Florida Alpha Brothers:

This year has been very productive and 2012 is shaping up to be an even more productive. This letter is coming to you on the heels of our annual event and meeting during homecoming, which if you didn’t have a chance to attend this, year turned out great! I would like to take this opportunity to thank Alex Rangel ’06 for planning one of our best homecomings yet, and I look forward to what he has in store for the AVC in 2012.

At the start of 2011, our AVC identified several key initiatives to focus on throughout the course of the year. Those key initiatives were to initiate the Residential Learning Community program, host a significant homecoming event for alumni, grow our mentorship program, build a robust communications program, and most importantly identify a course of action to address our aging facility.

I am pleased to report that Brock Hankins ’10 accomplished all of the required benchmarks for 2011, and our plans to become a Residential Learning Community are well underway. We have identified not one, but two Residential Scholars and have selected a Faculty Advisor, more to come about this program in our next newsletter.

We set out to put a renewed focus on programming for Alumni in 2011 and Alex Rangel ’06 was successful in hosting one of our best Homecoming events yet. Alex was able to put together an excellent package for our Alumni by bundling well located Gator Growl and Homecoming Football tickets for our AVC in addition to planning a great program throughout Friday and Saturday of homecoming weekend. I would also like to take a moment to recognize Mark Warner ’70, who as we all know has made game day weekends at Florida Alpha a great experience for as long as we can remember.

Once again Steve Shewbrooks ’66 has done an outstanding job tackling yet another improvement for our AVC. Steve not only built an excellent communications platform with our AVC newsletter, but early in the year Steve sought out to redevelop our website so Alumni could use it as a valuable resource going forward. Steve not only accomplished this for our AVC, but also was able to build a new professionally designed site for our undergraduates. Please take a moment to visit www.flalpha.org to check out the site.

Most importantly, our AVC set out to identify a course of action to address our aging facility and Patrick Dunnigan ’06 and Todd Bonlarron ’93 have made outstanding progress this year. They accomplished their objective for 2011 and identified a course of action early in the year and now have moved onto to phase II, execution. More to come about our Long Term Facility plan in our next newsletter.

In summary, our AVC made significant accomplishments in 2011, so much so that I have not even had a chance yet to note that Bert Harris ’70 became Sigma Phi Epsilon’s Grand Chapter President this summer and is at the start of his 2 year term. Bert is the first Florida Alpha to be bestowed with this great responsibility and honor! As productive as 2011 has been, we have monumental plans for Florida Alpha in 2012, I believe we will look back at this coming year, for years to come, and see that 2012 was a year that a very good chapter became a great chapter.

All the best and I look forward to catching up with you sometime soon!

Bryson Ridgway ’05

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