Day 223: Fundraiser for local homeless shelter

I recently joined a professional healthcare fraternity at Penn, and the past couple weeks have been jam packed with pledging duties. Among other facts that my pledge class is required to memorize, the three pillars of the healthcare fraternity are: compassion, discipline, and integrity. As it was "compassion week," we were required coordinate a bake sale and donate the money to a charity of our choosing. Since there were 22 of us chosen for this year's pledge class, there was a lot of confusion and strong opinions regarding the details of the sale (it was especially difficult as we were given less than a week to plan this). But, many hands make light work, and we managed to set up a four hour long bake sale on Locust Walk today. I baked chocolate chip cookies the night before (which I am told were the first to be sold....even though they were from a box!) and we ended up raising $110. We chose to donate the money to the local student-run homeless shelter that just opened on November 1st. This is only the second student run homeless shelter in the nation (Harvard's has been successfully operating for 28 years). Since the shelter just opened and all of the workers are student volunteers, we figured our donation would be put to good use. In keeping with the compassion theme, we also handed out little paper hearts with messages to students walking by to brighten their day. Even if they didn't stop to buy anything, we ran up to people a shoved a heart in their hands, watching them smile as they read their message ("nice scarf!" "stay beautiful!" "great smile!"). It was probably one of the most fun bake sales I had ever worked, and it was great getting to know the members of my pledge class a little better.