BDelta Zeta Connects with the Community

When I began to plan the “Grilled Cheesy with the Dee Zees” event I thought of common misconceptions surrounding events help by organizations in Greek life. Typically, only other fraternities and sororities attend each others events and the events stay within the Greek life community. However, this idea make these events very limited to a specific group of people, and if the event is hyperfocused on one group of people--it will not perform as well as it could perform. Since I am from Macomb, I made sure to make this event community oriented. I wanted to reach out to local businesses, schools, community members, and anyone and everyone who would enjoy a good grilled cheese. I took my role as a Macomb local to the extreme and emailed every business that is listed on the Macomb Business Bureau! I reached out to the mayor, city hall, police department, fire department, hospitals, family, friends, professors, and more! All in all, I knew this event had all the potential to become a community event rather than just an event for Greek life or even just Western students. I was so surprised to see how many people from the community showed up as well as donated generous amounts of money. I was thankful to have so many connections within the community as it helped with majority of monetary donations and donations for our raffle basket table. In fact, the largest community based donation came from the police department. The idea behind community involvement was to change the face of the event, and to build a strong foundation for the future of any “Cheesy with Dee Zee” events. I had also realized while talking to a lot of faculty at WIU that many people had no idea Delta Zeta held a philanthropy event like this. Through my resources I can access as a student, I emailed everyone in administration, different academic departments, and other students. I also came up with the idea to try and include the Speech Language Pathology department due to the fact that our philanthropy benefits The Starkey Hearing Foundation. Community is where great things begin, and as a member of the Macomb community I wanted nothing more than to include them on this event to expose them to my sorority’s amazing sisterhood and service initiatives!