This Wednesday, members of Penn's Panhellenic and MultiCultural Greek sororities will travel to Alexander Wilson Elementary School to make each student's winter a littler bit cozier.
This project is run by Operation Warm, an organization that works to provide brand-new winter coats to school children all over the country.
This partnership with Penn's sororities is one of the first University-wide initiatives that Operation Warm has embarked on, said founder Richard Sanford.
According to Sanford, a 2005 census said the United States contains 38 million people in poverty, 13 million of which are children and 4 million of which are under the age of 5.
And "with the economic climate we have today, gosh knows . how the numbers will expand," he added.
Operation Warm is designed to raise awareness of this problem by allowing universities to identify a local grade school and work with the administration to customize fundraising, he said.
"I think it's really important that we are involved in our direct community," said College junior and member of Chi Omega Haley Samsi. "The school is only a couple of blocks away from us."
Over the past several months, the sororities have raised over $4,500 to buy over 300 new coats. Each coat costs $15 to produce and comes in many different colors, styles and sizes.
According to College senior and president of the Panhellenic Council Drew Tye, "many chapters have gone above and beyond the call of duty" by hosting bake sales and soliciting parents and friends in and outside the chapter for donations.
Operation Warm also hopes to raise environmental awareness among school children. On Wednesday, each child will exchange a certain number of plastic bottles - determined according to their grade - for their coat.
The bottles will ultimately be taken to Mayor Michael Nutter to be recycled.
Next year, Sanford said he hopes to turn some of these bottles into "green coats," which will be made entirely out of recyclable material. They will be given to children through Operation Warm in next year's endeavor.
"This is such tangible change because putting a coat on a child does more than just keeping them warm," said Tye.
With coats, children can stand at the bus stop in the winter, which in turn allows them to get to school and pursue their social and academic lives, added College senior and member of Alpha Chi Omega Corinna Provey.
Penn's sororities also hope this project will give school children the opportunity to visualize higher education as "a potential future for themselves," said Office of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs associate director of programming Stacy Kraus.
"Hopefully we will inspire kids to want to go to college," College senior and MGC president Jocelyn Chandler said.
