Chapter Officers Look Forward to Partnering for Success

By lunchtime on Thursday, Aug. 5, roughly 90 of 130 chapter officers had arrived to Kansas City, M.O., and registered for this afternoon’s Partnering For Success workshops, the first in a series of two such gatherings prior to the 2010 Convention. It’s anticipated that more delegates will arrive throughout the day and pop into the group meetings, with the remainder making it for Friday’s morning session.

Headquarters staff, led by the Society’s chapter relations department, will facilitate discussions about how to increase acceptance rates of those invited to join Phi Kappa Phi, about ways to raise student involvement on the campus level, and about what constitutes a healthy chapter. Additional presentations span the numerous awards programs the Society offers, the importance of customized invitations, the ins and outs of online enrollment, and the best practices of chapters.

“I’m looking forward to picking up lots of ideas about how to get faculty and staff and students engaged,” said Convention delegate Marveta Ryan-Sams, president of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania chapter, an hour or so before Partnering for Success was to begin. She also wanted suggestions on viable fundraisers and service opportunities to keep a chapter flush and motivated.

“I’d like ideas to involve more faculty participants and to generate activities for student members,” echoed delegate Gary Greer, University of Houston-Downtown chapter president, who ate a boxed lunch next to Ryan-Sams at a small table in the hotel lobby. “Once they join, they ask, ‘What can I do?’”

One student who probably could answer that question was delegate Rodney Hughes, a second-year doctoral student in higher education at Pennsylvania State University and one of 10 student vice presidents on the Society’s new Council of Students. He interrupted his lunchtime to mention that he was concentrating on “making connections with institutions whose characteristics are similar to ours,” that is, finding common ground between, in his case, large schools and chapters and proliferating tactics and pooling troubleshooting accordingly.

Delegate Eileen Prouty Patton, president-elect of the University of Maryland Baltimore Campuses chapter, was focused on the basics: more new members and more participation by members for a chapter that had been installed on May 6. She added, “As a new chapter, we’re really interested in promoting the campus more and making the receptions more memorable.”