October 20, 2009

Interior Design Professor Deb Ruben, her students and the West Philadelphia Alliance for Children (WePAC) recently received a $25,000 grant from the MacLean Contributionship to support their work to build a new schoolyard for the Rudolph Blankenburg School, a public elementary school in West Philadelphia. This grant is in addition to an $18,000 grant from a private foundation and support from the Philadelphia School District totaling over $70,000, as the project seeks to raise a total of $215,000 to complete the project.

The playground project started as part of a community centered sustainability project where our Interior Design students worked with Blankenburg 2nd through 5th graders to develop ideas for their ideal safe and sustainable playground. From Blankenburg's students' drawings, Interior Design students devised a final plan to create a play area for the students that will also serve as a learning area, complete with a mural of the United States. Lasy year, Deb received a Westphal Faculty Mini-Grant award which she used to create this video which details this most worthy project.