Schaumburg Side Notes

Grand President Yeatts Reaffirms Committment to Volunteers

Friday night all of the CLA faculty met to go over the gameplan for the weekend. Some of us at S&P who knew the faculty had a chance to talk with them shortly after. National Board of Directors members in attendace for the weekend were Grand President Archie Yeatts, and Steve Shanklin. HQ staff included Chris Minnis (Director of Operations and Director of Volunteers) and Dave Graziano (Director of the Balanced Man Initiative and Director of Leadership Continuum) You may notice that our boys at HQ are pulling double duty as some other staffers plan to move on with their careers.

The CLA schedule had some format changes with "electives" that everyone could go to Saturday evening. We were told that the topic of Past Grand President Jim Robeson's volunteer initiative was brought up at the faculty meeting, and was directed towards Chris Minnis to report on its progress. As Chris responded, Archie spoke up and said, "I made a promise and that's what we're going to do...my ass is on the line". We're glad to see Archie is still committed to seeing the vision through. Archie went on to explain that a Volunteer Committee, headed by NBD Director Phil Cox, had been formed and they met in January. Some volunteers in attendance included Steve Taylor, Mike Williams, and John Skelton. Topics covered at the meeting touched on training and retention, coordination with the Foundation involving development of alumni relations and donations to the Foundation. We had a moment to catch up with Steve Taylor who let us know that he wrote a paper 20+ years ago that covered all the same topics and more. He offered it up to the committee. We'll see if that piece of knowledge gets used. The next Volunteer Committee meeting is scheduled to take place in March.

Some other funny tidbits came up during discussions of undergraduates from the faculty regarding buy-in to SigEp's mission and vision. The best part of it was that one of our national officers referred to a sudent as drinking the Kool-Aid.

I do have to say that this was one of the most well attended CLA's I have ever been to. There was approximately 400 people in attendance including volunteers and faculty. Overwhelmingly, there were many comments made about the undergraduates regarding the high level of professionalism and preparedness. Friday night sessions were extremely well attended with a large amount of chapters working past 11 PM, and nearly full attendance at breakfast in the morning. There's something about the SigEps in the Midwest that just makes you proud of what we're doing.

The Renaissance of Brotherhood ceremony was performed initiating, National Recruitment Committee member, Chris Dilion's Step Father. The New Member Ritual Discussion was run simultaneously and was a packed house. Two of the four OHG's at Schaumburg CLA attended the discussion adding a hightened level of awareness during discussion of the keynote of the fraternity.

Archie Yeatts closed out the weekend's festivities with a quickly improvised speech. He didn't know that they were going to show his acceptance speech from Conclave, which he had planned to use that night. He did however manage to deliver an empassioned speech in which he said that he's "tired of [seeing SigEp] nibbling around the table of greatness." There is something about Archie that is genuine and helps to bring the topic at hand down to its simplist form. [Keep your eyes open for the latest buzz about Archie's most recent letter to AVC's...we'll need you to weigh in]