summer during a pandemic, and expenses for supporting family and loved ones as breadwinners. Our Emergency Fund has been a crucial resource for 1 in every 13 Pomona students because the Pomona administration has not been adequate in its aid response for meeting holistic student needs, or transparent about the amount of funds available to students, or the exact time in which these funds will be made available. With our fund, we have continuously notified students of their individual aid and the status of funds at large.
<aside> 💡 100% of donations go directly into the hands of students who request financial assistance.
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Since March 2020, $123,896 has been disbursed in crucial expenses for 127 students to fulfill 178 grants. Our funds were emptied on May 20th; since then, the organizers have continued to fundraise as students expressed severe continued need. The image below represents a total budget of $144,882.52 as of May 28th. Blue shows allocations during the Spring 2020 semester, orange shows allocations for the summer, and gray shows donations made after our latest wave of allocations on May 20th.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/SAgKKvBGk-zMnyJHsI1dcOrgUZC4zP4TPkA5LSWCvmSRLGc_qnMVJyyln_wT37SoXqV13bbSQMYe3nj4VAdDc-Ty71W_I5JnpOthTyVbYXE_7pn4HO6rNyBZHiY8rfalpcOgWcnS
<aside> 💡 After Pomona students departed campus in March due to COVID-19, Occupy Pomona allocated $60,240.25 in monetary aid for essential needs that students lacked off-campus.
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