Philanthropy Day
 

Hey girls!
I have a quick question, for formal recruitment do any of your chapters do activites concerning links to literacy on philanthropy day? If so what do you do for them? We've done the same activity year after year and I want to do something new.

Our chapter does Alphabet Books for Philanthropy Day. The letters are already cut out, and the PNM's, along with the actives, make a page relating to the letter they chose. For example, if the letter they pick is an A, they can make an apple or arrow on their page. At the end of the day we compile all of the pages together and make about four books to send to our local philanthropy.

Hi,

We have always found it pretty hard to do an acitivity in the time limit plus without being too complicated. Years past we would have them make bags then we would add school supplies to donate to a local school. Two years ago we made bookmarks. We cut out worms, school buses, etc. out of construction paper then had them decorate the bookmarks which we later laminated to give to a local school. We would decorate the rooms in the house like different storybooks.

This past year panhellenic cut out doing an activity during rush for time and money reasons. So this year we just decorated the room for our philanthropy events arrowtracks and hoopfest.

This was always hard to come up with something.

In the three years I've been at recruitment, we've done three different activities...

As a pnm, we made literacy bags (I have no idea what they were actually called). We basically decorated paper bags, made bookmarks and put a bookplate into a book (we decorated the bookplate, too). Personally, I didn't like this activity very much because it involved a lot of drawing and I'm not a good artist!

My sophomore year, we made alphabet blocks. One girl's dad cut wood into cubes for us (much cheaper than buying the cubes pre-cut). Then, we had to sand and prime them. During the party, the pnms painted a block (we penciled in the letters so that we didn't end up with like 100 A blocks and nothing else). Overall, this was an okay activity... messy and a lot of work (after recruitment, I ended up painting all the blocks that weren't finished... it took like 6 hours!).

This past year, we made angels dolls, which has nothing to do with Links to Literacy, but I think it was the best philanthropy project (during the actual parties pnms told us it was the best philanthropy project!). We premade the bodies (a small triangle of felt sewn together like a pillow) and let the pnms glue on the hands, feet (felt), hair (doll hair), heads (wooden bead-things), eyes, halos, wings (ribbon bows, but you could also use felt), etc. They ended up coming out really cute and the organizations we sent them to seemed to really like them (one was for the children of September 11 victims and the other was a childrens' hospital).

When I rushed, our chapter did a philanthropy event. We made booksmarks for a reading circle at the local library.

Bookmarks and the the "literacy bags" (as someone called them) I think are a pretty good idea. It may not be the best event, but when you're under a time constraint it's pretty hard to do anything else.