No Greek Life

[mckid]

I go to a private, catholic, small college and there is no greek life available. There have been a few girls that shown interest and we are looking for advice on how to go about starting a sorority. We think it would be easier to start on the local level, and we've starting coming up with our constitution along with our name, colors, etc. However, we were wondering if there were any local sororities that were looking to start an extention at other colleges, or at least be able to give us advice on starting and maintaining a sorority. The problem is we haven't exactly gotten the support of the college yet, we are still waiting to hear back from our student government in charge of clubs and organizations. We need help! Thanks.

[Aduladi]

Hi Mckid, I responded to you off line too. But publicly, I wanted to respond to give you some suggestions in case my shameless marketing pitch doesn't work

I would say that if you decide to go it alone, you should really focus on getting your rituals, constittion and mission statement together and expect it to take some time. I am a founder of my sorority and it took us 7 months to put everything together, and there are 11 founders, which I think helped us and maybe slowed us down too b/c there are so many opinions to work through. The founding of an organization takes such a long time because of the research process. Like we had to answer questions like what is our motto and why, what are our color and why, what is our mascot and why. We had to decide what kind of multiculturral org we wanted to be and what that means to us. In addition we decided to incorporate, so that took money time and effort and we decided that we needed to be insured, which also took money, so deciding on dues really early on was important. Basically, you need to be ready to do serious and long work and have really great communication. Being recognized by the campus may be possible if you dont call yourselves a sorority and call your selves a social club for campus purposes. But if you guys are really active on campus and do great work academically and in the community, I have seen campuses change their minds about supporting a Greek system, but that could take time.

Being a part of a pre-existing sorority is helpful just because number one you dont have to do all that work and number two you can always join up with a nearby chapter (or help to establish a nearby chapter) to work with in a recognized way. But again if you seek recognition as a Society as opposed to an sorority, you may have some success and an opportunity to be active to some degree on your campus. Here's the thing, if enough of you are walking around wearing letters, the campus will have to respond in a way to accept you because ultimately they are liable.

Good luck with the process and feel free to contact me personally at the email I gave you if you have additional questions. No matter the letter we're all Greek together