Greek Tour Philanthropy?
 

I was driving through the greek village at my school today with my boyfriend and I mentioned how beautiful the ADPi and ZTA houses were (Seriously, all the houses in our greek village are wonderful, but those two take the cake) and how I wish I could see more of the houses than what I saw during rush and I've never seen the inside of any of the fraternity houses.

We got into thinking of something like a house-crawl (maybe with beers at the fraternity houses and food at the sorority houses) and how maybe it could be a good philanthropy event if enough people are interested in touring the greek village. You could pay a cover charge and look through the houses, take a look at old composites, there could be speakers/tour guides at each house, and they could explain their philanthropy, their symbols, and any other cool facts about their houses to all the guests. The proceeds from the admission tickets would be divvied up between all the participating sororities and fraternities.

The only thing is, I don't know if any non-greeks would be interested in this, and how to market the philanthhropy event to interest people. Maybe it could be like a bar crawl, but would probably have to be heavily regulated so it doesn't get out of hand as a philanthropy event.

Any suggestions on whether or not something like this could be do-able?

If you have a Greek system that gets along, you could probably do a function around Greek Week or Homecoming. Or for that matter you could hold a mock-rush event where the sororities take turns going through house tours or something.

Your sorority headquarters would probably not be on board with having an alcohol related event, even if the actual alcohol is not in your chapter house, but since there's alwas a struggle for a good alcohol-free Greek event, this might fill the bill if you can talk the guys into going dry for a night. I think it could be great fun to do a progressive dinner (with mocktails?) or just an open house. And I'd invite the various Alumnae Associations. They'd probably eat it up!

Suggest it to your NPC rep. Maybe she could take it to her next meeting and they can start the ball rolling.

The Tucson Alumnae Panhellenic has had great success with its annual fund raiser being a luncheon at one of the Sorority houses at the University of Arizona. Included in the price of the luncheon was a tour of 3 or 4 of the other sorority houses. With 12 houses, we covered all 12 in 3 years. It was great fun and the alumnae, those with and without chapters at UofA just loved it.