Hi all and welcome to Orlando Town Hall um we will do introductions in a second but my name is Jesse Ashton and I serve lambikai Alpha as our director of chapter support and wellness um our intended outcomes for today are our roadmap for tonight is to do those
Introductions give it a little bit of an overview on lambakai Alpha and the higher education landscape review our chapter support model our programming and our organizational partners and then truly we want to spend most of tonight opening up to a question and answer with our two board members we
Have on this call so uh without further Ado I would love Steve Scott if you’ll introduce yourself and then Justin and I will go here can you hear me okay all right uh hello everyone I’m Steve Pattison I’m currently the board chair for Lambic eye Alpha International fraternity we have a fancy firework
Called Grand high alpha but uh essential that means the chairman of the board I went to Florida State University uh and it was a member uh obviously the Miami guy as an undergraduate and I also have the honor of having one of my sons who went to the University of Florida
I’m also associated with Lambda Kai and later in the Q90 I could speak a little bit about my experience and this experiences as well thank you hello my name is Scott Jackson I serve on the same board with Steve uh I’m the my title is the grand High gamma which
Is just an office on the board of directors uh I went to Eastern Kentucky University I graduated about 20 years ago uh serve Lambda Kai as a chapter advisor for about 15 years or so I too have a son that actually uh probably much like you uh
You have a son that’s an associate member I have a son that’s an associate member in our chapter at the University of Tennessee so uh probably wearing two hats as a Lambda guy dad of an associate and as a board member uh excited to hear from you all tonight and hopefully
Answer some questions hello my name is Justin Fisher the privilege and honor of serving as the Chief Operating Officer for Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity I’m also a member I joined at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro when I was in school there and I’ve worked at the
Office for about 12 years now and I’m Jesse Ashton I service I said earlier as the Director of chapter support and wellness which means I oversee our chapter support uh group and our health and wellness operations I am a member of Pi beta 5 from the University of Alabama and I’ve
Been on staff for about um three and a half years now we have like a broad I would say a wide array in terms of audience uh on this call and so um our intended I guess audience or desired audience was parents of associate members if that is not you you
Are more than welcome to be here this is just a general overview but uh if you’re an alumnus or an advisor this may be repetitive or things that you already know just kind of want to wanted to share that um we really wanted to start with an
Overview of like who is Lambda Chi Alpha as an organization uh what are we about uh so on the side you can see our mission is to inspire an equipment to lead an ethical life of growth service and Leadership and our vision or what we want the world to become is a world
Where the ideal man pursues a life of respect and inclusion for all a world where we support and encourage one another so those are two uh aspects of the organization that really Drive everything we do as an organization uh what our strategy is and where we go
From here are driven by those two things we have roughly 170 chapters across North America so both the United States and Canada um one unique I guess fact about lambdaq high alpha is that we actually have One Singular founder so most organizations are started by a group of people we were
Started by one founder Warren Nicole at Boston University in 1909. and then uh we’ll we’ll kind of overview this as well um but if if your son has not shared with you one of the unique aspects about William dick high is that in the 70s we
Actually uh got rid of pledging and then had associate membership we created equal membership for students and then as they joined the organization same rights and responsibilities and privileges as an initiated member so that’s something that kind of sets us apart as an organization um being that I would say that’s probably
Most of the parents that that we interact with are not members um we’ve thought it’d be helpful to kind of go over you how we’re structured uh and I will uh try to get through this quickly because this is not the most interesting thing that we’ll probably
Talk about tonight uh what is unique is that Lambda Chi Alpha is governed by students so 75 of the vote at our general assembly or legislative body uh is students so students uh set law students change laws uh students are able um basically to really chart the course of the organization
And uh that meet that body meets every two years and so when they are not uh meeting our board of directors or our grand Isaiah you will learn that we have a special term or name for everything in Lambda Kai that is something that’s very unique to us uh but our board of
Directors then uh assess the Strategic direction of the organization um and then also provides that direction to the office of administration I think one of the most common misconceptions that we hear uh is that like the our office of administration has like operational control or authority over chapters uh we
Provide uh resources education training to assist them and help them have the best experience possible but we also try to ensure that they can operate kind of on their own uh and they have control over their local experience and then you’ll see some other boxes around there
These are I would say other entities that help support uh the experience so Advisory Board this is a group of volunteers who volunteer their time and energy that actually advise chapter officers and chapter members so before Scott was actually on the board he was a long time chapter advisor and when Drive
I think over an hour every week each way to make sure that you could go to chapter meetings we work with host institutions and then also when uh necessary there’s house corporations if the chapter has a facility that’s owned by that entity this is just a brief overview of kind of
