As part of our 2022 DEI commitment plan, which you can see by pressing the orange button on the left, we promised to publicly publish what we have done working towards our goals. Here we will continue to post what we have done as a community to work toward making a better Greek life community here at the University of Tennessee – Knoxville.
Spring Semester
- In this semester’s sessions of Meet in the Middle, we had about a quarter of all the participants from a variety of IFC chapters.
- In March of this year, all of our IFC executive council and chapter presidents were all level 1 safe zone trained
- In April, we created the first Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee which is composed of members of our IFC community.
Through the summer leading up to recruitment
- Throughout the spring semester OFSL had a practicum student who was working with IFC on gathering data surrounding DEI initiatives, and through his work he created a Cultural Foundations Training that we having been able to use to start DEI education in interested chapters
- We established a recruitment equity task force comprised of faculty of our University across many offices including the Pride Center, Center for Student Engagement, the Dean of Student’s Office, Multicultural Student Life, and more. Of these members some had a Greek background and some did not, but under the common goal of understanding how IFC recruits and how we can make it more accessible to all groups of men on our campus.
Fall Semester
- For this fall recruitment we partnered with Smokey’s Closet, a campus organization that allows students access to lightly used donated professional clothing at no cost. This allowed potential new-members going through the recruitment process access to traditional recruitment attire at no cost to them.
- In the fall semester’s sessions of Meet in the Middle we continued to represent out council with members from a variety of IFC chapters.
- At the end of September, our Presidents approved the proposed bylaw changes concerning the VP of DEI position to better suit the position and the person in it moving forward.
- For our 150 years of Greek life at the University of Tennessee IFC decided to sponsor two scholarships for the men in our community. These scholarship can go towards chapter dues, tuition, or any cost associated with school. One is leadership based and one is needs based.
