As I arrive home from our NGLA trip, I have several feelings present at once. The first feeling is nostalgia, for I am missing the sessions, conversations, and connections already. My other feeling, however, is that of excitement! I am extremely eager to be able to meet back up with our Greek community and share all of the wonderful information I have gained over the weekend, and I hope using this information will help us better our community and unite us even further. I have several takeaways from this trip, probably more than everyone wants to hear, so I will try to summarize them into three main points:
1. You need to work with the Greek members in your community from where they are at:
As leaders of the BSU Greek community, we all have this strong passion and desire to improve every aspect of our community that we can in hopes to better it for future members. This is an great goal to have, however in order to do so, we need the support and assistance of the other Greek members. With that said, in order to gain that support and get them involved in bettering our community, we need to ask for help in a reasonable, fair manner. We cannot ask someone who has been very little involved to make a 180 and be participating in every single event, meeting, etc. This is asking too much and setting members up for failure. I instead, we can provide them with simple, actionable goals to achieve. It could be as small as asking them to attend the new member education program for one hour during their meeting to introduce themselves and get to know the new members of our community. It could be as simple as asking them to help a committee hang flyers around campus, or help them pickup trash for an hour. If we provide our members with achievable, manageable tasks, it will be easier to gain their support and assistance. From this I can roll into my next point,which is about how to be an effective leader of our members and community.
2. There are three key elements to being an effective leader, which are: creating actionable goals, accountability, and communication. Like I said in my first point, we need to create goals with reflect the values we connect with in our organizations, but make them actually achievable. We all talk about the things we need to do and the goals we wish to achieve, but rarely do we put them into action. By creating actionable statements, we outline for ourselves the goals we have and exactly how to achieve them. An example is " I plan to strive for good scholarship and maintain a high GPA by completing an extra hour of studying everyday". This statement identifies the goal: represent the value of good scholarship and academics, and how you would achieve it: do an extra hour of studying everyday. These statements can help us improve ourselves and achieve a high standard of living like we all as Greeks have devoted ourselves to do. Accountability is very important as a leader. Not only do you need to hold your members accountable for their actions and make sure they are acting by our standards, but you more importantly need to hold yourself accountable. We cannot be good leaders if we do not hold ourselves to a higher standard. We need to act just as our values state, because if we cannot stand by those values and act accordingly, why would our members? Along with this, if our actions and behaviors aren't what they should be, we lose our credibility as leaders and members will not take our role seriously. Communication is also very important because it is how we create those actionable goals, how we hold each other accountable, and how we praise/interact with our members. As a leader it is essential to give credit where it is due; members need to be acknowledged for their hardwork and their achievements inside and outside the organization. Membership comes with support, and if we do not give that to our members, we are missing a big piece of what sisterhood/brotherhood is. A helpful acronym to create these communication statements is "FBI: feeling, behavior, impact". An example would be, "I feel proud when you come early to the event to help set up, it really shows the support you have for your sisters and makes them feel appreciated". These statements can help members feel valued for their work and involvement in our organizations, and this can help us maintain a tight knit community and strong bonds between our members. This leads into my final key point, which is about membership and retaining our members.
3. Greek members have different ideas of brotherhood/sisterhood, and we need to acknowledge every individual members perspectives, making sure they feel connected to the organization and truly feel that bond of brotherhood/sisterhood. Members can all have different personalities and different reasons for joining. Some join to become a part of a bigger movement on campus and join the common purpose, some join to gain the support and encouragement of others, some join for the higher standard of living and accountability, some join to have a sense of belonging on campus. Whatever the case may be, every single members has some specific reason for joining that is important to them, and we need to make sure we can cater to that so they receive the most out of the membership experience and so they feel the strong bonds of sisterhood/brotherhood during their time in the organization. Helping the members gain what they are looking for in their organization, whether it was someone to motivate and support them during a tough semester, or someone who shares the same philanthropic goals, our job as leaders is to make sure members feel like they found those valuable things in their organizations, and that they stay in them because they found what they were looking for. If this happens, these members too will eventually not focus on what they can gain, but more on how they can help members find what they are looking for, just like we did for them. This can help us better retain our members, and strengthen those bonds within our community.
There is so much more information I gained from having the opportunity to attend this conference. I feel like I have been given new tools to make an impact on our members, and to gain their support to help our community to continually grow in a positive direction. With that said, I need to express my thanks and gratitude to a few people. Thank you to President Fred Clark and Vice President Jason Pina for your support and assistance to make this trip possible, Without it, we would have not been able to attend this amazing conference and be able to bring back all these tools on how to better our Greek community on campus. I also want to say thank-you to the other ten members of the BSU delegation that attended the conference with me. I am so grateful that I was able to bond with you all over the weekend, and that we all share a common interest in bettering our community. I am glad we have the support of one another to make these changes a reality on campus and are able to rely on one another whenever necessary. You are all great leaders and I am proud to know you and work with you all. My final thank-you is a very important one. Thank you to the amazing leader of student leaders, Maribeth. MB, I am so appreciative of everything you do for our Greek community at BSU. Without your dedication, conferences such as NGLA, and other growing and improving opportunities would not be possible. Your never ending support and passion for our organizations and community continuously motivates me to always try to improve my own abilities as a leader, and you stand as an example to all of us of what it looks like to be a phenomenal leader. Thank you for all that you do for BSU Greek Life, I appreciate it so much and it does not go unnoticed.
As I return into my routine on campus, I am full of ideas that I am ready to share and put into action. I am grateful to have been chosen to attend this conference, and it is one of the many experiences I have had during my time at BSU that makes me so proud to be a member of Greek Life,
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