Last week, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc. explored how to improve themselves and the community through five events focused around the theme “The Better Making of Men.”
The fraternity, one of Elon’s six National Panhellenic Council organizations, hosted one of its two NPHC programming weeks this year, which often include service events, informational events and entertaining events, according to Alpha Phi Alpha president Kristopher Jiles.
Jiles said the chapter wanted to use this week as a way to get its name out there because, while it is the largest NPHC organization with 11 members on campus this semester, it is smaller than every IFC and PHC organization at Elon.
“My goal this week is to make sure we’re living up to the aims of our fraternity,” Jiles said. “And pretty much showing people what we’re all about in terms of letting people raise their voice with the ‘Better Making of Speech’ program or allowing people to become more aware with the gun control program. Just living up to the aims of our fraternity is one of those things that I just want this week to do and just hit each of the pillars that we stand for.”
Jiles, a sophomore political science major, said the week went well overall, with one of the biggest events, “The Better Making of Women," going off without a hitch. Vice president Brandon Williams said the group put a lot of effort into the women’s appreciation event.
“It’s good to give the staff some credit,” Williams said. “It’s good, especially from students because, you know, as students, we come and go but when we’re the ones acknowledging them, letting them know that they’re appreciated, that’s even better, and it’s good to see some reactions.”
Jiles said sometimes female faculty and staff members’ achievements are overlooked, and this event was meant to show women on Elon’s campus that they are appreciated for paving the way for women everywhere.
“It was just a lot of good experiences for us being able to appreciate the women for the little things we see them doing on campus and just letting them know that they’re advancing women leadership,” Jiles said.
Other events included “The Better Making of Awareness,” a discussion on gun violence and gun control, and the week’s most well-attended event, “The Better Making of Speech,” an open mic night at Irazu emceed by Williams, a junior strategic communications major.
“We got a pretty good turnout,” Williams said. “I was happily surprised. Basically I annoyed the crap out of people during the weekend and that day, I was like, ‘everybody come out to Irazu around 7 p.m. If you have a mouth, you can come by.’”
Overall, Jiles said his organization as well as the rest of NPHC hopes to build a greater reach through doing programming weeks like these.
“I want to just make the point that we want to expand the horizons of NPHC as a whole,” Jiles said. “I think just having these opportunities to discuss our programming weeks and discuss different things that we’re doing on campus, I just want to expand the views of NPHC on campus because it’s such a small thing that people just overlook sometimes.”