A junior double majoring in Digital Marketing Strategies and Hospitality and Tourism Management, PRISM member Jason Guarino sought to make a change to Virginia Tech Greek life. Guarino founded and is President of the very first chapter of Delta Lambda Phi not only at Virginia Tech, but in the entire state of Virginia and the entire ACC. Delta Lambda Phi is a fraternity for LGBTQ+ individuals as well as progressive, forward thinkers.
In PRISM, Guarino is powerful in his role as Account Executive and Social Content Creator for PRISM’s client Virginia Tech Admissions. It is no surprise that he is equally as powerful with his creativity and drive to make a difference in another major area of college life.
Guarino’s inspiration for founding this chapter of Delta Lambda Phi started after his own Greek life story. He exhausted the rush process, participating three separate times, all with the same unfortunate ending of Guarino walking away empty handed.
“I [rushed a fraternity] in the fall of my freshman year, spring of my freshman year, and fall of my sophomore year, all before PRISM. It was very much me trying to find my place on campus, I wanted to fit in more because this is such a big campus. I had friends, of course, but [rushing Greek life] was something to give me more of a purpose besides just classes,” Guarino said.
However, Guarino noticed a pattern. He found that Greek life accepted those who “fit their mold,” and recognized that he and some of his friends were not a part of that model. After hearing similar stories from his friends about their own rush processes leading to nothing, Guarino set out to find an all-inclusive fraternity where he and others could find their home. Soon, after a quick google search, Guarino found Delta Lambda Phi.
“I started doing a bunch of research on Delta Lambda Phi and sent a totally spur of the moment email to the random contact they had on their website. I didn’t think anything of it. Literally the next day I got an email back that was like ‘Hey, we found out you’re interested. Let’s make this happen.’”
From there, Guarino gathered a bunch of his colleagues to set his plan in motion in the most modern way possible; he created a Snapchat group chat to get the ball rolling. Then, out of the train station, his goal to create a chapter of Delta Lambda Phi at Virginia Tech took off. Before he knew it, he and his friends were meeting with people from Nationals and his inbox became flooded with emails from the Dean of Students at Virginia Tech, the Director of Fraternity and Sorority life, and many other important contacts at Virginia Tech. The next step, Guarino knew, was to find more members who could help transform this idea into reality.
“It’s not a secret that the LGBTQ community [at Virginia Tech] is relatively small. We all kind of knew each other, but it wasn’t a super tight-knit community. It was very much just that we all knew each other because there’s so few of us. So, I started reaching out to everyone I could. Even to people that I, embarrassingly enough, had gone out on dates with. Here are the people that I know in this community and who I think could add to this project/organization. I reached out to them and to my surprise, I found people that were extremely excited to be a part of it,” Guarino said.
From this community, Guarino was pleased that there were plenty of people who had skills curated to the roles he needed to fill to bring Delta Lambda Phi to Virginia Tech. Guarino was able to figure out everyone’s strengths and could identify those key people from the group he talked to. He found a finance major who was itching to be the treasurer, a journalism major with a passion for communications and English that he knew would be a perfect fit for secretary, and someone with the perfect amount of passion and social skills to become the recruitment chair, and from there the dominos fell one after the other as more members joined.
“It was like the perfect storm of all these moving parts. Since we got [our recruitment chair], we have seen this exponential growth. We started with four or five people and we would sit around a dining room table in someone’s apartment. Now we are 25 people and we are sitting in a living room on one couch, across to the next couch, spilling onto the floor. Of those people, everyone has found their niche and groove within the group,” Guarino said.
Despite how new this endeavor is, Guarino has already seen Delta Lambda Phi make an incredible change in the Virginia Tech LGBTQ+ community; a change that Guarino himself did not anticipate. The most moving story he has heard so far comes from one of their transgender members. During their most recent recruitment, which brought in 20 pledges with six accepted, they had an event called the “Hot Seat.” They put all of the potential new members in a hot seat and asked a handful of fun questions, ending with a more serious question to determine what the potential new members could add to the organization. When this person answered that question, the entire room went silent with emotion as they let the impact they are creating finally reach them.
“When [this person] was asked the question of what they could add to the organization, they said something along the lines of ‘I have been at VT now for only a few weeks and I want that typical college experience, I want to be in a fraternity, but I am transgender and I can’t do that. The University does not recognize me as male. So, I can join a sorority, but I am a male. I know I am a male. DLP is my only option to be a member of Greek life.’ I just remember it going silent in the room, everyone looking at this person and it being a very centering moment of realizing that what we are doing here is changing people’s college experience. It’s changing the experience they otherwise would have had, or otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to have,” Guarino said.
Since starting this chapter of Delta Lambda Phi, they now have almost every letter of LGBTQ in the fraternity. Delta Lambda Phi has different races, different ethniticies, nonbinary, trangender, and they even have sweethearts in their fraternity who are lesbians and bisexual. It truly is a place where all people are welcome. As for the future of Delta Lambda Phi, Guarino has a moving vision.
“What’s really important to me with DLP is not just that we are seen as the gay fratenity and such a niche thing. We are not just the gay fraternity. We are a fraternity for LGBTQ+ individuals as well as progressive thinking individuals. Those who are more forward thinkers. We do have two members who identify as straight. My bigger vision and bigger goal is that we will just be a fraternity that is an inclusive space, that other fraternities will look to us and say ‘That’s how you do Greek life. Look at DLP. They are the example of how to run a chapter meeting and they are the example of how to recruit.’ That is what I hope we are able to do here at Virginia Tech,” Guarino said.
To make this vision be seen by more than just himself and members of Delta Lambda Phi, Guarino has found himself a spot on the Interfraternity Council.
“Being invited to sit [on the Interfraternity Council] and hold a seat as a chapter president is super important to me. It is important to have a voice in that room that is predominantly cisgender, white straight men. Just being, even slightly, different and walking into that room and shaking things up is the first step in making that change. So, I hope that the legacy is that we stay on this campus for a long time and that people look to us to make a broader change. At the end of the day it’s not just about Delta Lambda Phi and what it can do, but it’s how we can affect the greater Greek life culture at Virginia Tech.”