An advisor destroying a chapter

[peachesandplums]

I am a semi-regular poster, but needed to get advices without disclosing my organization or any school I may be affiliated with as a volunteer or my ungergrad school.

A little background: Last year I volunteered to help out a chapter of my GLO that has been struggling for a few years. The chapter is at public state school and recruitment is a little competitive. Within the last 2 or 3 years a national advisor has helped get them back on their feet with recruitment, membership issues, and image on campus. She, along with several volunteers that are local alums and from the national sorority have invested a lot of work into this chapter.

Fast forward to late summer/early fall: The national advisor had to leave her position. An alumnae who was involved with the revitalization of this chapter was tapped to become the regular advisor, we'll call her "Jenny". At first working with Jenny was fine, but then she and a few of her her sisters from her chapter that were volunteering started saying a lot of bad things about other alumni volunteers that were helping and this information got around. Over the last year many volunteers have left because of Jenny and her clique of alumni from her original chapter.

Fast forward to now and the bigger problem: This chapter had recruitment last month and I volunteered to help. Jenny and her clique said that they would be there, but they did not show up one time. (The membership advisor is one of the girls in Jenny's clique - that Jenny chose after the original membership advisor left because of Jenny's badmouthing. The current membership advisor was a COB herself, never attend any training, or even participated in formal recruitment on either side at her originating chapter.) The chapter, which has not done recruitment without a large volunteer base in several years was left to fly and basically fell on their face.

Jenny is not taking any responsibility for this and is blaming me because I was there for 2 of the rounds (work related issues kept me from being there the entire time - which I had told Jenny about prior to recruitment). Mind you, I am not an advisor in any capacity for the chapter and while I enjoy recruitment, I do not have the training to support an entire chapter.

When I was there during recruitment, the chapter voiced a lot of concerns that Jenny wasn't there and that they felt abandoned. Even when they did have a question that I couldn't answer, they called Jenny and she didn't answer or even return her call.

When I found out what Jenny was saying about me behind my back, I confroted her. I told her that it was not my fault that the chapter fell apart for recruitment, they had no preparation and no support and that as chapter advisor that was her job and that membership advisor should have been there per our national policy. Jenny wrote me a rather scathing email demanding that I no longer volunteer with the chapter.

Personally, I think Jenny is doing a great deal of disservice to the chapter and while I love the girls in the chapter, I don't think I could ever work with Jenny ever again, so I will step down from volunteering with this chapter. However, I think our nationals needs to know whats going on here and I'm not sure how to approach it and I am still in contact with some of the chapter members and I don't know how to tell them whats going on without creating more bad blood...any advice would be nice....