Whether it’s repainting doors, building a playground or installing fences, each year students from the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity add a little bit more to the Janet Pomeroy Center for the disabled.

For the last 15 years, Pi Kappa Phi men have volunteered time, formed fund raisers and helped to increase awareness for the San Francisco center, recently renamed after its founder.

“When I first came here to SF State, I was never really involved in any type of community service,” said Jose Hernandez, 22, a senior communication studies major. “But since joining the fraternity, I’ve had a great opportunity to give back to the community and volunteer at the Janet Pomeroy Center.”

The Pi Kappa Phi fraternity has worked mostly with the children’s center and is recognized as long time supporters through the countless volunteer hours and yearly projects they have contributed with their national non-profit group, Push America, whose name is displayed on the custom designed playground they installed some 15 years ago.

“There was nothing here before,” said Jay Katz, a social worker with the center, looking out at the playground. “Trees were cut [by Pi Kappa Phi], plants planted, they even made the paths winding through.”

Omar Alcala, 21, a senior at SF State, said he wouldn’t give fraternities a chance before and always thought of them as those typical, “frat” boys, who like to do nothing more than to party.

“Whenever someone mentioned the word, ‘fraternity,’ the first things that would come to mind were the images I saw in movies such as "Animal House", "Revenge of the Nerds" and "Old School", which made fraternities seem like a group of individuals who didn’t care about helping others,” Alcala said.

But after learning about the fraternity’s community work with the Janet Pomeroy center, he said it completely changed his views.

Now Alcala is currently his chapter's “Push” Chairman and, along with his fraternity brothers, continues the 15-year-old tradition of helping the Janet Pomeroy center for their chapter in San Francisco as well as continuing the 30 year-old national effort for the fraternity’s history in philanthropy.

“What drew me to this fraternity, was the fact that it serves children with disabilities and for someone who has worked with children for about a decade, I’ve always respected that aspect of the fraternity,” he said.

Every year Push America trains over 200 members of Pi Kappa Phi on disability awareness issues and how they can spread the message of acceptance and understanding to their local communities, according to their Website.

The SF State chapter of the fraternity collaborates with the Janet Pomeroy center and sets up events, baseball games, carnivals, and barbecues and sometimes joins in to help out with the center’s after-school program’s classroom activities.

For more than 50 years, the center has served the community’s children and adults with disabilities. They help integrate the disabled community into society by working on developing independence and everyday life skills. In addition to after school programs, they hold summer day camps, therapeutic recreation, vocational rehabilitation and adult vocational programs.

Pi Kappa Phi plans projects every year to continually improve the center and this year helped make way for new padded patio floors. They ripped out the old and damaged flooring that was cemented down with heavy-duty industrial glue. It was a difficult task that required prying, hauling and eventually resorting to heavy machinery, according to Terry Gross, Master Teacher at the center, who oversees the after-school program’s class curriculum and activities.

“We almost called them back to put the tiles down but we thought they had already worked so hard,” Gross said.

Last year the fraternity helped the center by building a new piece on the playground and acquiring a grant that helped fund the center’s annual summer events and outings.

“We’re a non-profit, so we’re limited on the money we have,” Gross said. “We use a lot of the money for these programs five and a half weeks of day camp, 50-70 kids, supplies.”

Gross said the money goes on to help increase the number of spaces available for the summer day camp events and the miscellaneous activities they set up throughout the year.

“[It’s] not just us [the staff], but the kids really appreciate it,” he said.

The Pi Kappa Phi members volunteer most of their time in the spring semester due to better weather conditions but conduct their fund raising events during the fall.

The next fund raising event is planned for Monday October 29th at the Malcolm X center on campus, where members of the fraternity will spend the afternoon pedaling on stationary bikes to help raise awareness for the Janet Pomeroy center and Push America.
“[Pi Kappa Phi volunteers] are a wonderful group of young men,” Katz said. “As the years go on, the character and energy delivered by the fraternity is equaled each year.”