How to make our local sorority legitimate?
 

Hi! I have looked through almost ALL the threads for locol sororities and it's helped out a lot. I know that people tend to ask repetative questions so I made sure I looked through all the threads before I posted my questions.

I am one of 23 founding sisters of a locol sorority in Connecticut called Phi Gamma. We started two years ago and are still very young, but we have a strong group of girls and we already have quite a few alumni. We also have a prominent member of the NPC on our campus who is advising us on everything we are doing. We have the support of the administration for the most part and we have been able to recruit a sizeable number of women these past few years (usually we can get about 12 to 20 girls for our Fall Rush/ 5 to 10 for our Spring Rush). Our name is also readily recognized all over campus which is great. We even have the support of multiple women from other national sororities on campus. Although things are going okay for us we do have problems that I am afraid will hurt us in the long run.

Basically we are an underground sorority. Although we have the support of our administration theres not much they can do but recognize us as a club. We have been trying for the past two years to become recognized by the NPC, but there are certain people who have blocked that from happening. Their excuse is that because chapters from national sororites on our campus have acted inappropriately which in turn has caused them to be "disbanded", they do not want to accept any other greek organizations on campus. As another option, we have been operating under our student government as a club but what we WANT is to become a legitimate local sorority on campus that can be recognized as such.

I am worried about this because there are people who are interested in joining that are discouraged from doing so because they think we arent legitimate and that we have no right to call ourselves a sorority. People from other sororities are telling PNM's that we arent a real sorority and I see it hurting our recruitment numbers.

SO what I want to know is what kind of options do we have for making our group legitimate if we arent under NPC or NPHC? We were thinking about becoming Incorporated but its so expensive and we need our dues to fund us throughout the year. Is there maybe any other umbrella organization that we can join?

Just to make it clear we arent looking to become affiliated with a national sorority anymore. We have started from scratch and all we want to be recognized by EVERYONE as more then just a club faking as a sorority. We just want to be seen as a local sorority that has a legitmate claim to call itself a sorority. What can we do? I would really appreciate any help because I want our young sorority to start off on a strong foundation so that eventually in the long run we can open up other chapters. Thanks!

If you have admin support you are NOT an underground anything. You are just not recognized as a Greek group. Don't make it worse than it is. :)

The admin is gun-shy about adding Greek groups; however, I would point out to them that just recognizing you as a "club" means you can select and train your members however you choose. If you are a sorority, recognized by panhel, you will have to follow Panhel rules which are more rigid. It's to their advantage to recognize you as such.

Unless of course it's the Panhel members who are voting you down, but it doesn't sound like that. Is it?

If you're able to get and keep members, why join panhel in the first place? If you're at a public university, you can probably get money for your activities just as most clubs on campus do. Being in Panhellenic means you have to split those sorts of funds between several groups (and it never amounts to much if anything at all).

Carefully weigh the pros and cons of affiliation before you do it. Right now you have a lot of independence. Make sure giving up all of that is worth it.

Kevin - thanks for the response but in my post i said we DONT want to affiliate with a national. We are looking to stay local.

What I want to know is how we can make our local sorority more legitimate. Is there any other kind of umbrella organization we can join that are similar to the NPC or NPHC. There are people in the Greek community that are calling us a fake sorority and I'm looking for ways for us to say "look we belong to this group we are legitimate." I hope that makes mroe sense!

I believe he was referring to affiliation with the local council, not a national NPC organization.

ETA: There is no central office to make your sorority "legitimate." Joining a national umbrella organization is not going to have an effect on your being able to affiliate on the local level (unless that umbrella org is recognized on your campus). Your sorority could join NMGC (for example) on the national level, but if there is no NMGC on your campus, you'll be in the same boat.

Likewise, incorporation (which shouldn't be that expensive, btw) does not make you "legitimate." It makes you a corporation.

My guess is that nothing can make you "legitimate" except acting "legitimate."

Meanwhile, wasn't there someone here recently working on forming a national council of locals?

Not sure if I missed something, but did someone bring up incorporation? Or was that just in addition to my comment?

And yes, there was someone here trying to create that council. Still not sure how it'd work, but I suppose there's no harm in trying.

It was deep in the OP's post:

Quote:

Originally Posted by dp1228 (Post 1847640) We were thinking about becoming Incorporated but its so expensive and we need our dues to fund us throughout the year. Is there maybe any other umbrella organization that we can join?

Gotcha. There was no way in hell I was reading her whole post lol

Thanks.

33girl - yeah we were trying before to become affiliated with a national but it had to be a unanimous vote in the NPC to let us on campus. The meeting never happened because the women we were talking to never organized it like she said she would. So we started a local. At this point we are past panhel but i was just wondering if there was anything else we could do to have a larger support system

MysticCat - According to the President of our sorority the cost was too high. But I am doing research on that as well and like you said it looks as though it might not as expensive as we first thought.

And yeah you're right we have been acting legitimate and thats why we havent lost too manynumbers in recruitment. Its just discouraging when people say to potential members that we arent "legitimate" because we have no national ties. For us its a pro but for some its a con.

33girl and Kevin aren't talking about joining an NPC/NHPC organization. They are referring to your campus Panhellenic, the governing body over all sororities ON YOUR CAMPUS. It's simply made up of members of different sororities from your school. They have meetings, by-laws, and other ways of making sure that all of the sororities on campus are "following the rules" and running under the same system.

At some schools, the locals choose to affiliate with the campus Panhellenic. At others, they don't. They're talking about your group requesting to become a member organization of Panhellenic so that you will be viewed as a more "legitimate" organization.

ETA: It sounds as if you're already doing very well as an organization. Why do you want to be seen as more "legitimate" by your peers? As the saying goes, "Those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind"

Knight_ shadow - you made a really good point about being in a same boat if the umbrella organization isnt on campus. That does make sense loll. I was just rambling on about options available to us. Thanks!

astalumna06 - im sorry i misspoke. i meant we were trying to join Panhel but the meeting to do so never happened because certain members were against us forming another group. while we were trying to join Panhel we were also trying to colonize a chapter from a national sorority. So when were essentially turned away from Panhel we decided to start a local sorority to just start our whole process over fresh.

sorry for the confusino :)

Becoming incorporated in this day and age does nothing to make your organization legitimate, except by showing that you had some cash to pay to an attorney to form a corporation or spent some time doing it on your own *which I do not recommend*.
(Note, there are historical reasons some GLO's proudly say that they are incorporated, but becoming incorporated in 2009 is not much of an accomplishment).

Not that there aren't advantages of being a corporation, but they're not going to help you feel legitimate.