Letter from the President

Dear Brothers,                                                                                                                                  

I hope and trust that this letter finds all well with you and your family.

I am pleased to be writing to you as the new President of the Phi Sigma Kappa (Kappa Chapter) Alumni Association. This is a challenging time to take on this work, given the expected and unexpected challenges of the time. The expected challenges include care of Kappa Mansion. The unexpected include the current (difficult) environment for fraternities in general. I believe that the Board and our Brotherhood are up to these challenges. Of course, meeting and exceeding these challenges will take proper planning and implementation. The Board looks forward to this work, and seeks your support and guidance as we move forward.

The goals/challenges we are seeking to address can be summarized as follows:

• For Alumni: Identifying the best ways to enable and/or to support meaningful connection among Alumni, and then implementing those ways - connection being both away from the house at the various places we have scattered after leaving campus, and at the house itself.
• For Actives: Identifying the best ways to attract new Brothers, and then implementing those ways. Attraction includes highlighting the positives of the fraternity experience, and addressing the “bad apple” impact, which has led to an increased importance on developing and growing strong community relationships (including with the University, State College, and the greater community).
• For all Brothers: Identifying the best ways to maintain and preserve the House.   

The Board has organized subcommittees to tackle these goals:  Alumni, Actives, Finance, and House. Through these subcommittees, Brothers are participating in the work of Kappa Chapter without being on the Board. All meetings are held remotely, and having the input is very valuable to our efforts.   Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in participating on a particular sub-committee or project.

I close for now with a few words about some of our current projects. Thanks in large part to the efforts of Ben Jarmul, our Treasurer, we successfully closed on a refinance of the mortgage on the House. The balance is now below $500,000 and we are working towards retiring this balance within the next 5-7 years. We have begun working with Affinity on improvements to the website that we think will enhance communications between the Brothers, both Alums and Actives. Lastly, the Board has taken control ( ☺ ) of the Card Room and are working on making it the Chapter Museum. We plan to store and display chapter memorabilia here, which we hope will develop into an additional reason for you to come back to visit your House.

We are all inundated with things to read. Hopefully you got this far through this message! Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you and seeing you in the future.

Fraternally yours,

 

Martin