Values Clarification

Fraternity and Sorority Values and Service

An important aspect of Fraternity and Sorority Life (FSL) is understanding values. Values within a Greek-letter organization provide a foundation for understanding what membership means. While they vary from organization to organization, values are for more than looking good on a website. The organization's values should guide the actions of its members throughout their lives and are reflected through their work and contributions. We strongly believe that this experience and the discussion of ethics previously detailed have a profound connection to each of the values our organizations hold.

The image below is a word cloud of all the values of our organizations. Shared values among our organizations appear larger in this image. From the word cloud, it is clear that the Fraternity and Sorority Community as a whole places especially high value on friendship and service. We have seen that being an active citizen involves making meaningful connections and forging friendships with fellow members of the community. This applies to alleviating tensions that exist within the FSL community. Additionally, this mutual understanding and respect is essential for service to be ethical and meaningful.

We further explored the congruence between Fraternities and Sororities and their values when we visited several national head-quarters. Specifically, the entire group visited Alpha Chi Omega 's and Kappa Alpha Theta's national headquarters as well as the North American Inter-fraternity Conference's (NIC), which was located in Theta Chi's national headquarters. We saw that the two sororities we visited were part of major philanthropy projects. The North American Inter-fraternity Conference displayed a bit of a dissonance between its claimed values of diversity and inclusion and the actions they were taking as well as the lack of knowledge they possessed about non-traditional organizations.

We also had the opportunity to speak with Ginny Carroll, who is the founder of Circle of Sisterhood. Circle of Sisterhood exists to help provide girls with access to education all over the world by arranging to have schools built in developing nations on the condition that girls are allowed to attend. The strongest supporters of Circle of Sisterhood are sororities, with strong support coming from all four councils at The University of Iowa. Carroll told us about here experiences in a sorority and how it gave the tools she needed to make Circle of Sisterhood successful. She told us that by seeing the issues firsthand and thinking about them critically, we were taking steps to better ourselves and everything we interact with.

Becoming Values-Based Active Citizens

Organizations are built on a solid foundation of values based on specific pillars and tenets on which they strive to live. Fraternities and sororities extend their values to their members in order to sustain and grow with each other in a common bond. Values-based members try to adhere to the same principles their founders established. Three common themes within our different organizations are service, friendship, and personal development. All three common values align with similar missions of the service trip by continuously working to better the self, establish meaningful relationships, and working with others to serve and benefit our community. Similar to the idea of the Social Change Model (Individual, Group, and Societal Values), there is a sense of three different parts coming together to enact change. With these pillars at the forefront of our thought processes and actions, we are able to think about the larger picture and work with others as a main priority.

Since our different organizations, spanning all four FSL councils, found common values in service, friendship, and personal development, we can continue to be active citizens by advocating for issues within our chapters. Service trips like these are easy to complete, but the more difficult task is to continue to raise questions and bring different perspectives and experiences to your own organizations. After the trip, continuing the conversation back in an area where you have a concrete routine can be difficult, but that is one of the first action steps. Not only did we discuss the trip topic, food justice, but also larger themes of privilege and oppression. During our trip, we built a comfortable atmosphere where others could share their opinions and experiences freely, which lent different perspectives and created fruitful discussion. While most chapter members are congruent with their organization’s core pillars, values will still differ from member to member. This is a beautiful reality of a group of individuals trying to grow and learn by respectfully challenging each other. Furthermore, being an active citizen and a values-based Greek community member requires constant education and work to better yourself, your peers, and community. Creating a positive environment, starting the conversation, and educating yourself on a multitude of topics are all steps in the right direction to bringing our trip experience back to our chapters and community.

This image display's the crests of the organizations represented by our group.