I see the connection now between your orginal post and your second question.
The only thing I can offer is that while you were there, your chapter did what it needed to do with the members it had. Now that there have been some graduates and different new members, the dynamic of the chapter is changing, and they might have decided, that with the group of girls they have now, what they were doing before was not working for them, and they needed to adjust to aaccomidate the people who are in the soroity NOW. There is a reason that a person could graduate from a chapter in 1998 and have their chapter 30 over total, and then come back 4 years later and have that chapter struggling. When that happens, it's usually because the chapter didn't make the needed changes to adapt to what was going on. It could be that when the chapter was 30 over total, they didn't need to worry at all about recruitment, and so they let it slide, and by the time the chapter was so small that they were desperate, it was too late to jump into recruitment hard core. (Just an example of a problem - without knowing spesifics on your chapter)
You mentioned something about girls dropping because they couldn't afford it, and you didn't want that. It's possible that the girls there now decided it would take X amount of dollars to run the chapter with the number of people it had, and could not afford to let people not pay dues. (And even if it could afford to let a few not pay, I'm sure they recoginze that a]it's not fair to the girls who do pay and b] who gets to decided who has to pay and who doesn't? There's hardly a fair way of doing that)
I'm not sure what else to tell you, except you can always leave a nice card in their mailbox, letting them know you're there for them if they need help.
