New Sister with a Chapter Problem

[beautifulnite12]

Hi all - Thank you very much for all your advice! In regards to me, I was initiated last fall in our new member class of 12. Our chapter is between 50 and 60 women including the women who initiated last semester. We just had informal recruitment and now have 8 new women pledging.

My chapter is apparently not the typical chapter - we have no alumnae advisor and our only advisor on the local level is our Greek Advisor, who believe it or not is not very pro-Greek. I spoke with my Big and several other sisters who have spoken up against hazing in the past. It didn't go well for them and all that happened was that everyone got really angry and began to fight. We think that one of the reasons for that is that no one really proposed any concrete solutions for how to make all the changes while at the same time protecting chapter traditions. There is no life-threatening hazing going on (at least not unless something goes horribly wrong) - just things that are outside of our national new member program and that are not fun - actually that just plain suck for those forced to do them. (I'd rather not publicly elaborate, if that's okay.)

My new member class and I are going to bring this up at our next chapter meeting. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to present it so that it doesn't seem like we're trying to take over and so that the older sisters might be more receptive to our ideas? We want to take a stand, but also don't want to make threats that we can't/won't follow through with.