What the membership journey in Lambda Kai looks like um so if if you are a parent of a brand new associate member uh your son has probably gone through the associate member ceremony uh and has started kind of in that first block on the left with education uh may have received a big
Brother uh but this is kind of our onboarding process in the Lambda Kai they’ll learn a lot about the organization uh some about its history but more about kind of what it means to be a Lambda Kai that will culminate with initiation it’s usually six to eight weeks after Association they go through
The initiation ritual uh there’s a debrief afterwards that explains you know kind of everything that they’re going to see and experience and then our associate to initiation uh rate is above 90 so most of the men that join almost all the men that join uh will actually become initiated
Uh from there the experience is really uh driven by the members themselves uh we’ll get into our programming and things that are are offered but uh a lot of the there are opportunities in terms of whether they want to serve as an officer or want to chair a committee uh
That’s kind of left up to the individual and the chapters to decide and then upon graduation they become alumni and then can stay engaged with the organization can volunteer and then we have many alumni that donate to their Educational Foundation as donors and I think before we kind of get into uh
Lambda Kai today and some of the new initiatives that we are rolling out this fall I thought it would be really helpful for us to get on the same page in terms of kind of what’s going on with higher education right now and what we
Are seeing uh kind of on the macro level um I I think the enrollment Cliff if you are anywhere near higher education or or around that kind of industry this is often talked about but there are a million less men in college today than they were in 2015 so if you think about
Like in the 70s men made up like roughly over 70 percent of students on campus uh and as we get closer to 2030 they’re approaching 30 percent of a college campus uh population uh combined with the enrollment decline is that the perceived value is also declining so I
Think this was in 2019 about 11 of c-suite Executives and 13 of adults gave strong approval in terms of work Readiness for college graduates um and so these are our problems or issues that we were kind of seeing as an organization that is uh intertwined with higher education which has really
Informed kind of our next steps and and how we operate as an organization um so there are three things that we really hinge our value on uh in terms of when someone says why should I be a Lambda Kai or why is Lambda Chi Alpha important uh here are the three big
Pillars that we focus on so number one and this will always be true is belonging I think helping men of that age or men of any age find Friends Community people that they can feel a part of and have support them is incredibly important
Um if I don’t know if you read The Wall Street Journal but there was an article that came out this week that basically four forty percent of uh men claim that they do not have a best friend uh which is both I think shocking uh and also sad that
Um we’ve we’re lacking that community so our big thing is we want to connect people uh to people that they feel a part of and that’s always going to be a big aspect of Lambda Kai the second is character you know helping men develop into uh the best versions of themselves giving them
Opportunities and experiences where they’re able to grow and have other other men help them grow as well is going to be important and then competence so how do we help our brothers develop skills uh and have experiences that will help them in their future whether that’s uh getting an
Internship or getting a job advancing their career uh all of that is really important to the organization to ensure that we are providing value uh to men throughout their time in Lambda Kai and so to accomplish all of this we’ve developed different and I apologize for
My voice I went to the University of Alabama so I was yelling at football players all weekend um whether they liked it or not I uh so we we have our chapter support model which is comprised of our chapter support Specialists many of these people are recent graduates from either
College or graduate school who are especially trained to work with college students this these chapter support Specialists work um with our high Alphas or our chapter presidents to provide executive style coaching to those leaders to ensure that they’re developing a strategic plan and operating within our expectations and so they set
Goals weekly with our chapter support Specialists that chapter presidents do and then um the chapter support specialist help them ensure that the chapter and the chapter leadership are accomplishing those goals we also have our health and wellness team their organizational accountability professionals who work with um the health and wellness of our
Members whether that be prevention initiatives so working with our team to do alcohol social host liability uh presentations sexual assault programming really anything that falls under that health and wellness risk management sphere to investigating when we do get an incident or we get a report adjudicating that report and then
Working with the chapter to shift culture if they are participating in behaviors that don’t align with our expectations and then lastly a big component of this and something that we adopted in 2020 is our Brotherhood survey we survey each of our members every fall from September 15th to November 1st and we gathered
Data on what their experience is looking like in their chapter so we can help guide those conversations around strategic and operational plans of the chapter in a way that’s data driven and really helps them move the needle and in a way that they can illustrate in future jobs within the chapter as they
Transition leadership um in a numerical manner so that survey measures belonging accountability leadership satisfaction health and wellness and so much more and we use that data internally to also set goals for how we can support our chapters moving forward in addition we have our learning outcomes team who supports all of our
