A History of Lost Connections
Over the years, Omega Phi Alpha has worked hard to establish connections with “missing” sisters. In 2011-2012, Andie Hixson’s (Epsilon) President’s Project was “Archiving OPA.” Through this project, the intention was to document the past and present of Omega Phi Alpha. Andie called on chapters to document their chapter history including local activities and traditions. On the national level, Andie and the rest of the executive board committed to reach more sisters who had lost touch with OPhiA, to re-engage them and encourage them to contribute to the future of the sorority.
Part of “Archiving OPA” relied on the Alumni Relations team, and under the leadership of Ginger McGarity (Delta & Nu), the team created a special task force called the “OPA History Detectives” who worked to find the names and contact information for all of the founding members of the single greek letter chapters. From there, they created a chain of contact from bigs to littles to update all contact information. This project, the Big-Little Chain Project, connected us with hundreds of members we had lost contact with. Outside of this project, the team worked to encourage alumni to update their profiles in the sorority database including career and contact information.
Andie’s project of documenting the sorority’s history sparked a desire to continue connecting with lost sisters even beyond the end of the project. Many initiatives have been launched since 2011 to update all missing sister information in our database. At Convention 2019, Mary Morrison (Delta) led a service project to find lost sisters and contact them to get their updated information. Through this project, many collegiate members were able to see the importance of collecting accurate information and encouraging members to continue to update even when they are alumni.
Revitalizing the Search
As we welcome a new year, we are revitalizing our search for lost sisters. Omega Phi Alpha is offering new and improved programming and opportunities for alumni engagement so we want to reach as many sisters as possible. Additionally, we have thousands of sisters who are eligible to be inducted into the alumni society at Convention 2022 in Fort Worth, TX. The alumni membership team would love to reach out and invite each eligible member to attend.
A recent search of our database identified 771 members that we do not have any way to contact via email. This list does not include those that have outdated email addresses.
We need your help!
We are asking all sisters to review this list of lost connections and reach out to any sisters you recognize from this list and ask them to update their contact information. There are two ways that their information can be updated:
Any information submitted via the form will be updated in OPAportal.