Greek Council
 

I'm a freshman in Phi Sigma Sigma and I'm on my campus' Greek Council. I'm running for VP of Greek Council next year and I was wondering what other campus' Greek Councils do? Ours seems to not do much except for Greek Week, our annual Greek Formal, the Greek Excellence award, and a few alcohol awareness training seminars for Greeks throughout the year. I'm looking to make it more active next year... :)

VPs are divided into other specialty areas. (e.g. VP of Finance, VP of Academics, etc.) The specialty VPs help with all aspects of that area.

The entire council establishes the entire governing body. They have to approve any Greek activity before an organization can do it.

Define "Greek activity"....if sororities and fraternities had to have evrerything they do approved by a council they'd never get ANYTHING done.

Good luck! Looks like you have a great platform to work with... more community service events would definately be my focus.

I am on the NPHC council, even though I am alum, it's pretty much the same thing. We focus alot on community service. We try to do alot together.. one thing you may want to consider is Souperbowl for Caring food drive done every year around Superbowl, usually with local food banks http://www.souperbowl.org/. This would be great on campus!

Another things is to incorporate a huge day of service in our Greek Weekend, which im sure may be similar to your Greek Week. This year we will clean up a homeless center then, have our first ever greek bowl a thon, proceeds benefit Big Brothers Big Sisters.

We also walk in the Relay 4 Life every year, teams (orgs) with most laps win a prize.

We also have a 5th Friday Happy hour for every month that has a 5th Friday.. since you are students though, maybe you all can incorporate another idea.. maybe a 5th Friday Fish fry.. something everyone can look fwd too. Also, may be an opt to collect say $5 plate and donate to a local charity or group!

Last year I was VP Internal for our council, which made me oversee all the innerworkings of our PHC system. Here are some of the things that worked for us:

Do you all have a sister sorority program? Basically, sororities are paired up at the beginning of each fall and are required to do some sisterhood activity each semester. At the end of the Spring (or Fall depending on programming) we have a field day where sister sororities compete in pairs for the "championship" followed by a giant cookout. It's always a huge success and a great way to promote unity within the system.

I also was the advisor to our Junior Panhellenic. Jr PHC is made up of all the NM's in the greek system- these girls are required to host a carnival to raise money for the children's hospital in the city. It's a great program and an awesome way to introduce NM's to PHC.

Other things we do are we have a Panhellenic Points system. Each PHC event and PHC-sponsored philanthropy events (i.e. community events that we say we want girls to go to) are worth a certain number of points and attendance at these helps your chapter win the Panhellenic Cup. It gets a lot of people out at events.

These are just a few of the things we do and it's worked pretty well for our campus- we have 6 chapters ranging 55-105 in size, but it really depends on what your PHC looks like as to what will work and not. Good luck though!! Getting involved in Panhellenic was the most rewarding thing I did :-)

SLAM4eva, my campus doesn't have a "sister sorority program". The Greek community at my school isn't really big enough. There are only about 3 IFC fraternities, 3 NPC sororities, and 5 or 6 NPHC orgs. The IFC and NPC orgs only have around 20-30 people per org.
I do really like the idea of a points system for events throughout the year. This could go towards our Greek Excellence award, which would be a big motivator for orgs to get more involved...