Programming initiatives for our members our landikai Academy is our new fresh intuitive Interactive Learning Pro platform that was that it will be rolled out in September 18th um comprised in the slamikai academy is our ideal man program which is a four-year personal and professional skill building program really aimed at
Educating and and developing that character and that competence of our members um and it follows them through their time in lambakai for a traditional four-year but can also be used if a member joins as a junior and is only here for four semesters so we’ve built
It so that it’s relevant no matter how a person how a man joins what does joining experience looks like and and how his campus operates and then our said Leadership College which is a leadership development program for our officers that really helps them develop the competence to lead the chapter and give
Them skills that they can then articulate later to be transferable in the workforce post graduation and Beyond yeah and one of the benefits and I should point out that um we have very generous donors that give to the Educational Foundation and they raised uh over a couple million
Dollars to ensure that we could create uh this programming for our our brothers and members um one of the things that it was was a priority was to ensure that this would be made for Gen Z in terms of um they can use it on their phone tablets uh computer there’s plenty of
Devices that you can access and utilize this from um really made it user friendly uh we’ll talk about this uh on the next slide but there’s also it’s also gamified uh so there’s a competitive element to it uh people can win prizes um and then the other thing aspect of it
That’s really beneficial is that it’s uh Blended learning so some of it happens completely virtual you can do it on your own there’s also cohorts uh which you’ll be in a group with other brothers from across uh North America and which you can learn together uh it’ll be guided by a volunteer facilitator
Um you know I think when we first rolled this out we heard a lot of feedback because it was all virtual that you know after covet we are just sick of just virtual learning and that being the only option so this Blended approach gives uh multiple options but also gives students
The chance to choose what works best for them and their schedule so we are really excited that this launch is uh in the next week or so one aspect I forgot to mention about this uh is that it’s also meant to be social right so we don’t want students
To feel isolated while they’re going through this but they’re learning together they’re able to share uh and kind of learn from each other and each other’s experiences as well and in conjunction with everything that we’re trying to accomplish programmatically and in supporting hard chapters we’ve also leveraged some relationships with organizations across
The country to really help us help our men achieve what um we want them to as far as it as far as service and philanthropico so we’ve partnered with movember this is a leading the leading charity dedicated to changing the face of men’s health which is super relevant to our men
Um Lambda kyalfa’s partnership with November aims to prioritize Men’s Health and research to support it we have been the highest fraternity um fundraising partner for November the last two years um and hope to do it a third year we just recently secured a partnership with the American Red Cross
Um and really this has led to us encouraging chapters and supporting chapters as they host blood drives to ensure that we are saving lives across North America and then the Judd Foundation our partnership with the Judd Foundation creates access to Mental Health Resources and prioritize preventative programming for our men so
This allows us to create resources in reaction to mental health crises for our chapters while also doing Pro engine programming with them all three of these partners are really valuable to us and we hope that you see that one of the things that is we’re centered on as a
Part of our Partnerships is the health and wellness of our members and ensuring that they are um healthy while in college so with that overview we wanted to kick it off to questions so if you want to put questions in the chat feel free to submit those I have a
Couple of repair questions that we received before today that I will make sure that I will push out to Scott and Steve to start but um please feel free to type in any questions about any questions and we will make sure we answer all of them so
Um to start I think we’ll just kick it off with something general Scott and Steve how has Lambda Kai Alpha impacted you personally um in your life oh God can you hear me yeah um you know to be honest with you uh land Akai had a fundamental uh impact on
My life for the good um I did not come the traditional path to college I was the youngest of four children of a single family uh parents uh my parents didn’t go to college and none of my siblings went to college I went to college and uh basically had a
Really rough go initially probably the best decision I made trouble financially a troubled kind of making the adjustment ultimately dropped out after two two quarters um but it was the people I met in Lambda pie that actually made a joke come back and I actually went home and started working destruction
So my path could have been go back to school get a degree and get a professional job or work construction for the rest of my life my my brothers convinced me to come back to school I ended up graduating with honors getting a degree in finance and
Accounting worked for a major big four accounting experiment also uh Finance executive for a Fortune 100 company so um much different outcome than what it could have been uh so I can’t I can’t thank them enough for urging me to do the right thing at that tough stage of my life
Yeah I’ll piggy back up when Steve said I have a similar back out background I came from a very blue-collar family uh yeah I’ll be just blowing up the reason I graduated was from Landing Chi Alpha um the standards our chapters set with grades pushed me to do the best I could
Academically and I wanted to stay in school um to not disappoint my brothers and to um you know to be a Lambda Kai and what has brought me in life beside from just the leadership skills and the such uh that you get just from interacting with people of different views and and just
