Penn’s Way to heaven

With so much charitable giving directed toward the Sept. 11 tragedies, your donation to Penn’s Way and the charities it supports is needed more than ever. Just $4 buys a one-day canoe field trip for a school child. And $50 provides a set of literacy brochures to help 50 people learn how to read.

Your donation qualifies you to enter a drawing for some terrific raffle prizes as well as for the grand-prize drawing for an iBook laptop computer.

And in our book, your donation also qualifies you as an angel.

Lea gets books

The Lea Elementary School saw much activity and ceremony Nov. 11 with the opening of its newly refurbished library. With funding from the University of Pennsylvania, Central City Toyota and Toyota Motor Credit Corp. and book donations from the Eagles Youth Partnership, the school will build, as the Eagles Youth Partnership puts it, “ a community of literacy.” At the opening, guests, who included Philadelphia Eagles starting fullback Cecil Martin, read books that children from grades one and two picked out from a bookmobile.

Old money

A $500,000 donation establishing the Virginia Brown Fellowship for Aging and Stroke Research in the Department of Geriatric Medicine has been donated by Brown’s estate. The fellowship, meant to benefit the growing elderly population, will fund research on the aging process, dementia and the relationship between care and outcomes across age and ethnicity. Brown’s husband, Richard P. Brown, formerly chaired the board of Penn’s Health System and currently serves as a University Trustee and member of the Advisory Board of Penn’s Institute on Aging.