Successful Alum Community Service

[winneythepooh7]

Hi everyone, I am wondering what kinds of community service events everyone's alum assoc. has done and how you get your alum involved in these events. I think it's hard for us because several of our community service events (ie. this weekend's AIDS Walk) have been held on weekends. I know that many of our sisters come out for our monthly dinners during the week and I'd love to see the same amount who come to the social events particpate in community service events. Any advice anyone has would be appreciated

[Rudey]

Another GC member, 33girl recommended Habitat for Humanity to me once.

-Rudey

[Tom Earp]

We do fund raisings for two things. Great North American Food Drive, the largest in the world as a total Fraternity. We also use Ronald McDonald House as the other one for the Chapter.

Rudey, I like your idea. Doesnt cost much but getting Brothers out to do some physical labor!

Kuddos to you and The Brothers Of Phi Kappa Psi!

[WCUgirl]

Our alum. association has adopted as its philanthropy "Grin Kids" - it's a charity that was created by 2 morning radio dj's to support terminally ill and chronically handicapped children. Any time they have an event, we participate. The cool thing is there are so many options...they do an annual walk/run in September, and we participate in that, we make an annual Founder's Day donation, one of the dj's has a band that plays at locations around Charlotte and all proceeds go to Grin Kids, so we'll attend the concerts, etc. Look around your area and see if a radio station has established some kind of charity like that, or even if they support one - they'll be more likely to have planned events that your group can attend w/o having to deal w/ the stress of planning one from scratch.

[winneythepooh7]

Thanks. How do you get your members to actively participate though?

[txtiger]

our alum groups participate annually in the safeplace walk (http://www.austin-safeplace.org/default.htm) in our city. this year we had an excellent team leader who helped us raise five times our goal, which resulted in our team being one of the top five teams participating in the walk. additionally, we had the largest team and largest day-of turnout of any greek organization participating in the walk. several members on our team also raised enough funds individually to be recoginzed as "walk-stars" at the event.

i think the key to this event being successful for us was the strong motivation and inspiration given to us by our team leader. we recieved weekly emails updating us on our team's progress, inspirational stories, and friendly encouragement, but nothing over the top.

we have been working on some more philanthropy ideas, like partnering with a local high school for a prom dress exchange and a fundraising garage sale, but those are still in progress. hopefully they'll be as successful as the walk we do each spring!

[winneythepooh7]

sounds like good stuff. i think our organization is still so new with only a small group of really dedicated alums right now to do these bigger things like the walk. so that goes back to my original question, how to get people to come out and become really active and motivated? we usually get a good turn out for our monthly dinners and if we could get the same amount of people to come to community service events that would be great. i love the prom dress idea.

[AGDee]

You could start with smaller community service projects. For instance, we once contacted the local office of the American Diabetes Association (diabetes is our international philanthropy) and asked what we could do to help them. They gave us a stack of information packets that had to be collated and stapled. We had our usual dinner type event and did those while we chit chatted. We got boxes and boxes of them done in a very short amount of time.

Dee

[winneythepooh7]

that's a good idea. one of our sisters suggested for an upcoming meeting that everyone bring a clothing item to donate to a shelter. or in the winter everyone bring gloves and scarves to donate to a shelter. i've worked with homeless before and know they can really use socks and underwear. we are having our first community service committee planning meeting in the beginning of june. i am going to suggest that we encourage sisters to bring items like these to our upcoming dinners.