Making chapter more active in our meetings and socials

How can we do this, and please criticize me as well, I want what is best for the chapter

Well to be honest with you, I think there's a mentality of we're not having enough fun. At least that's the way it is for me. I really enjoyed having a social every week, and now we're only doing business meetings, it makes coming to meetings boring aside from musical rehearsals. I have the mentality of if we're going to have a meeting every week, I'd rather just have a short meeting than waste time with a "social business meeting". And while I've been trying to come to every meeting, it makes it harder to get motivation to come.

So I can see why some brothers might not be coming to meetings consistently. I would talk about it rather than miss constantly, but I can maybe see their perspective. I think it's awesome that we planned a ton of stuff for the beginning of the semester. I came to as much as possible, which wasn't much since I was pretty busy, but I liked that we had something going on at least once a week, and that way if I miss a social event, I don't feel like crap because I didn't want to go because the event wasn't interesting to me, or I missed the only event because I was busy.

I didn't go to the social before the meeting today because I personally don't care much for BWWs, and I feel bad since that's the only social we've had in a while. I know if we have more then not as many people can come, but I think it is good to go out and do a bunch of stuff.

I know all of us are busy and value our free time, but we didn't join this fraternity to only be a part of it in name only right?

I feel that maybe we could change the structure of our meetings a little to best fit what we want. I personally feel that we need more music time. And in accordance with our 10:30 cutoff time i thought this scheduling might work a little better:

9-9:45 - Music Rehearsal
9:45--10 - Lead discussion on topics
10-10:15 - Business
10:15-10:30 - Open discussion


I think if we have something like this we get a lot of music learned, we get to lift each other up in a lead discussion and have "thinking time", then we leave the last 30 mins to get business stuff done, as opposed to have music sandwiched in between business. Critique it please.

I kind of like that but i think 30 min's of music would be more then enough, personally becuase most of us are doing music all day. maybe not. But music in the begining is better since the longer the meeting runs the more irrate everyone gets.

I think it would be adventajust to have some sort of brotherhood type of activity in meetings that is fun and would help to get us more acquinted with each other. Maybe listen to some cool music idk

this 15mins would in my opinion Really make meetings worth going to. maybe even if some people stayed a little after to just kick it or came in before for people who wanted to rant.

the key to PMA is Brotherhood and we have to have fun together.

I agree with Quentin wholeheartedly. By making the meetings businesslike, it saps the fun out of hanging out with each other. I think we should go back to having a business meeting every other week, but still meet in the choir room, so that it feels like an official meeting instead of an optional event. Instead of doing business, we could have fun, and bond as brothers. And we'd still be there if there is seriously pressing business that needs to be addressed.

I also really like working on music at the beginning of the meetings. I also agree 30 minutes is plenty. I love music, but I think 30 minutes is plenty.

Kind of referencing my other post about PMs, I think we need to take a step back in intensity in business and really grow as a brotherhood, so our meetings are something to look forward to instead of dread.

I REALLY like all these ideas. And I really feel we can do this in meetings, especially with this forum idea. We can talk business on here, give short reports in the meetings, and spend the rest of the meeting time on us; developing brotherhood, sharing thoughts with one another, and just becoming a better chapter overall. AND once we get the bylaw passed, we can have proposals to amend (change) the bylaws whenever an issue is raised on the forums or to the Bylaw Committee. It seems very efficient.

SO! Starting, not next week, but the week after, We'll try this new meeting format out..

This is For Formal Meetings...

30 min Music
30 min of Discussion/ word of the week (one of the acrostics)/ Brother Bonding name drawing.
15 min Officer and Committee Reports
15 min Open Forum/ discussion.

This is for social meetings...

Switching between 30 minute Music rehearsal and 30 minute discussion
15 min Open Forum/ Dire business reports
45 minutes MANDATORY FUN TIME.. as Mr. Wimett put it.
After 10:30, you are free to go.

Remember. This is going to take effort and sacrifice from all of us... working as a team to still get stuff done and progress and a brotherhood, but I'm certain we can do it.

Thoughts.

TW

Travis,

I was just curious for the social meeting setup. If we didn't do music (which i think is good) then what is the discussion? Open discussion? If so, that would waste a lot of time.

Maybe put the dire "business" stuff at the end or just not even have business at social meetings. But if there's something of importance then just mention it, not to get bogged down on business at a social. And also I don't think we really would need an open forum at a social if every were using the forum...

While thinking about it... we should yell at the people that haven't signed up for this yet. haha.

-Smith

Haha! Agreed! Let's go kill some ... ...

As for the discussion, it would be something led by Cole. There's a butt load of Post Membership stuff we can do. That's what I had in mind.

Yes, I think this is great, with the regular meetings for bonding time, and the social meetings for fun time. If we can get more people on these forums, it's just a few of us right now, we can nail out a lot of the business on here, particularly with the committees, and save the time when we're together for fun stuff. We'll be able to actually see what's going on with the other committees, so we'll know something is getting done. Also it's nice that stephen can have more of a direct hand in what we're doing, it was awesome seeing his input on another subject.

This all sounds good to me, I'm pretty excited about this, hopefully we'll hammer out a good plan.

I think the most important aspect of our fraternity is the ideals we attain to as sinfonians. I think that should always be very important However, I also think that the second most important part of our fraternity is brotherhood and friendship. While I think that community outreach is important and getting our shit together so to speak is important, I don't think it all has to happen at once. I'm nearing the end of my time here at NAU, and when I look back on my time in the fraternity, we've done nothing but strive to get to the next goal: start the fraternity, phase 1, phase 2, initiation, initiating the next class, now getting our own ritual stuff. I have to say, I think it is boring, and I don't want to remember my fraternity experience as boring. I have been doing official stuff for the fraternity for too long, and we haven't had much of an opportunity to just be us and have fun as brothers.

I feel like we function as an academic fraternity right now, a lot of business and community outreach focus. I want to get to know everyone who I recognize as a brother. I was talking to travis about some of the ritual stuff, and he mentioned that we don't have to have all of the ritual stuff done now. In theory we should have a mentor chapter that would help us out with that, but unfortunately we don't. If we set a realistic goal with all of this stuff, and try to get there and have an awesome time doing it, I would have no regrets. We need to build this house as smith said, but the house isn't built overnight.

I want everyone to have the best brotherhood and bonding experience, and I want our memories that we make now to be the ones we remember forever. I don't want to look back and think about how I got everything all set up so that the next generation could really focus on what it means to be in a fraternity, I want to have fun too dammit!

I honestly Think that it is crucial for us to do as Ossian said and just come and have a good time. We really don't do that very much at all, there was the lock-in and that was real cool but it think if we got to gather and really took the time to chill with each other thinking not of having fun ourselves but of helping our brothers have a good time then we would certainly all be Having a blast and getting to know each other. Now i'm not sure what the best way to do that is but i know that we gotta get there.