“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.”
Robert Kennedy

At the Gamma Eta Chapter of Beta Theta Pi, we believe in giving back to the Atlanta community in order to not only improve that community, but to also improve our brotherhood. While philanthropy is unfortunately something that is sometimes neglected by the Greek system as a whole, most Betas will tell you that this is one of the most enjoyable and rewarding experiences of fraternity life.

We consistently finish at the top of the campus is philanthropy hours. The past year, we had the second most service hours of any fraternity on campus. Here is an overview of service projects the brothers of Beta Theta Pi participate in:

Community Service with the Atlanta Dogwood Festival

The Atlanta Dogwood Festival is an annual Arts and Music Festival in which all the proceeds go to Camp Sunshine, a summer camp for children with cancer. Every year the festival is held at Piedmont Park and expects to draw more than 300,000 visitors. There are only two paid professionals on the Dogwood staff, and everyone else planning the festival is a volunteer making this event quite impressive.

The largest volunteer group for the festival comes from the Gamma Eta Chapter at Georgia Tech. Current Alumni of this chapter, Jim Dahlby, is on the board for the festival and is the Co-Chair logistics with active Beta Matthew Tomme. Matt is the current Dogwood Chair for the Gamma Eta Chapter and has overall responsibility for the house involvement with Dogwood. He is in charge of organizing volunteers, setting up parking and stages, and managing disassembly and clean-up. Matt is also auto-cad technician for the festival. In this position, he places every single sponsor, food vendor, artist, musician, and children’s exhibit in a specific at the festival with the help of fellow colleagues. As for the other Betas, each has a specific job to be done at the festival. The parking team is in charge of all gates and traffic as well as mandating where parking can occur. This means that they are there from roughly 6:00 am to 9:00 pm. Also, the parking team has to organize a parking plan for every person involved with the festival. By no means is this an easy task, with the limited space of an inner city park found in Atlanta.

The Betas that are on stage set-up duty are in charge of installing and taking down music stages, the bands’ transportation through the park, and the security for the stages. Music plays all weekend long starting around lunch and not ending until dusk each day. Crowds have been seen to grow into the thousands. One of the most important people for Beta’s involvement is the Dogwood Chair’s assistant. This person is in charge of getting all the brothers to the places they need to be in order to help with the events. If the Dogwood Chair needs people in a certain area of the park, he notifies the assistant who then locates those who are available to help. In addition to these areas, the Betas are used in many general purposes. First, they are the responsible the entire park’s set up and take down. Every sign, table, chair, and fence seen at the festival is installed and removed by a Beta. Secondly, they transport all the festival’s materials to and from the storage unit. They also clean the storage unit out once a year. Finally, the Betas fill in everywhere needed, if volunteer hands fall short. A brother could find himself selling tee-shirts or beverages, playing with the children in the kid’s area, working at the parking gates, helping out the musicians, delivering ice, manning the information station, or even transporting greenery.

There is no question that the Betas do a lot for the festival. Every year they work thousands upon thousands of hours for the festival and never ask for anything in return. They have been said to be the backbone of the festival and without them nothing could ever be accomplished. At the Atlanta Dogwood Festival, there is very little if anything that does not go through a Beta in some way.

Team BUZZ

Our brothers have great turnout in this event created by Georgia Tech students to make a difference in the surrounding city area. This past year, we had several brothers serve as project coordinators, and a group of brothers helped beautify Chastain Park, working with Chastain Park Conservancy to remove overgrowth from the park.

Hands-on-Atlanta

This event is organized to encourage citizens of Atlanta into participating in community service to give back to the city of Atlanta. Our chapter volunteered 2 groups of 20 brothers each to participate in different service projects. One group helped re-landscape a church that had become too deteriorated for the parish to manage. The other group helped organize the inventory at the Atlanta Toolbank.

Tech Beautification Day

This event is organized and executed entirely by students at Georgia Tech in an effort to give back to the campus. Two of the brothers of the Gamma Eta chapter, Tim Dennis and Aaron Bivins, coordinated a landscaping project to re-sod part of campus. Another brother, Kevin Widmaier, was the coordinator of a project to replace flower beds around the Student Center Commons. Both groups had several Betas show up early on a Saturday morning (in the rain) to help improve the campus.

Strong Leg’s Race

This event is a 10k/5k/1 mile road race held at Turner Field to benefit Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Our chapter assisted primarily with the events occurring at the finish line of the race by encouraging race participants to complete the event, timing the race, organizing the participants in their respective order of finish, and collecting the participant’s registration tabs.

Charles Harris Race for Leukemia

This event is a 10k/5k/1 mile road race held at a local high school and middle school in Tucker, GA to benefit those that suffer from Leukemia. Thanks to the work of Gamma Eta brother Grant Cassidy, the organizer of the race was able to come up with more than 20 desperately needed volunteers less than a week before the race. The race organizer went to several other fraternities on campus that day, and the response of others paled in comparison to that of our brothers. During the race, the brothers helped direct traffic around the race course, which was run primarily on a main highway in Tucker.

Georgia Tech HERO

This philanthropy benefits children in Georgia who have HIV and AIDS, and it was co-founded by a brother of Beta Theta Pi at the University of Georgia. Georgia Tech Basketball Coach, Paul Hewitt, is on the Board of Directors. Coach Hewitt recognized the brothers of Gamma Eta for raising more money (over $3,000) for HERO than any other fraternity on campus. Coach Hewitt had dinner with the brotherhood one evening, and the chapter’s service was recognized during the Georgia Tech-Duke basketball game as three brothers even represented the chapter on the court.

Furthermore, two brothers, Josh Click and Evan Foster, were host to some of the children that this charity benefits. They took time out of their day to give the kids a tour of the Tech campus along with taking the kids to a Georgia Tech baseball game.

Atlanta Children’s Shelter

Starting in the Fall of 2006, the brotherhood will be sending two different brothers every week to the Atlanta Children’s Shelter, which helps Atlanta’s homeless children and their parents. The shelter provides free day care along with emotional and educational support to these children. This new project will hopefully become one of the cornerstones of the chapter’s philanthropy effort.

Joint Philanthropy with Phi Mu

In 2005, the brothers of Beta Theta Pi had a joint philanthropy with the sisters of Phi Mu. We worked together to provide volunteers to Trees Atlanta, a group that “protects and improves our urban environment by planting and conserving trees”. We plan on continuing this philanthropy event with Phi Mu, as a project is planned for September 2006 that will be geared to our pledge classes.

IFC Habitat for Humanity Project

The Gamma Eta Chapter of Beta Theta Pi has donated $5 per brother to the IFC’s Habitat for Humanity project. The project is an effort among all Georgia Tech fraternities to support Habitat.