It’s often the condition of the roof that determines whether a deteriorating house is beyond repair, as Robert Bellinger WG’89 notes in this issue’s cover story, “Building Blocks” by JoAnn Greco. But the organization Bellinger and some fellow Wharton students started while he was earning his MBA, now known as Rebuilding Together Philadelphia (RTP), laid a solid foundation for decades of work keeping people living in structurally sound homes that they are then able to pass on, meanwhile shoring up neighborhoods by avoiding the blight of abandoned housing.
“Home ownership has been shown to be the best way to build generational wealth,” JoAnn quotes RTP’s current president and CEO, Stefanie F. Seldin C’90, in the story. “It’s also important to have neighborhoods that can keep their culture and keep their people housed.”
To date, RTP has repaired and renovated some 2,300 homes in the city, working through professional contractors and volunteer squads who gather three times a year for two-day “Block Builds.” Penn and Penn people have been partners all along, and the University recently donated $1.7 million to help fix 75 homes over four years. JoAnn fills in the group’s history, impact, and plans for the future, and also reports from a Block Build that took place last fall, where one beneficiary of the program told her, “It felt like we had hit the lottery.”
Mary Ann Meyers Gr’76 wrote regularly for the Gazette before my time here as editor, and I’m happy to welcome her back to our pages. In “The New World of Organ Transplantation,” she details the foundational work of Clyde M. Barker GM’59 and others in establishing Penn as a leader in transplant surgery and advancing research to stave off organ rejection and otherwise improve outcomes.
The article sketches significant developments since the 1960s in kidney, heart, liver, lung, and other organ transplants, as well as Penn’s work on complex hand transplants—see also “The Gift” [Nov|Dec 2015]—and in a trial of uterine transplants that has resulted in five births so far. Mary Ann also talked with Penn experts on the prospects for technologies to extend the viability of donor organs, or to replace them with genetically modified animal organs (the latter of which got a boost in February when the FDA approved clinical trials using modified pig kidneys by two biotechnology companies). In a sidebar, she reviews Surgeons and Something More, a history of surgery at Penn from the rivalrous medical school founders William Shippen Jr. and John Morgan up to the present by Barker and his daughter Elizabeth Barker.
Also in this issue, “On Highway 67 (and Beyond)” offers a conversation with the photographer and videographer Charlie Steiner C’68 about how he got his start at Penn; his later work as a freelance photographer and photojournalist in the Phillipines, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere; ongoing video projects in India and Japan; and his forthcoming book Highway 67 Revisited, in which material from his years on campus plays a prominent role, including shots of figures such as Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Robert Kennedy, and Muhammad Ali. (Those images and more from the era will be featured in an Alumni Weekend event, “Remembering and Celebrating the 1960s at Penn,” on Friday, May 16, at 3:15 p.m.)
—John Prendergast C’80
Editor
