Students provide 'corp' services

Several hundred people participated in Quaker Corps, a program designed to unite Penn with the West Philadelphia community. The streets surrounding campus were filled with students carrying trash bags, toting shovels and lifting saplings on Saturday as several hundred people rolled up their sleeves and headed out into West Philadelphia for the first-ever national Ivy League volunteer day. Students from the Undergraduate Assembly joined forces with UC Green -- a Penn initiative that seeks to improve University City's appearance by planting and gardening -- and Penn's Greek community to amass equipment and labor for the day-long activities. The event, Quaker Corps, was composed of four greening and building projects that were all part of a larger Ivy League plan, Ivy Corps, designed to unite each university with its surrounding neighborhood. Four different projects were spread over five sites, including the construction of a pavilion between University City High School and Drew School at 37th and Lancaster streets and the building of a brick path at 39th Street and Baltimore Avenue. Some members from Habitat for Humanity arrived at University City High School at 6:30 a.m. to begin the day's work of erecting a garden pavilion where only an empty lot had existed. Thirteen hours later, the huge construction project was 80 percent completed, according to College freshman David Levin, who helped organize Quaker Corps. "It was a momentous change bringing people together for this project," Levin said. "It changes our relationship with University City High School and Drew." Meanwhile, 15 workers toiled in the warm noon sun at the intersection of Baltimore and Woodland avenues -- the area known as the "Gateway to West Philadelphia," according to the site's project coordinator and recent College of General Studies graduate Alex Schlachterman. Penn undergraduates, graduate students and high school students, along with community members -- and even Tom Lussenhop, a Penn real estate official -- toted wheelbarrows filled with dirt in an effort to clear 225 square feet for a brick path. "'At first my friends were like, 'We can't even move wheelbarrows,'" laughed volunteer Vanesa Sanchez, a student at Germantown Friends Academy and the daughter of the director of UC Green. "But now they're like, 'Wheelbarrows are the fun part.'" Engineering freshman Shuo-Ju Chou helped two high school girls that were navigating a load down the sidewalk. Chou said he volunteered because he wanted to help out the community -- and discovered that, though rewarding, the work was pretty hard. "[The event] goes until two," Chou said. "I'll see if I can last until two." By noon, the cleanup was already in full swing in front of fraternity and sorority houses on Spruce and Walnut streets in conjunction with Greek Weekend. Dozens of students scoured the sidewalks with trash bags, while others used equipment to clean up the broken concrete and still others lounged on their porches -- taking a break from the hot sun and tough work. Directing his fellow fraternity brothers, John Buchanan, IFC executive vice president and Phi Psi brother, stepped back for a few minutes to soak in the scene. "No one takes care of this," Buchanan explained, shaking his head. "You have to take care of grass. That hasn't been done so we're replacing it with gravel. We wanted it to look clean and neat." Buchanan cited high attendance rates among the Greeks, with almost every sorority house and over a third of fraternities participating. And Jenny Turner, chair of the Panhellenic Council's Civic Committee, described the overall mood of the afternoon as positive. "I think everyone's having fun," Turner said. "It's a nice day."

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