What’s the only thing better than a concert featuring one of Stanford’s many a cappella groups? A concert featuring two, of course. This is the logic behind the ASSU’s recently-launched Voluntary Student Organizations (VSO) Collaboration Initiative (VCI).

According to ASSU President Melanie Kannokada, a senior, the VCI is a fund established by ASSU executives and then-Dean of Students Greg Boardman to provide incentive for VSOs to plan events together. In order to qualify for the fund, at least two student groups must cooperate to throw an event. The fund is available for use by both undergraduate and graduate groups. Group financial managers can access and submit the application online.

ASSU senators said they feel the fund will help student groups gain larger audiences at events.

“Stanford prides itself on the fact that it has somewhere around 600 student groups, which means that a lot of groups are highly, highly focused,” said ASSU Senator Danny Arbeiter, a sophomore. “For instance, there are several pre-professional societies for each professional career path, each with a slightly different focus, making a lot of redundant efforts. If those groups combined efforts they could expose each other’s memberships to other opportunities, and all parties could greatly benefit.”

In addition, the fund could reduce financial hardship on smaller student groups. The ASSU executives and the Dean of Student Office have each pledged up to $5,000 to create the fund. According to Arbeiter, that amount may increase in the future if the VCI proves successful.

“Collaboration was one of the ASSU Executives’ three broad goals for the year, and creating a Collaboration Fund was one way of achieving this goal,” Kannokada said. “To secure funds, we set aside a large percentage of our own budget in the beginning of the year, but realized it was still a modest amount for this endeavor. Therefore, we approached Boardman to see if he would be willing to match the funds that we contribute, thus increasing the overall sum of money which we can give to support student groups.

The VCI was officially launched just weeks after the undergraduate senate announced a “soft cap” on student organizations supported by general fees. These groups now receive $40 in funding per undergraduate participant. Because the cap on funding is proportional to number of undergraduate participants in student groups, the smallest organizations may have suffered the hardest blow.

“The VCI helps small groups, and groups that have very focused efforts and consequently, because they’re focused, have smaller memberships,” Arbeiter emphasized. “This allows them to join efforts with other clubs and produce better programming through combining their human resources and monetary resources.”

However, Kannokada stressed that the VCI was introduced in order to encourage innovative group collaboration and not as a Band-Aid for reduced VSO budgets.

“The primary purpose of the VCI is to encourage collaboration on new, original events, and not for the purpose of recuperating funds or supplementing a reduced budget,” agreed VCI Chair Lauren Graham, a junior. “Student groups should keep their annual, staple events within their own groups, and consider applying to the VCI as an opportunity to jointly expand their programming where a limited budget would have otherwise prohibited them from doing so.”

Some members of small groups said this would pose a challenge.

Senior Olivia Sohns, co-president of Coalition for Justice in the Middle East, said she is opposed to the VCI.

“The new ASSU policy does indeed promote group collaboration because the policy forces small groups out of necessity to desperately seek out co-sponsorships in order to fund their events!” she wrote in an email to The Daily. “We surely wish that the ASSU would not frame its unfair soft-cap policy in a way that seeks lamely to excuse the unfairness of causing small groups like ours to be financially stricken, despite all we do to contribute to student life and awareness on campus.”

Other group members are more sanguine about the VCI, according to Graham.

“I have already received several emails with questions from interested students since the VCI was first announced at the VSO Leadership Dinner in November, so I am pretty confident that we will have many strong applications,” she said. “The ASSU and the executive have high expectations for the success of this fund. Student group funding is, and has always been a high priority for the ASSU.”

The application for the VCI went up on the ASSU Web site on Friday, according to Kannokada. For more information, visit the official VCI Web site at http://assu.stanford.edu/vci.html