Most people eat two or three pancakes for a normal morning meal, but on Wednesday, Big Brothers Big Sisters challenged students to eat as many of the breakfast favorite as possible.
BBBS, a student-run mentoring program, is on a mission to recruit 100 male volunteers during the month of March — and hoped a pancake-eating contest would spark students’ interest.
“I really feel like it caught people’s attention,” College junior and BBBS board member Jaclyn Gurwin said of the contest, the recruitment campaign’s kick-off event in the Perleman Quadrangle.
“We got a lot of people to sign up,” she added.
BBBS pairs Penn students with West Philadelphia elementary school children in order to provide them with positive role models.
Volunteers spend one hour per week at an elementary school, playing with and talking to the students there, said BBBS Student Director Eileen McKeown, a senior in the College.
Although the organization holds recruitment campaigns every year, this is the first time it has specifically targeted male students, McKeown said.
There are currently 300 members in the group, but there is not enough of a male presence, College senior and BBBS board member Dan Liang said.
The shortage of men is not a result of the reluctance of male Penn students to volunteer, but from the needs of West Philadelphia children, he added.
“I don’t think that it’s that Penn men don’t sign up. I think that it’s just that we need more men for the community,” Liang explained.
The need for male role models stems from the lack of men in many West Philadelphia homes, College junior and BBBS board member Anusha Alles said.
This is due to the fact that many West Philadelphia students “come from broken homes” and “a lot of their parents are divorced,” she said.
Alles attributed the lower number of men in the program to a lack of understanding about the BBBS program.
“Guys think they’ll have to sit doing arts and crafts for an hour a week, when a lot of the times when we go, we play kickball [and] board games,” she said.
Though BBBS has a long way to go until it reaches its target 100 male participants, the members of the organization are optimistic.
“I really feel like we will reach our goal,” Gurwin said.
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