Just being with a group of men for four or five years it’s just overall confidence and just like my backbone as far as who my friends are I could go through my phone right now and I talk to Brothers every day guys you know the the
Best friends of my life are the guys I was in chapter with 25 years ago that’s who I reach out to uh when I’ve had a great day that’s who I lean on when I’ve had a bad day um so so if that was the one thing that
Lambda Khan has brought away that would be the one thing I would really uh really hit on it’s just I mean they are they’re my core they’re my core group of friends today 25 years later actually we’re longer than 25 years but yeah those are those are the guys that uh are
With me and my greatest moments and my worst and y’all and we have a question so I’m gonna Charles you should be able to ask it now another question we have is how do you talk to your son about his fraternity experience and what what kind of
Questions do you ask what is that conversation look like and he’s probably going through that line as well uh yeah Steve I’ll hit on that so as an alarm there’s probably some stuff that like I would know that a a parent that’s not a member wouldn’t but stuff I would
Tell them is important is just ask about his friend group you know who are you hanging around who’s your big brother uh normally chapters will have a chapter meeting on Sunday or Monday night so when you talk to them ask them how chapter meetings going ask about stuff
That’s like not your you know would they we could consider stereotypical fraternity like social events uh yeah not much different than what you asked him when he came home from middle school you know what kind of stuff did you do today like what kind of events is the
Fraternity doing and I would really really stress to get to know those young men that your son’s around these are like I’ve talked about these These are the guys that are going to stand with him and his best days and are going to be beside him consoling him on his worst days
Uh so I don’t know if I’ve answered that well enough but questions like that just every day uh what’s going on uh what kind of stuff did you do with the chapter a lot of times they’re going to play intramurals ask them how they did who did you beat you know uh
Yeah anything like that yeah I know you know I stress a lot about activities on campus what kind of philanthropic uh events are they involved with Beyond you know a lot of times you you may get uh sort of focused on the social aspect which is very important but there are many other
Aspects of what kind of uh leadership opportunities you know I asked my son what does he think of the leaders of the the chapter when he joins you know are these people leadership opportunities are they about academics um a lot of host universities little scorecards on all the Greek
Organizations and that’s their academics you know where are they right um but most importantly I asked him if um one of the things I stressed when he wanted to join was I said you really need to get out of your comfort zone and uh don’t socialize the people who are not like you
So are there is there enough diversity of people different places diversity ethical diversity religious diversity that you feel like this experience is going to give you an opportunity to really expand your horizons and and really learn a lot from people who are who don’t walk and walk
And look like you and uh he took that to heart thank you um and then our last the last question I have and if anyone has any more feel free to put them in the Q a um submission but what do you wish you would have known before your son joined
Or before you joined in the tag I would I would say that um I’ll take a shot for for since this is focused on parents let me let me answer this done question first I think I didn’t really appreciate a lot of host institutions have um very controlled processes for for us
And others it’s pretty loose I probably didn’t I wish I would you know 2020 hindsight I didn’t really understand the process that well health and what about it and the timing and all that sort of thing uh so I probably would have liked to have understood that a little bit better to help
Help guide you a little bit uh with that but he did he did a great job and actually he did enjoy laying in the kai because I was in it I was actually surprised I actually encouraged them to connect wherever you feel you have the best chemistry if you want to go Greek
That’s where you should go um because doctors are different you know different campuses and that sort of thing in my experience but he called me one day and said he was laying with God just wanted to let you know um so uh it was it was a pretty big day
To be honest with you pretty exciting yeah I think for me as an undergraduate and it’s maybe that I didn’t know but something I didn’t understand then was just the scope of Lambda Chi Alpha uh when you’re an undergraduate fraternity is very local you’re going to know the
Men on your campus and you don’t understand we’re at 170 campuses and probably have close to over 200 000 living alumni so uh it’s not a four-year five-year experience as an undergraduate you’re going to be a lamborgh Alum a lot longer than you are an undergraduate and uh the
One thing that certain thing I did know going in but something I learned is you don’t use Lambda Kai in the past tense I am a brother of Lambda guy office it always irritates me when undergraduates are alums say like wow was Lambda God you’re you still are
Uh it is a lifetime organization it’s a lifetime Brotherhood um and going back to talk about it again but the young men that your friend your son is meeting now or that’s going to be his friends for forever uh I could lift up my phone I talked to
My big brother about an hour and a half ago the guy I met he was he was given to me as a big brother in Richmond Kentucky on Eastern Kentucky’s campus in September of 1997. still talk to him talk to him in Africa I mean that’s your backbone so I think
If it was one thing I I wish I knew it was just the scope of the organization um how awesome it can be hey Jess if I if I may allow me I could like to extend a little bit about this concept of a lifetime
