The Cowboy Parents Emergency Fund endowment has recently been updated. The endowment is joined together between the ASUW President Ben Wetzel, Cowboy Parent’s Council and Vice President of student affairs Sean Blackburn.
The endowment has been around since 2002, but has been rewritten to make it easier for the group of three to figure out when to bring it up and how to apply it to situations.
“The reason we took a look at it was that the paper work for how to implement it and use it was really confusing,” ASUW president Ben Wetzel said. “So what we did was [rewrite] a new agreement between the three groups.”
The new agreement was signed this weekend at the Cowboy Parents Council meeting. The endowment ensures that in a situation of crisis such as a sudden death or serious injury of a student there will be a possibility to help immediate family members of that student travel to Laramie and even have a place to stay.
“[It’s for] all students and all families,” Wetzel said. “Even the definition of families isn’t necessarily refined to their parents.”
The endowment currently sits at about $4,000. Wetzel states that one of the last uses of the endowment was to pay for the flight of several family members of a couple of international students from Japan who passed away unexpectedly.
“It’s loosely defined to kind of encompass all sorts of varieties of incidences, emergencies, or situations that might occur,” Wetzel said.
There have also been cases where students have been in major accidents and the endowment was used to pay for their family’s travel to Laramie as well as hotel rooms to stay in if, say, the student were in the hospital for an extended period of time. The main idea is to assist and support the families.
“I think it just goes without saying that we’ve got to support the families of our students because that family support network is what keeps all of us going,” Wetzel said about the importance of the endowment.
If an incident comes up it would be brought to discussion by either Wetzel, Sean Blackburn or the chair of the Cowboy Parents Council where it would then be voted on in a decision of 2/3 majority on whether to utilize it.
“We talk all the time in orientation speeches and all sorts of different situations about this University of Wyoming family, this University of Wyoming community, and I think that our family here on campus starts with the family you have at home,” Wetzel said.
