Worth joining?
Reflecting on your organization’s welcome practices
Once you’ve completed the Worth Joining quizlet, this page will help you understand your results in more detail. For more education about how to leverage these results for a supportive and inclusive welcoming process that aligns with your school’s and legal expectations, consider enrolling in Calibrated Outcomes’ workshop, “You ARE One of Us” or requesting a custom workshop.
You can also find school-specific and general resources on this webpage.
If you would like access to the quizlet, please email info@calibrateducational.com.
Some key points:
1) This quizlet is not a diagnostic tool developed with empirical testing. Please treat it as a tool for your consideration and education—not an absolute result.
2) Lots of the resources to create effective welcoming practices focus on hazing. Whether or not your organization is technically engaging in hazing, these results and those resources can help you consider how to adjust your welcoming process to better align with the goals of your organization and institution.
If you have questions or feedback, please email info@calibrateducational.com.
About your organization
The quizlet asked you a few questions about your organization’s overall structure and approach to welcoming new members. These included:
What are the goals of your welcoming process?
In what ways, if at all, does your welcoming process include a selection process?
How long is your welcoming process?
During your welcoming process, which of the following does your organization use to distinguish new/rising members from full members?
Generally speaking, the most inclusive and supportive welcoming practices focus on helping new members understand the organization and connect to all levels of it. Processes that are relatively brief and easy to complete and that don’t visually distinguish new/rising from more senior members are likely to be more welcoming. Selective organizations have the most effective welcoming processes when the criteria for selection are documented, reviewed, and well-known to everyone, including potential new members.
If you have a long welcoming process, one with relatively unknown selection criteria, or one that focuses on maintaining tradition or bonding the individual year of new members ("the line”) versus the whole organization, you should consider ways to adjust your process to make it more supportive and inclusive. If you’re considering shortening the process, be sure you are also reducing the number and timing of activities accordingly. Compressing a three month process into one month with no other changes is likely to cause more harm. Taking those steps will also likely better align it with your school’s and legal expectations for student organizations.
Transparency in your welcoming process
The quizlet asked you a few questions about your organization’s transparency in your welcoming process. These included:
What do new members know about your welcoming process before it begins?
If a new member wanted to learn about your welcoming process, what information exists about it?
Generally speaking, the most inclusive and supportive welcoming practices are transparent in their welcoming process. This helps new members consider if the organization’s values and practice are safe and comfortable for them. This includes that somewhere the organization has written directions to maintain consistency about what should and should not happen during the welcoming process. This helps maintain continuity of a good practice.
Effective welcoming processes can have secret elements. If your welcoming process has some secret elements, consider the following:
What is the purpose of the secret?
What is the history of the secret? If you don’t know, try to find out.
Would the secret be a welcome surprise to everyone? Consider how different racial/ethnic identities, disabilities, and other identities might be impacted?
If the secret were made public tomorrow, would you feel proud explaining it to your faculty, your family, and your future employers?
If you have a welcoming process that is not very transparent to you or new members, consider how you can make it more inclusive. Documenting the process (including what should or should not happen) in writing and being sure all members know how to access it is a useful first step.
Equality/Equity Among Members
The quizlet asked you several questions about equality/equity among members. These included questions about how your organization distributed the following among new/rising/senior members:
Demonstrating knowledge of organizational history and culture.
Interaction between members.
Mentorship of new/rising members by more senior members.
Opportunity for optional tutoring.
Opportunity for educational events.
Community service opportunities.
Education/training opportunities.
Cleaning/tidying responsibilities.
Purchasing items for each other.
Running errands for each other.
Ability to freely come and go from events and locations.
Engaging in physical challenges.
Receiving jokes or put-downs.
Generally speaking, the more equity/equality you have between new/rising and more senior members, the more supportive and inclusive your welcome process is. In this context, equal means that members do exactly the same activities, regardless of their role/seniority in the organization. Equity means that members’ activities might be different, but that relates to specific responsibilities and training. For example, the executive board might be the only one who makes purchases on behalf of the organization, but if that’s because of their training and position, then it’s still an equitable difference.
You can certainly have equal activities between members that are very harmful. If every member is the target of jokes or insults, that’s very equal, but not a supportive or inclusive welcoming practice.
If your welcoming process has significant or numerous differences between the way new/rising members participate and the way more senior members participate, consider how you can increase that equity or equality. Be thoughtful about the ways in which equity can align with the goals of your organization.
Maintaining Members’ Individual Routines
The quizlet asked you several questions about the ways in which your welcoming practices impacted members’ individual routines and behavior. These included how your welcoming process (didn’t) change members:
Typical wearing of hair, clothes, and make-up.
Spending money
Socializing/Social media use (or abstinence from)
Participating in other organizations
Sleeping
Attending class/doing homework
Eating
Consuming/abstaining from alcohol
Using/abstaining from drugs (including cannabis)
Exercise habits
Work (employment)
Engaging in/abstaining from sex
Expression of identity (race, gender, national origin, disability, etc.)
Generally speaking, the more individual members can maintain their usual routines and behaviors, the more supportive and inclusive a welcoming process you have created. Understandably, members will likely have to make small adjustments to add their involvement in your organization to their other commitments. When those adjustments are minor and don’t create a burden on their ability to maintain their other commitments (especially regarding their own wellbeing), that’s an indication of a supportive and inclusive welcoming process.
If your new/rising members find that their wellness or other commitments are hard to maintain during the welcoming process, consider what you can adjust or remove from the process. Remember to focus on what is central to the mission of your organization and creating community between all levels of the organization.