Changes

We began 2015 with Recruitment and ended the week with 3 34 new Kappa members. This had been one of our best recruitments ever, excluding a helium shortage that limited our balloons for decoration, everything ran smoothly throughout the week. We followed Recruitment with Officer Transitions, holding our triplet meetings and officer retreat. Overall we have realized that transitions are something that our chapter needs to work on and set that as a chapter goal to work on for the 2016 transitions. In February we hosted Kappa Kisses on campus, our traditional Valentine’s Day Philanthropy Event. This provided the new members an opportunity to get involved right away and understand one of the many ways Kappa fits into the Greek community at Richmond. We also had a successful New Member Period where the new members learned all about Kappa’s history and traditions, their meetings helped them to bond as a pledge class – a foundation we have seen through out the year as they have remained close. Our next event was Inspiration Week. We were lucky to have a Leadership Consultant with us during this week so that she could help us to make sure we were executing the week to the best of our ability, inform us on areas we needed to improve, and give us some great ideas for next year. Inspiration week was complicated for us this year as it was bookended by St. Patrick’s Day and Sigma Chi’s Derby Days Philanthropy Event. As a whole, the chapter handled the restrictions of the week admirably and we were able to initiate all of our new members without any problems. This was one of our most successful Initiations, our CC had worked on solutions to any problems we have had in the past and everything ran smoothly. After the new members were initiated we were able to hold our spring social “Sapphire Ball.” The formal ran smoothly due to the attentive planning of our social chair and excellent risk team. We finished off the spring semester with our philanthropy event Richmond Carnival, which was a new event run jointly with Sigma Phi Epsilon. The event was a success and we are looking into continuing it in the following years. Our final event of the year was our senior banquet where we said goodbye to out outgoing seniors and celebrated their time at the University of Richmond and in Kappa.

Our first event of the fall was our philanthropy Kappa Kourtside. This event has become a tradition for our chapter and improves every year. This year we had more than 75 teams participate and raised over 1,000 for RIF. This continues to be our most successful event. We also attended Kappa Delta’s bid night in order welcome all the girls to the Richmond Greek Community, KD is new on campus and did not have any older members to celebrate the night so all the chapters on campus came together to celebrate their new members. In addition we took part in “Girls Fight Back,” an Standard of Excellence (SOE) event that taught us self defense. Our next event was also and SOE, partnering with Delta Gamma and Kappa Delta, we hosted “Finding Kind” which opened our eyes to the problems of Girl on Girl Bullying. Our president, Hannah Cassatly, heard Erin Fischer speak at SEPC and had the great idea for this event. We initiated our Owl, Key, and Fleur de lis Groups this fall, as a project to improve Kappa attendance at nonKappa events. This semester has been a learning period and we hope to utilize it more in the future. We participated in many small philanthropy projects as well. We partnered with YouthLife this October as well to host a field day for the kids. They came to campus and the chapter met them on our intermural inturmural fields to play games and spent the afternoon running around. The children and our sisters alike loved this event. Kappa also worked alongside Richmond’s Women’s Soccer Team and hosted a “Think Pink” Auction where pink jerseys worn by the players were auctioned off during the game and the proceeds were donated to the Susan G. Komen Foundation. We also participated in Richmond’s Trick-or-Treat Street, which is a Halloween Carnival through which neighborhood kids can participate and celebrate a safe Halloween. This is one of our favorite events to participate in, the kids have so much fun playing the games and everyone loves to dress up in costumes. Our last activities of 2015 included a senior programming event where we participated in the Rope’s Course on Campus, and our final philanthropy event of the semester Kappaccino. We hosted Kappaccino for the first time last year to offer coffee to students studying for exams while our campus coffee shop was closed. After the success last year we hosted the event again with even better results. We improved the amount we raised and had even more of our chapter members involved in the event. This is an event we know will continue in the future.