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Old 05-28-2005, 09:22 PM
Zillini Zillini is offline
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Heart of Dixie
Posts: 1,008
First off so that everyone is aware that I know what I'm talking about, I started volunteering as a member of House Corp 11 years ago. I was "drafted" to be the Financial Advisor nearly 10 years ago and then asked to take on Chapter Advisor 9 years ago. I'm still Fin Adv as well as a non-voting member of House Corp. I also realize I forgot to mention that I'm an ADPi.

33girl, you're right that if the system were given enough lead time most chapters could budget for this. But there's more to the story. I'll probably bore you all to tears, but here it is anyways. Before I get into this too far let me clarify something, for this discussion I will use the term "chapter" to refer to the organization itself and "house" for the physical houses.

Now for a little bit of background. I confess I'm no expert on Greek Life history here at Bama as I moved here from Illinois back in '94. To my knowledge, at that time the ADPi house is one of the "newest" having been rebuilt in the early 70's. But it's still a 30+ year old house with all the maintenance and upkeep costs that entails.

FYI - Pi Phi and AKA were rebuilt about 4-5 years ago. The University owns the land the fraternities and sororities are located on. We have 100 year leases on the property and we all own the houses. Sorority Row backs up to the stadium and the University bought these two houses in order to expand. They were provided with new lots and were able to rebuild. Needless to say they are the envy of every House Corporation on campus because of their new modern wiring, plumbing, kitchens, etc.

Anyways, as I said all of the 17 NPC chapters own houses and the majority of them are roughly the same physical size. Obviously I don't know the specifics of other chapters and their houses, but I believe that ADPi's info is pretty much average give or take.

Chapter Total has been at 125 since I've been here. At the time when the Admin (again I stress previous) was proposing Spring Recruitment, the largest chapter was around 140 members. We were about middle of the pack size-wise and constantly flirting with that 125 level. (Note: These numbers are is off the top of my head without digging through my files to confirm it.) According to our accountant, our financial break even point is 120.

Keep in mind that the cost of running a house doesn't fluctuate too much regardless of how many members you have. The reason being that for our house we only have room for 40 members to live in. So adding or losing members doesn't really affect the costs associated with the house much, aside from a little bit more wear and tear on carpet and such. But utility bills, maintenance, staff salaries and everything else are roughly the same regardless of the total number of members.

Ok, back to the discussion of budgeting for a Spring Recruitment instead of Fall. As I said, we were around 125 chapter total so we couldn't take any additional members. With 120 as the break even, that only allowed 5 members worth of dues for saving. Given that we would miss out on 45 (average quota at that time) members dues for one semester, it would take several years to save enough to cover the loss.

Still we weren't even given that chance. The first we heard of the Admin's proposed changes was in mid-Spring and it was to take effect the following year. Budgets had already been made and approved and money spent. We would not have had the time to save for that deferred Recruitment rainy day.

We, and others I'm sure, would have had to eliminate all non-essential spending to make up for it, including probably all social functions, Recruitment, you name it. For those chapters with savings accounts, they would probably have been drained. Or as a last resort, chapter dues and house bills would have to be significantly increased for that first year to cover the shortfall. Then of course we faced the problem of losing more members because they couldn't afford this one time bill, digging us deeper into that hole. We finally learned in mid-June that Recruitment was scheduled for Labor Day week/weekend.

Phew...anybody still awake out there?

Last edited by Zillini; 05-28-2005 at 09:32 PM.
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