Tau Beta Pi

PET Tampa, Personal Energy Transportation Workshop

We have been given the opportunity to help the lame walk, so to speak. With workshops across the country, PET International has been granting the gift of mobility to those who would otherwise be without since the mid-nineties. Tampa is home to one such site in which wheelchairs are built and the resulting PETs are offered to ones most in need. 

But, you may ask, what constitutes a PET? 

P.E.T. is an acronym for a Personal Energy Transportation vehicle. The PET was originally conceived to provide mobility to victims of land mines, polio, and other calamities that limit the ability to walk. Each PET vehicle is a sturdy hand cranked wheelchair built to withstand demanding off-road terrain. The basic construction is wood and specially formed metal components. PETs are built in many workshops around the world, and shipped to those who are in need of a transportation vehicle that accommodates full or partial impairment. 

The PET Project began in 1995 as a ministry for those in greatest need of mobility. The PET Project ministry continues growing to serve the overwhelming needs in some of the most desperate places in the world. The majority of the gifts of mobility have been the three-wheeled, hand-cranked wheelchairs now affectionately called "PETs". 

Beginning with innovations, and after many modifications and renovations, PET International remains an incredible outreach to the world and an opportunistic collaboration effort in the Tampa Bay area. The PET Workshop here opened in 2004 and, the following year, was relocated to Faith Baptist Church in South Seminole Heights. 

Generating a few dozen units a month, the workshop hosts various student, corporate and civic groups. Over forty first-time volunteers serve at the PET every month.

Tau Beta Pi is the only engineering honor society representing the entire engineering profession. It is the nation's second oldest honor society, founded at Lehigh University by Edwards H. Williams Jr. in 1885 to recognize students of exemplary character and distinguished scholarship. There are now collegiate chapters at 234 US colleges and universities, active alumnus chapters in 16 regions across the United States and a total initiated membership of 500,883.

The University of South Florida has been home to the Florida Gamma chapter of Tau Beta Pi since this third Florida chapter started in 1974.  Becoming a part of so prestigious a society with the Fall 2010 initiate class has proved an incredible opportunity, with so many direction in which to travel.  Currently, I am serving as Events Chair for the USF chapter.

PET International Project