April Showers and Travel

As they say, April Showers Bring May Flowers, well April was one of my busiest travel and consulting months yet. I had three programs, one at Illinois State, University of Illinois and then UCONN. It rained on my trips, but it was nice to travel through IL so much in one month, and what a great excuse for some stops at 3Floyds… It made for a whirlwind month that was mashed in between a busy month of programs and speaking here locally in South Bend as well. So let’s recap my trips…

ISU – one of the most organized, and maybe the friendliest Panhellenic Council ever. I was invited to be the Greek keynote with the “Greek Legacy” program, and ended up doing three other workshops. One was my recruitment workshop with MGC, then one on risk management for IFC and one on unity and collaboration for Panhellenic. The highlight was coming to campus early and doing my student perception survey to inform my UGC Recruitment presentation. It is similar to what I did with UNCC campus, and yes of course the data was right inline with what I have seen on other campuses. That information helps me show the students the possibilities and potential on campus.

Thank you Panhellenic! Thank you MGC, and thank you IFC and specifically SAE for your dedication to address campus issues surrounding race. The timing put me on their campus weeks after the national SAE incident. This campus was proactive to host a march, and to create discussion about this topic. I am honored to be a part of positive movement on that campus.

UoI – here I was hired to come in and do a workshop for their UGC. The focus was on recruitment with some risk management and organizational development in there as well. It is probably the biggest culturally based council I have worked with, over 20 chapters! It was a great trip, I visited the famous archives for some research on another personal project, went to a Phi Iota Alpha new member presentation which was fun since my young brother Andres is a PhiA, I hung out with my Betas and hit up some old college road trip spots, and of course had a fun workshop.

I love when I see a campus making legit strides to support and grow their culturally based Greek chapters. This was an investment from their staff into their students and it was refreshing to see the support because so many campuses are still not working well in supporting their cultural groups. Good work UoI!

UCONN – this was a consulting visit, so very little student interaction but a great time. It was nice to visit a new campus, and of course see Todd Sullivan. They hired three consultants to do an external review and I made a new friend in Lauri Sidelko and caught up with Veronica M. Hunter my partners in the review. It was a crazy trip, we had 13 hours of meetings in ONE DAY. We had to be efficient, find breaks when we could, and now we are working on our report.

It was nice getting to do a different type of project and I am pumped about how well matched our team is for this review.

Well now it is May… only one gig in May. WHEW. Then summer slows down, I won’t be teaching over the summer, and I might teach this fall… this spring was very busy for me and with some contracted gigs and lots of leads for the fall we are blessed right now with everyone reaching out for help. Thank you!