Communicate to an 18 year old man with a lifetime of a relationship is meaning what it means they just came out of a four-year high school and they’re probably looking at a four or five year like Scott said time Horizon um to get to their undergraduate but this really is a lifetime of
Opportunity it’s not only a lifetime of friendship as Scott mentioned um but an opportunity to connect with the over 200 000 alumni um that he mentioned as well we’ve got um probably early days in this but we have a vision right now of the beginning of hurdle they’ll better connect
Our alumni with undergraduates and recent recently graduated alumni and throughout phases of their career and this connectivity will allow um this lifetime of membership to really to yield benefits throughout the course of your whole career think of the mentoring opportunities in the in the somebody who wanted to be a Chief
Financial Officer and wanted to speak to somebody like me about what do I got to do therefore got to say I would do that in a heartbeat a matter of finding a way to now it’s a little haphazard but there there are digital solutions that can do this and
We’re building it not going to happen overnight it’s not going to happen next year but it is going to happen in the um hopefully before my term is over uh because I want to appoint this accomplishment and uh it’ll be a huge benefit anybody that versus somebody who finds
Another organization or doesn’t join a great organization it’s just uh like the MasterCard from commercial it’s priceless so well thank y’all um we have one more question um asking what’s the difference between what’s the actual difference between associate membership and pledging um and then I have a follow-up to that
So to if one of you wants to do that or you want one of us yeah we can take it also what you want me to do that or you guys want to cover those we we can go so the difference between associate membership and pledging um is that our associate members have
All the rights and responsibilities of membership outside of knowing initiation ritual once that once they’ve gone through our associate members ceremony which is happens pretty quickly after they receive their bid so we um those members can hold a leadership position before they’re initiated they can um vote before they’re initiated all
Those privileges and expectations of membership exist no matter whether you’re active and initiated or an associate member um and then the second follow-up was what are the guidelines on drinking um and other substances and the health and wellness um aspect of chapter support so um what our team does is again we meet
Weekly with our chapters but we also serve as the primary point of contact in the event something happens so we get reports from campuses parents girlfriends community members um on about something going on with one of our chapters and we investigate everything so no matter how small the report is we investigate
Um we talk to whoever we need to talk to write up a report and then use a educational accountability system to really help our chapters see like what went wrong how they can prevent it in the future and what programming and accountability they need to ensure that
Nothing happens in the future one of the things we’re really proud of is in the last three years we’ve seen a we saw an increase as we built up ours chapter support model of incidents which we attributed attributed to the fact that we are building more relationships we were talking to our
Students more they were hearing from us they knew where to go to report things and then we’ve now seen our incidents cut into a third I’ve seen a third of the amount of incidents that we did in 2020 in 2023 or at the same time in 2023
And we truly believe that we’re shifting culture helping our as we have our chapters recruit differently provide programming and value proposition that recruits a different kind of member and how we’re really developing these men and so our health and wellness component is just as crucial as our chapter
Support component as we really try and support our our collegians foreign I would add like our policies and laws are very clear right we expect all members to follow uh all laws local laws state laws federal law et cetera um but our education model is based on information right so we want our
Students to make informed choices uh so particularly I would say especially around like alcohol right we want you to unders the students to understand what happens when you consume alcohol what happens uh as you increase like quantity or rate that you consume alcohol uh in
Your body what why do you you know what happens to your cognitive ability as that happens um you know we know we’re not there right we’re not there 24 7 with them we cannot um much like you right you’re not there you can’t be there with them so you know
Our hope is that through education and programming they are making informed decisions um and this is an environment in which they are able to make these decisions and if they do make mistakes they’re able to learn from those mistakes um within the organization thank you oh sorry just making sure we
Have any more questions thank you all so much for joining us we really appreciate it um if you ever need anything or haven’t any questions about your son’s experience please do not hesitate to reach out uh both Justin and I’s emails are up there on the screen and we are
Happy to connect with you and talk more about your son’s experience if anything ever doesn’t feel right or you hear something from your son that sounds a little bit fishy feel free to give us a call and say like hey is this normal we are happy to walk through that
Um we’re also happy to remain anonymous if you would like to just have an anonymous conversation or a hypothetical conversation we ultimately care about the health and safety and well-being of your son or your member and we want to make sure that we’re serving you as one of our stakeholders so that’s our
Ability we will look to do more town halls and more stakeholder meetings throughout the year we will also have parent messaging that goes out on at least a quarterly basis so please be on the lookout for that and if this went to your spam please consider adding us to your
Address book so in the future willamika emails don’t do that um thank you all so much and have a great rest of your night
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