Charity Fashion Show (CFS) announced today that it will hold its annual fashion show at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center, not Stanford, in April.

CFS producer Thom Scher ’11 said CFS is intent on maintaining some connections to Stanford, but said the organization is no longer an official student group and technically is no longer associated with the University. Stanford students will still organize the event and hope to call upon Stanford community members as both attendees and models as it has in years past, he said.

Last spring, CFS faced a deficit after its event and could not make a donation to its charitable recipient, Kiva. The group encouraged individual donations instead. Scher hopes that this year, given the new location and new fundraising freedom that comes with no longer being a student group, CFS will raise more funds for its yet unnamed charity and avoid last year’s situation.

Fundraising guidelines and event planning at Stanford make hosting a large, sponsor-driven event such as CFS “sort of a challenge,” Scher said, who was a Student Activities and Leadership peer advisor as of fall 2010.

“As a student group, we were bound by guidelines,” he added, saying the situation made it hard to capitalize on sponsorships and made the process “financially difficult.”