Click here to listen to the Founders' Day Proclamation Podcast! From the start, our Founders envisioned a Zeta Tau Alpha that would grow beyond the Virginia Female Normal School in Farmville. In The History of Zeta Tau Alpha 1898-1924 (Volume 1), Historian Emerita Shirley Kreasan Strout writes, “Since a national status was in the minds of the Founders from the very beginning, it follows logically that the project of first concern to them was the translation of their high hopes for extending their lines into a specific plan for accomplishing them.”
As we come to yet another October in the history of our Fraternity, we can be proud that we continue to translate the Founders’ high hopes for extension in grand fashion. This month, our specific plan for accomplishing that is to colonize new chapters at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and The University of Texas at San Antonio, re-organize our Iota Chi Chapter at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, and re-colonize our Alpha Gamma Chapter at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Colonizing four chapters in a month is no small task, but our Fraternity has always proven up to even the largest of challenges. We have always had, as The Historyrecords, “the courage to venture forth, create, or build so that others might benefit from (our) work.”
That these four campuses would enthusiastically welcome Zeta Tau Alpha now is an encouraging sign in our challenging economic times. Their administrators can see the long-term benefit of having an organization on their campus that values loyalty, responsibility, service, leadership and commitment. Likewise, recruitment enrollment numbers remain steady or have increased on many campuses, a sign that students and their parents consider sorority membership a worthwhile investment.
We must have the courage to continue to “extend our lines” to further the bright future of the Fraternity, to keep alive the high hopes of our Founders for an ever-expanding and prosperous Zeta Tau Alpha.
Given under my hand and seal, I proclaim the fifteenth day of October, in the year of our Lord, two thousand and nine, as our 111th Founders’ Day.
Laura Ladewig Mauro, National President
Winnsboro, Texas – October 2009
