Scholarship Policy [meta] [#3045004]

In years past we've had a scholarship fund set aside, of up to $3,000, to help with travel costs for camp attendees in need. Many years (or all years) we haven't used the entirety of this fund, or used part of it sporatically, on a year by year basis.

I thought, since we're talking about free tickets and keynote funds elsewhere, perhaps we should revisit this idea, and ask questions such as:

1. Is there a need for it?
2. If so, how much should we set aside?
3. Do we actively promote it and try to use it each year, or just keep it around and use it when we want someone to come to camp who can't afford it?
4. Who decides who gets the money? Or how does it get decided?
5. What do other camps do?

Comments

Comment #1

1 April 2019 at 20:06

minneapolisdan created an issue. See original summary.

Comment #2

minneapolisdan CreditAttribution: minneapolisdan as a volunteer commented 1 April 2019 at 20:16

Just for additional reference, I have not budgeted for it this year and we're currently projected to lose money or just break even, so keep that in mind when we discuss :)

Comment #3

stpaultim CreditAttribution: stpaultim as a volunteer commented 6 April 2019 at 03:14

I think that we should definitely try to work with a budget that keeps us from loosing money. So, if we don't have any idea of where the money is coming from, then we probably shouldn't plan on spending money on scholarships.

Having said that, I think it's been very helpful for us to have scholarship money available to get key folks to camp for sprinting, speaking or training in the past. I would like for us to find a way to offer some scholarship money, but we should do so by either cutting other expenses or finding additional revenue. If that is not possible, then we probably shouldn't be offering scholarships.

If we have a scholarship budget, it would also be good to be deliberate about how we use it. I think that we have generally used it on an ad hoc basis when someone contacted us and mentioned that they needed help to come to camp. We have on occasion offered it to folks who were not aware of it. But, I don't recall us ever doing a very good job of promoting the availability of this fund.

I don't ever recall having to make a decision to accept one person over another.

Comment #4

jerdavis

Minneapolis, MN

CreditAttribution: jerdavis at Horizontal commented 18 April 2019 at 21:54

I'm not sure where to take this given our budget. It's disappointing that this isn't accounted for in our budget, but we also don't seem to have the time or inclination to organize the efforts that would benefit from this support. I guess let's table this for now and see where we end up. We have 4k in deficit to make up for already, so adding to that seems impractical.

Efforts I can think of that this will impact:

* Training by Mauricio
* Any possible outreach to attempt to organize a key sprint initiative