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DKG Practice/Program

Reflections on a Chapter Project: Building

Strength, Health, and Power

By M. Susan McWilliams

I raise honey bees as a retirement hobby. I haven’t analyzed just one reason why I do this, but my enjoyment
likely is due to loving honey and the joy in giving honey away to friends and family members. I enjoy their
surprise when I hand over a jar of liquid gold and say, “This is from my apiary.” But my joy also has to do
with appreciating the work of bees, and no matter how much I read or watch or learn about honey bees, I
continue having so much more to wonder about them. Take for example, the behavior of honey bees: Apis
mellifera (the western honey bee) is an individual organism—each bee acts on her own. Yet the whole
colony also acts together as one organism—what scientists call a “superorganism”—for the good of the
group. The most well-known superorganism behavior honey bees display is that of forming a swarm so
they can continue to exist in favorable conditions. Swarming is why we have wild bee colonies in America
(honey bees are not native to America). Bees take on roles in the colony to advance the superorganism’s
strength, health, and power that enable them to do incredible things together.
I learned over the past year that, just like my bees, our DKG Omega Chapter members can take on roles
in the chapter to advance the chapter’s strength, health, and power. Creating and implementing a chapter
project together enabled us to do remarkable work with individual members performing jobs for the good
of the project. Acquiring funding to help us implement the project gave us confidence and support.

Building Chapter Strength and Health through a Special Project
Over the past several years, Omega Chapter members felt somewhat helpless and frustrated because
of recent changes impacting teachers and schools in our community. I suspect that we felt the struggles
of teachers more than does the general population. During the Covid 19 pandemic, our community’s
classroom teachers were educating students remotely. In 2024, with high proportions of children and
young people considered below grade level due to the pandemic and its aftermath, our teachers struggle to
make progress with students. We read of mass teacher retirements and teacher shortages in our area. Trends
in states that include lowering teacher education standards to stimulate an increased teacher-hiring pool
concern us. Schools continue to have difficulty in hiring substitute teachers, so they combine classrooms
under one teacher to do the work of two with twice the students.
In our own chapter, one member asked at a meeting, “What can we do to help?” These words served as
motivation for the Special Projects Committee to take local action. Our DKG Nebraska State Organization
(Rho State) offers an annual grant for chapter projects in Nebraska thanks to the Esther Pilster Endowment
Fund. Omega Chapter’s Special Projects Committee worked with our co-presidents to create a proposal
identifying project approaches and outlining expenditures to meet an overall goal of enhancing education
at a local Title I elementary school. By planning with the principal, we identified project goals and focus
areas at the elementary school:
• Working with after-school Grades 5 and 6 students to help them meet their service-learning goals
by facilitating blanket making with them and book studies afterward (books would go home with
students to build personal libraries at home).
• Donating books and blankets to early childhood and kindergarten children to build personal
libraries at home (and reading the donated books to the three classes before they acquired the
books to take home).
• Supporting the school’s discretionary fund through member donations (by designating this cause
for our holiday charity donation in December).

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