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Questions about Colonies

What is a colony???

What does a college have to do in order to get a colony established???

Cia

A colony is the time period before initiation into an "official" organization. A colony period usually lasts for one school year. To start a colony you need a certain number of members, something like 30? It all depends on the organization. Is there a certain fraternity or sorority that you were interested in colonizing? If you are not partial to any one group then I would suggest first organizing a group of people so you can show that you have strong numbers and then contacting different groups who aren't at your school already (or who may have been in the past) with your information. There are usually pages on each organizations website that give information or who to contact to start a colony. Usually if you have good numbers and a strong greek system, they will be more than happy to help you colonize. Remember though that just because you have backing from a fraternity or sorority doesn't mean that you have backing from IFC or Panhellenic and you NEED that to be established and recognized on campus.

I am part of a group at my school that is recolonizing a sorority that previously existed on campus. One way that we attracted members was by posting little flyers around campus stating that we were starting another sorority (since there are something like almost 20 more fraternities than sororities). We are almost 40 members strong now. Let me know if I can be of any more help.

Re: Questions about Colonies

Quote:

Originally posted by FCBeachGal13
What is a colony???

What does a college have to do in order to get a colony established???

Cia

I am a founding sister of my chapter of Phi Sigma Sigma. CSU Dominguez Hills decided to open itself up to extension (bring in a new sorority or fraternity). Phi Sigma Sigma won the privilege of trying to create a colony at CSUDH. They had national personnel at our "Welcome Week" passing out info and once they had some women interested in joining those women helped spread the word. Because of the size of CSUDH (12,000+ students and more than half women) our colony needed to have 30 women who wanted to join. We were pinned and set up as a colony in November 2000 and started the colonization period. On March 24, 2001 we were officially installed as a chapter. Phi Sigma Sigma's colony period is only 4 months but they were some of the funnest and hardest 4 months around. I still get goosebumps remembering my initiation and the installation of the chapter.

If you don't have greeks on your campus contact your Office of Student Life to see if they would be open to bringing in a sorority.

I'm also a founding father of my house.

Essentially what happened is IFC on my campus voted to expand. They invited lots of different groups to present and out of those they chose Sigma Nu.

So the National Directors of Expansion came to my school to recruit some people for a colony.

3 years later we have a house and a charter:D

The road from colony to chapter is tough. Don't become a colonist and expect someone to do the work for you. Be ready to give 110% and NOT have someone around to tell you what to do.

It's a totally different experience actually founding a chapter instead of joining one.

I can't wait to see our first real Candidate class get initiated.

I am also a chapter founder, but my experience was a little different from phisigduchesscv's and ktsnake's. What they participated in was a "from the ground up" colonization, where IFC or Panhel votes to bring a new national GLO to campus, IFC or Panhel picks the GLO, and national officers of the GLO come to campus to interview prospective members and select the initial founders.

I was a member of a local sorority that decided to go national. After existing for a year and a half as a local, we petitioned Panhel stating that we wanted to become part of a national sorority with a preference for AEPhi. Panhel agreed, and national officers from AEPhi came to present to us. We voted to go with AEPhi, they voted to accept us, and we thus became a colony of AEPhi. The members of my local, and only the members of my local, were the initial founders. It was then up to us to recruit up to 25 women to be chartered - which we did the following fall. So, Panhel had to approve the idea of bringing a new national to campus, but we got to pick the national.

So the short answer is, there are 2 ways to start a new colony - one IFC/Panhel-initiated, the other initiated by students (local GLO or interest group).