Leaders Regional Conference is held at beautiful Flying Horse Farms, a SeriousFun camp north of Columbus, Ohio. Flying Horse Farms was opened in 2010 and is home to 22 buildings, including the picturesque “Big Red Barn,” cabins, archery ranges, and two lakes, all housed on 200 wooded acres.
Regional Conferences are a one-day leadership development and officer training program offered across our nine geographic regions. Each Regional Conference offers three distinctive tracks with their own goals and objectives; Recruitment, Leadership, & Prevention. These tracks are designed so brothers can approach problems in their chapter with candor and develop real-world solutions to return with a plan for improvement and growth. Regional Conferences target officers for Recruitment and Prevention, but are made special because all are invited to attend Leadership track to work on their skills and network with other brothers.
For Leaders, chapters from Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan are expected to attend. In total this ended up including 44 brothers, representing 9 chapters.
Some of the Recruitment participants
A few participants in Prevention
After the introductory session, participants break into their tracks and start by playing ice-breaker games within their small groups, before diving into the material. The Recruitment track was the largest. They worked on skills like selling Phi Tau as a lifelong experience and best-practice tactics for recruitment on campus. They discussed what strategies work best for their chapter and what challenges the groups face.
At the Leadership track, participants worked on assessing chapter brothers’ strengths and weaknesses and how to use those strengths to benefit the chapter. They practiced delegation by playing “To Delegate or Not to Delegate” and discussed time management and effective communication. The Prevention track focused on mental health, the fastest growing area of university life, and the best way to provide support for chapter brothers. They held discussions on what it means to be a “Fraternal Gentlemen” in 2020 and how to create a proactive environment for good mental health and its expression, as well as positive ways to place expectations and boundaries.
Simultaneous to Leaders was the West Coast regional conference at University of Southern California in Los Angeles, with 58 attendees reporting from 9 chapters in California and Arizona. Remaining Regional Conferences this year are Bluegrass (Kentucky, Tennessee) and Southeast (North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida) on February 15th, as well as Heartland (Missouri, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Illinois, Wisconsin) and New England (New York, Massachusetts) to close the program on February 22nd.