08.15.2001
For the fourth consecutive year, a geography professor and a group of honors students at Penn State University Park campus will spend part of their summer in Philadelphia, doing what they can to devise practical solutions to inner-city problems.

The professor, Lakshman Yapa, has spent the last several years studying an urban environment through Rethinking Urban Poverty: The Philadelphia Field Project. Yapa says urban areas need to address how they can help their residents attain a high standard of living despite the limited resources that many possess, and that’s a main thrust of his four-year effort in West Philadelphia.

Yapa will bring students from the Schreyer Honor’s College at University Park to West Philadelphia this year as he does every summer, and this year’s group also will include some students from Penn State Abington.

Students who participate in the Philadelphia Field Project do research based around problems that community members wish to see solved, which have included issues of nutrition and gardening, health information, housing, schooling, access to public transportation, and more.

They also do plenty of hands-on community service. In the past, this has included serving as Big Brother/Big Sister volunteers, working with a homeless shelter for women, teaching computer job skills, growing urban gardens, and building Habitat for Humanity homes.

Yapa and his students have worked with the help of key organizations such as the Penn State Cooperative Extension in Philadelphia, the Lancaster Avenue Business Association, and the Sara Allen Home, a Quaker-financed shelter for the homeless and recovering substance abusers.

“Answers to poverty cannot come from jobs and income alone. Many of the available jobs are low paying and will not get people above the census poverty line,” said Yapa. “What we would like to do is to change ‘the value of money,’ knowing full well that inner cities have very little of it. We need to find ways of living our lives in dignity, security, and health by resisting the excessive ‘commodification’ of our lives.”

Instead of focusing solely on income, Yapa suggests that we look at the detail of our everyday needs in food, health, housing, clothing, energy and transportation. By rethinking the detail and acting upon it, it is possible to discover how we can live better and healthier lives even though urban areas will continue to have only a small fraction of the resources available to suburbs.

“Ever since President (Lyndon) Johnson’s War on Poverty, we have been trying to solve these problems, and they will not go away. As academics we have a fundamental obligation to rethink poverty and offer innovative, realistic solutions,” he said. “Actually, there are many solutions, but we are prevented from seeing these because of the current way we think about the problem. It is really time to think about this in very different and creative ways, and we are making progress.”

Yapa began the program in West Philadelphia because of his relationship with Quaker organizations, which have operated there for 30 years. They provide project team members with affordable housing at the Quaker Work Camp at 42nd and Parrish streets, and with their network of community contacts.

According to Dr. Roger Downs, department head and professor of geography at Penn State, the value of Yapa’s work is his ability to bring these experiences back into the classroom and to share them with students.

~David Jwanier