[ZGXFounder]

Hello everyone! My name is Bre, and I am a founder of a local organization (not yet a sorority because we haven't been accepted to our school's Panhellenic Council yet) called Zeta Gamma Chi.

We are from a very small school in Kentucky, where Greek life hasn't completely taken off quite yet.

Zeta Gamma Chi is a twenty-first century organization geared around preparing young women to be successful in a modern professional setting, while helping them to make the most out of their college experience and instilling a sense of sisterhood, tradition, and acceptance in our group.

We've run into some issues:

Being non-Greek (at this point), we are not able to do formal recruitment with the other two sororities on campus. And since we just started in March, our name isn't really prevalent on campus yet.

We have been assigned to a basement of a dorm building on campus. However, until we are accepted onto Panhellenic, this is only to be a storage area, not a meeting space. Until then we must meet at another place on campus.

We have very little money to operate on. We want to have the benefit of not paying national expenses and dues without leaving our own chapter to suffer for the sake of affordability. (We've reduced our dues to almost half of most organizations, and initiation fees and such are almost a third of the cost.)

We started from scratch with ritual, symbols, values, and all other indicators that set sororities apart. Since starting, we've developed an induction ritual, and are working on a pledging ceremony.

We have no chants or songs to work from, since we are a brand new organization. Definitely going to need to do a lot of borrowing from other organizations.

We're trying to find a website domain that can easily allow us to present information to not only prospective members, but to our members as well.

Officers. We've adapted a condensed system similar to that used by Kappa Alpha Theta (we used it because it's more professional). We have a Chief Executive Officer, a Chief Administrative Officer, a Chief Operations Officer, a Chief Recruitment Officer, a Chief Marketing Officer, and a Chief Financial Officer, as well a philanthropy director, a new member director, a facilities director, a scholarship director, and events director. However, organizing responsibilities and procedures has been quite a feat. We know how to operate a sorority already. It's just a matter of condensing responsibilities while we condensed offices.

There are other disadvantages at this point, but we're very optimistic for the future. We've already got a few incoming freshmen who are very interested. We also have a core set of girls that are very dedicated to making this work, and even maybe aim for expansion some day.

If anyone has words of encouragement, ideas, or some words of wisdom, I'd love to hear them!

Thanks for reading this super long post.