Quote:
Originally Posted by OPhiAGinger
About ten years ago Omega Phi Alpha had an issue with one of our chapters that is relevant to this discussion. This chapter was very successful at attracting large pledge classes, but they also had a really big retention problem. Even with the large pledge classes, they seemed to turn over almost their entire chapter every 3 semesters or so. Eventually we discovered that women on that campus viewed OPA as a pathway to the NPHC sorority of their dreams. They would pledge OPA, get initiated, and rack up an impressive amount of community service hours performed on OPA chapter-sponsored projects. If she was successful in securing an invitation to join the other group, she would immediately dump OPA. Regardless of the fact that they made a lifetime commitment to OPA, they were using OPA just to meet the service requirement of the other org.
The issue eventually resolved itself, but I'm curious about how the NPHC leadership would view a situation like this.
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On the NPHC side, I tell aspirants that they are dead-ass wrong for using APO, OPA, or GSS service hours to count toward community service toward an NPHC org. My rationale is that you are SUPPOSED to do service for a service GLO, and you are REQUIRED to do service for a service GLO. For an NPHC org, we only ought to be counting the service that you didn't HAVE to do to maintain your membership in something else, but the service you WANT to do, unselfishly.
In my opinion, the work really needs to be done on the NPHC side, for those orgs who require prior service.