Name: Anne Piervil
Major: Social Work with a focus in Immigration and Child Welfare
Year: Senior
Hometown: Mount Dora, FL
Courtesy: Twitter
Her Campus: How did you get involved with SISTUHS?
Anne Piervil: I’m the president of SISTUHS currently and as a freshman when I was in C.A.R.E. One of the C.A.R.E counselors was the president of SISTUHS at the time and she always talked about this organization saying they did community service and love each other and it’s a sisterhood and she sold it to be so great. I looked up to her, I wanted to be just like her and I learned it was more than a community service organization, but it was truly a sisterhood.
HC: Tell us a little about your process of joining.
AP: When you’re first getting involved you do “a rites of passage” and that’s when you learn about the history of the organization and why it was founded on this campus and that’s when I fell in love with the acronym, with women who inspire me, with the girls who were in my class at the time. I realized that the organization wasn’t only about community service, but helping the African American community as a whole with a concentration on African American women at every level: community service, political action, education, families, all of those factors that go into really helping a person. My major is social work and helping in every aspect is very important to me because you can do community service once a week and then go home, but if you don’t address the aspects of a person’s life, you can’t help them fully.
Courtesy: SISTUHS.org
HC: It sounds similar but different to a sorority. Are you a member of a sorority?
AP: I’m not a member of a sorority so I can’t speak on behalf of them. But I do know with SISTUHS it differs from a sorority in that we’re not at all secretive about what we do, we don’t have calls or line names and we obviously have classes so we focus about coming together and pouring our energy into the community. Yes, we focus on that sisterhood, but we’re just not associated with just a brand and our name. It’s about what we’re doing in the community and not the legacy we’re leaving behind, in that way. We’re really about helping the people that we aim to help. And even if you’re not a member you can still come to our events and when you are ready to join, you know all the girls and it’s a smooth transition. We’re very transparent. We have an office in the SAC office so anyone can come in and ask “What is SISTUHS doing?” and get involved pretty quickly.
HC: How is being with SISTUHS helping you get to where you need to be in the future?
AP: Social work and community service is what I’ve always wanted to do. But SISTUHS specifically, it’s comforting that there is an organization that wants to empower women like me. I have other girls who are in the same mindset, and it’s great to have that kind of support. These are educated black women on campus and it’s really helpful to have the kind of camaraderie and sisterhood that we do. And on a career level, you get to see how you can really affect the community; you get to see what kind of hurdles you’ll have to jump over. And it’s helpful now through my community service I’m doing what I want to do. Right now, we just started a mentorship with Excellence Dance Studio and I was able to sit down and figure our how are we going to mentor the girls and do a full needs assessment, which is what I do in class. I’m getting real world experience thanks to SISTUHS.
HC: Any other events coming up?
AP: Yes, we are doing Black Girls Rock, which is happening on Sunday October 11th through October 15th with the National Council of Negro Women and the Black Female Development Circle. We’re partnering to co-sponsor the three/four days with the name Black Girls Rock it’s just iconic for this campus, for the time that we’re in, we’re just so excited. Working together with the female organizations, to show that unity, there seems to be an idea that we’re only working for ourselves and that’s not what we believe it should be. A huge hashtag that was used was Queens support Queens and that’s huge for me that we need to work together. We have different days planned out: physical fitness day, bonding events, community service day, a seminar titled My Black is Beautiful. Just so much is going on.
HC: That all sounds super incredible! Are you hoping that it develops into an annual event?
AP: This is really new, but everything that we plan has to be approved through our national board and they are in love with the idea. They want other chapters to get involved so we’re hoping that this becomes an annual event! We really need this message out there that black girls do rock and we’re giving a scholarship to a high school girl so my hope would be to make it annual. Even if it doesn’t become an annual event, it’s just something that we worked so hard to put on that I can’t see it having a negative impact.
HC: Absolutely amazing! To wrap up, is SISTUHS only in Florida right now or have you spread to other states?
AP: No not right now. We just chartered our new chapter in Atlanta and it’s an Atlanta Metro Professional chapter, but we hope to spread like wildfire! We’ve had a lot of campuses in Georgia and even in the northern region interested us so we’re really excited about chartering all these new campuses and playing on the national field. We were founded on FSU’s campus, but when women graduated they wanted to bring the sisterhood with them so we’ve spread and established professional chapters for adults so even if you weren’t involved in undergrad you could start professionally and obviously if you were involved in undergrad you could continue doing what you were doing. The girls in Atlanta are AMAZING, very accomplished women so we hope to continue to grow and I would love to see us across the U.S.