The Winter Brotherhood Retreat was this past weekend. This event merged into one event our regional conference programming from the past few years and the Council of Presidents meeting into one larger event.

About 160 High Alphas, brothers, and associates attended. When you include staff and the Grand High Zeta, the total attendance was almost 200.

The GHZ schedule was set-up to allow us plenty of time to listen and learn what’s on the mind of today’s students. It also gave us an opportunity to reality test some of our thinking about the future.

What caught all of us by surprise were the overwhelming conversations about alumni engagement. In 30 years of involvement at both the chapter level and internationally, I’ve never seen our student members so desirous of engaging alumni.

During the GHZ meeting, the staff recommended adding a position at HQ to focus exclusively on alumni engagement. Needless to say, that conversation, based on what we were hearing from students, was a slam dunk and will continue to get our attention as we build next year’s budget.

We also took time to listen to what our student members think would be the best way to approach our mid-year educational events. For old timers like me, is the answer to bring back Leadership Conclaves, which ended in 1998? Or, is the answer to bring back Regional Leadership Conferences, which ran from 1999 to last year? Or, should it be a hybrid or something totally new? There are strong opinions among alumni as to which direction we should take, but we wanted to hear what our students think.

There was no clear consensus in the student conversation. That conversation was broken out by geography and the feedback we heard covered the water front. So the discussion continues and the Student Advisory Committee will have to step up to assist the staff and the GHZ in reaching a decision for winter 2007.

Overall, almost 200 brothers and associates had a wonderful brotherhood retreat in New Braunfels, Texas! If you attended, what did you think? If you missed it, hope to see you in Orlando in July!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Conferences, General Fraternity . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.