• Students
• Faculty
• Staff
• Alumni
• Donors
• Partners
• Internal and External Stakeholders

• Pre-event planning
• Venue and space selection
• Guest and/or meeting rooms reservations
• Caterer and menu selection
• Audio/Visual needs
• Registration
• Post event surveys

• Funding
• Strategic planning initiatives of the college
• Date and time
• Audience
• Intent
• Type of event

For the 2024 fiscal year (July 1, 2023–June 30, 2024)

In our ongoing efforts to reduce expenses, we developed a set of guidelines for providing food at college events. We hope these guidelines will be helpful when planning your upcoming event.

Until further notice, we will: 

• Prioritize having food only at student-centered academic or programmatic events.
• Temporarily suspend food at internal events for faculty and staff, with limited exceptions. Exceptions might include having a small lunch at the first meeting in a series of events or for special occasions, such as retirements. Food at these exception events would be generally <$150.
• Encourage a “brown bag” approach for lunchtime meetings; consider rotating the meeting format so that recurring meetings held over the lunch hour are only in-person as needed and virtual when not.
• Temporarily suspend food at student meetings that are non-academic, such as tutoring/LA/intern leadership meetings.
• Temporarily scale back on food provided at graduate program events.
• Utilize the Event Team’s popcorn cart to provide a low-cost food item for various events.
• Push requests for snack items (e.g., chips, granola bars, etc.) through the Events Team for any event.
  • Units should budget for potential snack costs to capture rationale and projection of costs.
  • The Events Team will order a variety of snacks in bulk to be cost effective; prepackaged snacks will ensure little to no food waste.
  • For student-centered events or special occasion faculty/staff events, requests can be submitted for snacks for the anticipated number of guests.
  • The Events Team is currently working on streamlining this request process via Smartsheet. Until the new form is announced and published, requests can be submitted as usual through email and Workfront.
• Requests beyond snacks (e.g., a full lunch, buffet) should be routed to Shannon/Amy/Jocelyn for review and approval to ensure consistency across the college. These requests will require a cost estimate and should be budgeted to capture rationale and projection of costs.

• Reservations for guest and/or meeting rooms
• Menu selections
• Agendas

• Catering options
• Meeting room setup

• Venue and space selection
• Registration Fleet transportation
• Miscellaneous items such as signage, décor, entertainment, staffing, post-event surveys, and giveaways