From Local to National
 

As many of you have seen, my local is a small and struggling sorority. However, a very close friend of mine wanted to start up a national and when she mentioned starting an interest group at Kent State, I jumped at the chance to affiliate with a national. Both my friend and I have kept in contact with the representative from XYZ and this representative asked me what would happen if some of my sisters refused to do this. I haven't answered her back because I'm not sure. What happens if one of five of us don't want to do this? How do I approach the sister(s) without making her/them feel left out? I know that the majority of us want this. Any advice would be helpful.

Wish I knew the answer to that. I never understood the people that wanted to stay local when faced with the likelihood of national affiliation until I became a Phi Chi. I love, respect, and am VERY attached to my letters, but my reasons for wanting to go national way outweigh sentimentality. I can't imagine splitting from my sisters, but I find myself wishing more and more for enforceable policies with a "higher authority" than our standards board. I also really want to be able to move to another town and look up a local group of sisters, something that we as a local won't be able to do. If your group is struggling so hard, I understand why you would be torn. If it's the majority of you, I would just try really hard to persuade the other sisters so that you could keep your sisterhood together.

Whoa. That is a tough one.

When we went from local to national, there was a few girls who were upset about it. Their fears were that they thought we weren't going to be the same group of girls, the feeling of sisterhood wasn't going to be the same, and that all their hard work was going to be forgotten.
I would find out why this sister/sisters are upset about becoming national. If their fears were as same as my sisters, just make sure that you make it a point that you keep your local history alive. For example, duing New Memeber Education (aka pledging) we make sure that all of our pledges learn not only the national founding, founders, symbols, etc but we also make sure they learn about our local history. We have Alpha Theta Phi Night (our local name) each semester, where those of us who were in the local explain our feelings and why we pledged and things like that. We started compiling a book/video this semster because we realized that we weren't going to be around forever, so that now the plegdes will get an Alpha Theta Phi pledge book and a Tri Delta book (er, CD. I hate the fact its on a CD).

I think the important thing is also to talk with the potential national. We made it clear from the start that we intended to keep our local legacy, and our nationals were okay with it. We were actually told that our second chapter was the equvilent of a local whose president tried to get Sarah Ida Shaw to become part of her group, and in the she got on the train back to Illnois an initiated member with ritual in hand. There was one group who was not, and we cut them off our expansion list.

I guess the gist of the post out is find out WHY the sisters don't want to go national, in order to find out HOW to relieve their fears. Let me know if I can be any help!!