Many clubs, both secured and chartered, had their budgets cut this year due to a lack of available funds, wrote Allocations Board Chair Alexander Mitchell ’17 in an email to club leaders on Wednesday. In the email, Mitchell explained that the A-Board received $450,000 in funding requests but only had $200,000 to distribute among the clubs that had requested funding.

“If your club did face a severe cut, please do not take it personally,” Mitchell wrote in the email. “We have nothing against you, your club, your mission, or anything like that. We made every one of these decisions in keeping with A-board policy, and with the best interests of the Brandeis Community at heart, and every cut was made in the most objective and balanced manner possible.”

Mitchell continued to explain that the appeals process begins this week but that club leaders should not “anticipate that our expectations will be any less stringent, or our pockets any deeper.”

He sent a follow-up email to club leaders on Thursday to clarify what is expected of club leaders during the appeals process, also specifying that coercion of A-Board members is not acceptable.

Giveaways will rarely be funded by the A-Board, while “swag” will never funded, Mitchell wrote, and only Student Events is allowed to have alcohol at their events.

He added that all movie and television events must involve the purchasing of licensing rights, as it is copyright infringement to hold an official club event and watch a film that was taken out of the library or streamed on Netflix or a similar provider.

Addressing coercion of A-Board members, he wrote, “There is an absolute zero-tolerance policy against bribes, kickbacks, threats, and intimidation. If you use any of these tactics to help your cause, then we will 1) reject your appeal on policy grounds and 2) add you to an internal blacklist to make sure you do not receive funding in the spring.”

He added, “Publicly airing your grievances with the A-Board, decisions, or its members may make us less receptive to an appeal request.”

He continued by writing that the Allocations Board is “one of the few places that I feel students can still have their voices heard and make an impact in school policy. It really sickens me that some clubs would actively try to jeopardize that independence [by involving administrators] in order to secure more money for themselves.”

In his original email, Mitchell wrote that the A-Board is adding policies to increase its transparency in the allocations process moving forward, including a Google Calendar with all A-Board funded events listed to “minimize the exclusivity of events in the future.

The appeals marathon runs until Monday, at which point club funding for the semester will be set.

Mitchell did not respond to request for comment by press time.