Annual celebration of Greek Life promotes unity through 5K charity race, other activities

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Greek Week is an annual event filled with a number of games, activities and charity events designed to promote positive relationships between the University’s fraternities and sororities, as well as promoting Greek Life as a whole.

“(Greek Week) is an opportunity to get to know another fraternity that you don’t normally work with or a sorority you don’t normally work with either,” Greek Week co-chair Julie Ray said.

“This year, we actually had the historically African American organizations join Greek Week for the first time ever. That consists of three organizations which are Zeta Phi Beta, Delta Sigma Theta and Alpha Phi Alpha.”

In addition to promoting Greek unity, Greek Week co-chair Brandon Clark said the event is a chance to pull the large number of Greek organizations at Northwest together for a common good.

“We try and get (Greek Week) to where we can not only have fun with it and go out and be active, but we also try to do some community service and raise some money for different philanthropy events,” Clark said. “This year we did a five kilometer race for the relief efforts in Haiti. We’re really trying to make a push to do more stuff in the community and to benefit different areas.”

The 5K charity race kicked off this year’s Greek Week event on Saturday morning. The Olympiad took place Sunday night, an Olympic-inspired competition between organizations that showed the debut of the Chariot race this year.

Rec night took the stage on Monday evening and included games such as ping pong, tug of war, dodge ball and knock out.

No Greek Week events were scheduled for Tuesday, thanks to a sold-out showing of the musical Hairspray. Wednesday featured the Zeus and Hara competition, Greek Week’s version of a king and queen contest.

The week of activities will wrap up with an awards ceremony at 10 a.m. Sunday morning at Bearcat Arena.

One event that has become a highlight of Greek Week in past years is Greek Song. Clark said the activity was left out of this year’s Greek Week event due to a misinterpretation of Greek Song in recent years.

“The Greek Song competition had really started to get away from what our goal for Greek Week was, which was Greek unity,” Clark said.

“Before, chapters would come write a song, and they were required to have each organization included in their song. In theory, it was a good idea because we told them they had to be positive and it reflected our Greek unity theme.

It had kind of gotten away from that, and for the past few years had become just a big ‘my fraternity is going to bash your fraternity’ or vice versa. After that, we met with our Greek Life advisor and reevaluated what our goals were for Greek Wee,k and so that’s why we decided to do away with Greek Song.”

All in all, Ray believes Greek Week 2010 has done a great job in working toward the event’s mission to unite Northwest’s Greek organizations and promote Greek Life.

“The mission and the purpose of Greek Week is to bring together organizations to share experiences.

I think a lot of people who aren’t Greek look at it as a party or something that’s stereotypical like what you see on TV,” Ray said.

“Greek Week is something that definitely promotes our image as well. Having Greeks come together as a whole, with events such as the 5K race, shows how much we really want to give back and help other organizations.”

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