Quote:
Originally posted by NinjaPoodle
SIAsensacion,
I was thinking about something slightly off topic. What are your feelings about the number of LGO's. Do you think there are too many? Not enough? Do you think that with so many, that at one point in the future there will be a period of merging? A lot of the websites I’ve looked at of these orgs have very similar goals [to each other] if not the same goals. I thought about this because I was looking into the history of NPC and found that a few of their orgs had merged and absorbed other orgs. At one point, there was more than the current 26 orgs.
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VERY interesting questions NinjaPoodle, questions that I have definitely thought about and formed firm opinions on LONG ago.
Disclaimer: The following statements are PERSONAL OPINIONS and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of any national organization with which I am affiliated.
NP--My feeling on the number of LGLOs is that there are WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY too many. I personally think it is NUTS that there are so many orgs with such a similar focus. And 24 is only considering the orgs that are members of NALFO. If you go to Latinogreeks.com, there are TWENTY NINE SORORITES, THIRTEEN FRATERNITIES, and SIX CO-ED orgs listed.
In my humble opinion, that is just crazy. To me, it seems like every time a Latin college student started thinking about Greek life, they went ahead and founded their own organization rather than researching what was out there and becoming a part of, and even strengthening, an already established foundation. People could say the same thing about SIA because we were founded on the later end of the spectrum (1990, when a lot of the orgs were founded in mid to late 80s), but we have grown to become the third largest sorority (SLG and LTA are larger), and one of the few Latin sororities that is truly national (we have chapters on both coasts as well as mid-west and south).
As for the merging question, I don't know if any LGLOs will ever merge with each other. One similarity between LGLOs and D9 is that we HIGHLY revere all symbols of our orgs--letters, colors, crest, founders, flowers, jewels, "mascots", etc. I REALLY can't see a smaller LGLO, with all the love for the symbols of their org and the meanings behind them, giving all that up to become part of a larger organization. And the larger organizations are DEFINITELY not giving up any of their symbols or adding new symbols in order to absorb smaller orgs. On top of this, most LGLOs have a unique membership process which is very important to the org. Most of the larger orgs would not want to let people in that had not gone through the same process, which would basically mean that members of the smaller orgs, who may have already gone through one membership process, would have to go through a second (and my guess is that most would not be willing to do that). So these are the reasons that I do not see mergers happening at this point. Maybe it could have worked if we had all these orgs around 70-90 years ago, but at this point I really doubt it.
What I do think will happen for many of the LGLOs is one of two things: 1) dying out 2) never expanding beyond the region where the org was founded and, essentially, remaining a "local" (many of the LGLOs consider themselves "national", but do not have chapters outside of one or two specific regions). I think in the end, a select few number of the LGLOs will come into the forefront as the large, national fraternities and sororities, while the rest fade out or remain strong on a local level. I definitely think in the end that there will be a larger number of large sororities and a VERY small number of large fraternities (this is already pretty much the case). I already have my theories of which orgs will last and which will fade off into the sunset, but this opinion I will keep to myself.
Anyways, thanks for asking interesting questions and reading my EXTRA long response.
