Unity in Community Cleanup
This year’s Greek Weekend included a campus clean-up project. (Photo courtesy of Kelsey Kerstetter ’12)
Ohio Wesleyan’s many sororities and fraternities are known for their dedication to service and their philanthropies, but last weekend, they worked together to serve the immediate Ohio Wesleyan community and clean up the campus. As part of Greek Weekend, a time for all Greek-affiliated students to come together as one community, they spent two hours working in collaboration with OWU’s Buildings and Grounds staff to make Ohio Wesleyan’s campus beautiful and clean, just in time for Homecoming and Family Weekend on October 8-19. Greek Clean-Up is what is known as a trilogy event.
“Trilogy is a series of three events held during the calendar year that involves learning of some kind and is generally based on fraternity and sorority values—in the case of the clean-up, service to the community,” says Panhellenic President Megan Evans ’11. In previous years, the clean-up activities started at a central location, but this proved to be ineffective at getting the entire campus picked up. This year, members of OWU’s sororities and fraternities were placed on teams which met at different locations throughout the campus in order to cover much more ground than in previous years.
The teams, new additions to Greek Weekend, developed “Color Wars,” a competition in which several members of each fraternity and sorority were on different colored teams—red, blue, yellow, and green. They competed against the other teams on Saturday and then cleaned up the campus together on Sunday. It gave members of the different sororities and fraternities an opportunity to get to know each other better.
“I was on the yellow team, and it was really fun,” says Maggie Sullivan ’12, a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG). “Even though it was rainy it was great to work with the different Greek members. I liked that it was mixed and promoted unity within the Greek community because you got to meet new people from the other chapters.”
Chi Phi fraternity member Macauley O’Connor ’13 agreed that working with other Greeks was an important part of the clean-up. “The thing that I liked was the sense of community that everybody involved in Greek Life has. It’s less about who is in what fraternity and sorority and more about helping out the campus that we belong to.”