Founders' Day Proclamation 2025

Zeta Tau Alpha has been enhancing the lives of women for 127 years and since 1928 it has been the honor of each National President to send a greeting to members in celebration of our founding, a tradition started by Bertha Cruse Gardner.

Founders' Day Proclamation

Zeta Tau Alphas have always taken and valued photographs of our sisterhood, even when it was not easy. The iconic Mystifying Picture of our Founders and some of the first new members was taken by a professional photographer in 1899 (bottom right). He used a heavy box camera, shrouded in a black cloth and placed on a tripod, which used glass plates to capture the image. Developing and printing the photos required an intense understanding of chemistry.

Each generation of sisters has used evolving technology to save unscripted ZTA moments, from Kodak Brownie cameras to Polaroids to digital cameras to smartphones. I can only imagine the thousands of shoeboxes full of prints and “party pics” and hundreds of chapter scrapbooks stored in closets around the country.

Photographs have never needed an aesthetic to make them memorable. All they need is that spontaneous sisterhood moment, like the first Alpha Chapter members drinking mineral water at Lithia Springs in Farmville, Virginia, or early leaders hiking together at Convention 1923 in Estes Park, Colorado.

My friends will tell you that I rarely take pictures. But I am so grateful for the ZTA historians, archivists, members, and their families who not only take but also preserve their special photos. Without them, ZTA could not have created our beautiful Historical and Educational Center at International Office or our award-winning pictorial book, “Our Shared Purpose,” in honor of our 125th anniversary.

As part of our celebration of Founders’ Day and the Day of Giving this year, we are asking members to share their photographs that evoke the joy of just being with our sisters, whether formal or informal, on campus or traveling, as collegians or alumnae. I hope you will participate and enjoy the reminder of those special captured moments.

On this Founders’ Day, I encourage you to celebrate your earliest ZTA memories and look for ways to
create new ones, remembering always that the foundation precept of Zeta Tau Alpha is, Love, “the greatest of all things.”

Given under my hand and seal, I proclaim the fifteenth day of October, in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-four, as our 127th Founders’ Day.

Dinah Jackson Laughery
National President

Austin, Texas
October 2025