PennGreen, an environmentally focused pre-orientation program offered to select incoming University of Pennsylvania freshmen, will begin August 30.

The four-day program will provide the students with an environmental introduction to the University and Philadelphia and offer them a chance to form relationships with peers interested in environmental activism.

Participants will meet faculty, learn about campus recycling and Penn building projects that are designed to meet the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards, volunteer at a local urban farm, partake in and learn about how the community participates in the sustainable food and living movement and take an ecological river tour among other activities.

The 36 incoming students will be under the direction of Chuck Brutsche, associate director of the Fox Leadership Program, and will work with 14 upper-classmen who are members of the Penn Environmental Group or are involved in some way with the green movement at Penn, including senior Laura Boudreau.

“We learned during last year’s PennGreen sessions that everyone takes something individually out of the experience, something they will find they will be motivated to pursue and enjoy,” Boudreau said.

Boudreau said the program will provide the students a day at Penn’s Morris Arboretum, where the group will tour the building site for Penn’s first LEED platinum-certified building. A trip to the Blue Mountain Recycling Center or a chat with former Philadelphia sustainability guru Mark Allen Hughes is next on the schedule, as are visits to both Millcreek Farm, an urban farm in West Philadelphia, and the organic Charlestown Farm in Chester County.

They’ll also have breakfast with senior administrators where they will hear about a variety of Penn sustainability initiatives before traveling to the Harrisburg area by bus for a canoe trip and ecological tour of the Harrisburg urban watershed in which the students can learn what is being done to preserve the Susquehanna River.

PennGreen is sponsored by Penn’s Office of the Provost, the Undergraduate Assembly, the Division of Facilities and Real Estate Services, the Trustees’ Council of Penn Women and the Earth and Environmental Science Department.

Visit the PennGreen webpage for more information.