A number of campus organizations and student leaders sent an open letter to the Student Activities Commission Friday, demanding the chance to offer feedback on SAC’s controversial new funding guidelines before a revised version of the policy is announced Sunday.

The current guidelines, put in place this semester to comply with last year’s Georgetown University Student Association spending reforms, have been met with criticism from multiple club leaders who believe they restrict their creativity and unfairly allocate money.

“We urge SAC not to assume what clubs need and want. In order to improve the funding guidelines to be more reflective of club programming, the process of determining club funding must be a two way process. Clubs must be consulted,” the letter, signed by nine organizations and 17 individual leaders, read. It added that there is no mechanism in place for clubs to offer formal feedback and underscored that clubs would like to be able to formally critique the funding guidelines before decisions on next semester’s budgets are made.

“We didn’t want to be confrontational, but we wanted to make it crystal clear that we as campus groups expect to be represented by our advisory board,” said Eitan Paul (SFS ’12), International Relations Club president. The IRC was the leading force behind the letter.

But SAC Commissioner Ruiyong Chen (SFS ’13) and Bill McCoy, SAC’s adviser in the Center for Student Programs, said they thought the letter was not the best way to express these concerns.

“It shows a kind of disregard for proper process,” McCoy said.

Leaders of 10 SAC-funded student organizations – including the IRC and College Democrats, the two of the largest groups on campus – signed the letter along with several GUSA members and three former SAC commissioners.

Paul said the IRC decided to take initiative when SAC announced Wednesday that they would announce new funding guidelines on Sunday.

“This came as a surprise to most clubs,” Paul said.

The upcoming GUSA budget meeting – at which key GUSA spending decisions are made – also served as an impetus for the letter. The summit is slated to take place on Feb. 27.

“If SAC does not solicit club leader input, it cannot claim to accurately represent or even understand club needs at the GUSA Budget Summit,” the letter read.

McCoy said that the letter came too late in the semester for any kind of formal feedback to take place, however; the new guidelines are scheduled to be released Sunday and SAC’s budget application to the GUSA Budget Summit is also due Sunday.

“It’s a little irresponsible of them to be making these demands this late in the game,” McCoy said.

Paul said that many groups signed on to the new guidelines because time to formalize the guidelines was short last semester after the passage of the funding reforms.

“This semester there’s really no excuse,” Paul said.

But Chen said that while there has been no formal opportunity for clubs to offer feedback on the procedures, she is always open to hearing their suggestions. Chen added that some of this informal feedback had been incorporated into the new guidelines, although she was unable to offer details since the revisions have yet to be finalized.

“Significant input has been put in there,” she said.

According to Matt Bernstein (COL ‘13), treasurer for the College Democrats, some individual SAC commissioners have been willing to listen to suggestions, but an informal process won’t be enough to cause real change.

“The only real way to do that is to have an open debate,” he said.

The letter was also signed by multiple members of GUSA and most of the executive candidates. Mike Barclay (COL ‘12), chairman of the GUSA student life committee, said he signed the letter because he thinks SAC needs to have an open dialogue with both students and GUSA.

“I’ve had a lot of students come up to me and say as club leaders that the funding process doesn’t work for them,” he said.

SAC is meeting today, and Chen said they are likely to respond to the open letter with a letter of their own. McCoy said that while he hopes to allow for more opportunities for formal feedback in the future, they are unlikely to hold a forum before the guidelines are released.

“We just need to get something up and running for next semester,” he said.