Gannon Knight Perspective

     Way back in September, Gannon University sponsored GIVE (Gannon’s Invitation to Volunteer Everywhere) Day. This year, more than 850 Gannon students (and 100 alumni across the country) participated at 46 sites throughout the city of Erie.
     On Saturday, 231 members of the sorority and fraternity community participated in Greek Service Day, a new event sponsored by the Interfraternity and Panhellenic councils, and volunteered once again in the local area.
     The participants made up only 58 percent of the Greek community, but they raked in more than 460 hours of community service in a single morning.
     If you do the math, members of social sororities and fraternities make up about 12 percent of the student body, and the Greek Service Day participants constituted a little less than 7 percent of the student population.
     But compared to the some 850 undergraduate students who helped with GIVE Day, these Greeks would have made up about 27 percent of the total number of GIVE Day volunteers.
     Theoretically, you’d think that 7 percent of the student population would account for about the same representation in campus-wide service events like GIVE Day. Theoretically, all of the other students on campus would be as involved in a great cause like helping the local community for a few hours on a Saturday. Theoretically, more than the 20 percent of the student population that showed up for GIVE Day 2009 would care enough to participate in service projects like these. But they don’t. Gannon students have a great reputation for doing lots of community service; the university has won awards for it for years and many local organizations have been helped by Gannon students at one point or another.
     This is great. But we have the potential to do so much more. People criticize the sororities and fraternities on campus all of the time for some of the questionable things that they think we do. But who doesn’t make mistakes? Certainly not college students. We’re perfect, right?
     Think big picture – at the end of the day, who’s doing the work? The leaders and active students who come out to events and participate, or the kid who slept through GIVE Day? While not every Greek has a phenomenal record and has lots of service hours under his or her belt, and many non-Greeks are great contributors to the community, look at the numbers. And you do the math.