What came first? The chicken or the egg?

What do you think??? Chicken? Egg?

Why am I bringing this up? Well, I've been wondering lately - what comes first? A well-functioning, strong RHA or an adequate RHA budget?

My RHA doesn't have a lot of money. We get less than a dollar per student living on campus. The average RHA in this area gets $14.50 per students; $9.50 of that being provided by their Housing department. Or let's look at it this way: We have almost 3,000 students living on campus. My budget is less than half of that of another school that has 300 residents.

Why do we have such a small budget, you may ask... Well, I've been told that it's because we haven't had a very active RHA. Last year, most areas didn't even have an Area Council for the entire year. At the end of last year, only three students ran for RHA Executive Board Elections.
We've come a long way since that. Every area currently has an active council that's planning events and has representation at RHA meetings. I have a full RHA Executive Board. I have students who have already expressed interested in continuing their involvement next year, Area Council members who want to take on RHA Executive Board positions. We've attended two state conferences (last year, RHA went to none) and the only reason we didn't go to more was because we couldn't get the funding, not because students weren't interested.

But where do we go from here? I still get to hear the argument that our RHA needs to grow first before it'd be justified to give them a larger budget. But how can my RHA grow without getting a larger budget first? Students are trying but how can they accomplish much with so little funds? Yes, the RAs program more - there's even an RA committee for campus-wide programs - and yes, part of that may be because the RAs have more programming experience, but they also have a larger budget than my RHA. And what incentive is there for students to get involved when you see RHA being such a small organization with a tiny budget? Conferences get students excited about RHA and can often help get new students involved or train current members to become effective and strong Executive Board members for the next year - but without funds we can't take them to any bigger conferences!

I just wish I had a decent conference budget, some more programming money and some money toward incentives for RHA Executive Board members (if that's a reduced room rate, a small stipend for their office hours - wait, I'd have to have an office first - or even something as small as RHA Executive Board shirts ... just something to let them know that we value and appreciate them).

So I guess to answer the question - I believe you need to have a decent budget to build up an RHA. Now is the budget the chicken or egg? That's for you to decide.