Panhellenic Service:
The Panhellenic council has been nationally recognized for its Philanthropic Service commitment. In addition, the Panhellenic council has been locally awarded with the CARDS of Service award as well as another Service award collaborated with the entire Greek community.
Participating in community service is one of the most rewarding and essential parts of Greek life! It is through service that we help our community better itself. Service projects allow us to become closer as sisters and as friends, while at the same time providing wonderful service to the place where we live.
Each sorority requires a minimum of 20 hours of community service to be completed each semester. At least five hours of this service must NOT be a monetary donation. This 20 hour minimum is never a problem. The ladies involved in greek organizations are some of the most dedicated, selfless people and they generally go far beyond this minimum.
Some of the more common service projects are local walks, such as the Memory Walk, JDRF, Breast Cancer Walk, MS Walk, and March of Dimes, and CANstruction.
Members of UofL's fraternities and sororities recently celebrated the conclusion of the 2010 Greek Week by presenting a check to Kosair Charities for $9500. For more than 10 years, the annual Greek Week has partnered with Kosair Charities to raise funds and build awareness of the charity. This year's Greek Week featured a fraternity stepshow, a Quiz Bowl competition, the Greek Games and the Greek God and Goddess pageant. The Fryberger Greek Sing Board also contributed $800 this year from its annual event to boost the total presented. T-shirts displaying the Greek Week and Kosair Charities logo and windows painted in the SAC cafeteria by each Greek organization helped to raise campus awareness of Kosair Charities.
CANstruction:
A foundation of the Society for Design Administration (SDA), Canstruction® is a trademarked design/build competition currently held in cities throughout North America and countries around the world including Australia. Teams of architects, engineers, and students mentored by these professionals, compete to design and build giant structures made entirely out of canned foods. It takes 8-12 weeks and thousands of cans of food to create a structure.
The results are displayed to the public as magnificent sculpture exhibits in each city where a competition is held. The public is invited to donate canned food at the time of the exhibition. At the close of the exhibitions all of the canned food used in the structures is donated to local food banks for distribution to emergency feeding programs that include pantries, soup kitchens, elderly and day care centers.
This year Panhellenic hosted a CANstruction event benefitting Dare to Care on November 12, 2009, collecting over 3,400 cans!
Big Philanthropy Projects:
Each sorority has one or two big service projects that they do every year. Some of these projects are listed below:
- Alpha Omicron Pi: Strike-out Arthritis
- Chi Omega: Chili Cook-off
- Delta Zeta: Miss UofL Scholarship Pageant
- Kappa Delta: Shamrock 5K Run
- Pi Beta Phi: Golf Scramble
- Sigma Kappa: Kick in the Grass
Some Impressive Statistics:
- Last year, sorority members provided over 34,000 hours of community service!
- An average of 35 hours per member were performed from Fall 2008 to Spring 2009.
- A total of 3710.25 hours were completed last Summer.
- A total of 19,529 hours were completed in Fall 2008.
- A total of 14,899 hours were completed last Spring 2009.
- The fewest hours completed from Fall 2008 to Spring 2009 was 3,455 while the most hours completed was 7,639!