A fresh face for a fundraising campus

At Penn's Special Events Office, Maureen Stridick is spending hours with caterers deciding between shades of blue, red and mango.

Her colleague, Ellen Overholt, is organizing the setup of eight food tents. And over in Facilities, Kris Kealey is trying to figure out how to supply electricity to a 12-foot-tall video wall.

"This is going to be the largest event ever," said Stridick, who serves as associate director of Special Events. "When it comes to scope, this is it."

Hundreds of Penn officials are busy sprucing up campus to prepare for Oct. 20's Celebration on the Green, which will officially kick off Penn's multi-billion dollar fundraising effort slated to last through 2012.

The event also has the potential to set the tone for the early years of the campaign, which will be largely responsible for funding Penn's eastward expansion efforts.

"We're literally talking about hundreds of people from various constituencies gathering on campus for a shared moment of excitement," said John Zeller, vice president for development and alumni relations.

Penn wants to "build momentum off of this event and send out the message that this is Penn's moment," he added. "This is a big opportunity."

To that end, Facilities has invested $128,000 to re-mulch areas of campus, add new stones to beat-up portions of the paths on College Green and polish fixtures on the 38th Street bridge, according to Kealey, Penn's Urban Park Manager.

"Most of the dedicated stones around campus will also be power-washed clean, but we're also replacing some of the more damaged ones," she said. "We want to freshen the place up."

Celebrations in other colleges have helped shape the early success of similar fundraising campaigns.

Jerry Kisslinger, who helped manage Columbia University's capital campaign kick-off event last year, noted the importance of starting off such campaigns on a good foot.

"It really energizes alumni for the first few years of the campaign, and so far, we've had some really wonderful early gifts," Kisslinger said.

Positive responses to the kick-off event, which included a series of receptions in New York City, London and Hong Kong, along with a panel discussion, may have played a part in recently pushing Columbia past the half-way point in its $4 billion campaign.

Penn's own celebration, which is expected to draw nearly three times the amount of people that normally attend Homecoming, will feature performances by six student groups, speeches by University administrators and a laser-light show, said Overholt, director of Special Events.

"We wanted to plan an inclusive celebration, and we realized that one event that's always a big hit is the Taste of Penn," she said, referring to the University's annual Homecoming event that includes various minority-alumni groups. "So we tried to capture that diversity with this event."

And while Penn officials want to make a good impression on alumni and students in the University, Kealey says that, "in the end, I guess the results are ultimately in the dollars we get from the alumni."

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