Since the beginning of the 2016-17 school year, Kids Vision for Life St. Louis (KVFL) has screened over 12,500 area students. Our successful numbers are highly dependent on our volunteers who help run our screening days.
Saint Louis University’s Eta Theta branch of the Delta Gamma Fraternity began volunteering with KVFL in August of 2015. We spoke with Erin Sokol, philanthropy chair, about the Eta Theta chapter’s involvement with KVFL.
Why did Delta Gamma choose to volunteer with KVFL?
Kids Vision for Life shares the same mission as the Delta Gamma Foundation, Service for Sight. We want to aid those in the community that experience any form of a visual impairment, no matter the age or demographic. Most important of all, Kids Vision serves those in our community that cannot afford a vision screening or eye doctor visits. We love to take part in helping children learn not just about their visual impairment but how to help them in that moment in anyway they can.
How many of the girls in your chapter volunteer with KVFL?
We will have anywhere from 3-5 women come twice, or three times a week to do vision screenings with kids vision. Around 100 of our women will take part in volunteering with Kids Vision for life each year. We take part in any event we can with KVFL!
Can you give us further information about your chapter and history with SLU?
Delta Gamma was founded at SLU in 2001 and has raised over $25,000 since we became an organization for Service for Sight initiatives! We have donated over $50,000 to Service for Sights organizations in the past few years. We do this through two main fundraising events, a three-on-three winter basketball tournament and a synchronized swimming competition in the spring.
Most of our members will say that their favorite memories and friendships have formed over service in the St. Louis Community. Our chapter alone complete over 5,000 service hours each year, all of which are for the visually impaired in our community. We will do all kinds of activities like choreograph exercise classes, show visually impaired individuals and their guide dog around Saint Louis, help at holiday parties, and more.
Our chapter won at our annual convention two national awards, The HK Stuart Spirit of Service award and Frankie Wakefield Pernassus award for Foundation Programming. We have consecutively had the top GPA on our campus, and recruit over seventy women to maintain the biggest sorority on SLU’s campus. We love participating in other fraternity and sorority’s philanthropy events, amongst our favorites are SLUperbowl by Sigma Phi Epsilon and Beta 500 with Beta Theta Pi.