Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections

The Beaver Times reported on the progress being made the Wild Waterways Conservancy, a Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections Regional grant recipient. (more…)

Imagine a historical map of the women’s rights movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, and Pat Ulbrich sees a line across the nation, linked by three well-known hubs of activity.

“Everybody knows New York was,” a hub of the movement’s mobilization, says Ulbrich. “Everyone knows Chicago, and L.A. But when you say that ‘Pittsburgh was the fourth hub’ – people don’t know that. But there were extraordinary things that happened here, and extraordinary people.”

When Ulbrich moved to Pittsburgh in the 1990s, she was immediately struck by “how far behind women were, compared to other regions of the country,” and when she left academia in 1995, she made it her personal mission to make Western Pennsylvania a better place for women to live in. While maintaining a position as visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, Ulbrich took her skills as a feminist sociologist into the community, working on issues such as the introduction of routine domestic-violence screening into rural areas and serving as the founding President of the Women and Girls Foundation. Along the way, she quickly discovered the rich history of the women’s movement in this region – and, paradoxically, that history’s absence from the standard canon.

“When you read histories of the women’s movement, Pittsburgh is never mentioned,” says Ulbrich. “It’s important to tell the story so that it becomes a part of the national history, but also so that this 250th anniversary [of Pittsburgh] includes [the legacy of] women who acted as change agents.”

Ulbrich’s answer to this historical paradox is In Sisterhood: The Women’s Movement in Pittsburgh, an oral history project, supported by a Community Connections Regional grant, for which Ulbrich and her team have been interviewing, filming, and photographing main players of the Pittsburgh women’s movement from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s. The result is not only an important set of archival documents, but beginning this October, a series of multi-media presentations telling the stories of the women’s movement in Pittsburgh – and how it affected women across the country.

Press-ing Issues

Less than 40 years ago, when Pittsburghers such as Gerald Gardner and JoAnn Evansgardner (both of whom are subjects of In Sisterhood interviews) opened a copy of the Pittsburgh Press to check the want-ads, they would find two sections: “Jobs – Male Interest,” and “Jobs – Female Interest.” The difference was stark. An example from one Press listing, from January 4, 1970 (exhibited in court documents), shows women’s jobs maxing out at salaries that amount to a mid-range men’s position, in one case offering over 50% more salary for men than women for the same position.

Gerald Gardner and JoAnn Evansgardner, however, weren’t typical Press readers. They were a part of Pittsburgh’s chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), founded in the late 1960s by Wilma Scott Heide, a Connellsville native who later went on to be one of three national NOW presidents from the Pittsburgh region.

“What Heide did brilliantly was to translate the national issues of NOW to the local level,” says Ulbrich. “One of the things they were really focusing on were women in the labor force,” and with Pittsburgh being a labor town, the city was an obvious choice to take a stand.

When the Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations adopted a policy of non-discrimination based on sex, thanks in part to Heide’s mobilization of the nascent women’s rights movement Pittsburgh NOW saw an opportunity. Gardner and Evansgardner – both of whom are subjects of In Sisterhood interviews – filed a complaint with the Commission. But a reluctant Press, buoyed by other newspapers and affiliated organizations, appealed the Commission’s repeated court victories all the way to the Supreme Court.

On June 21, 1973, the Court ruled in favor of upholding the ban on sex discrimination, putting an end to sex-typed hiring advertisement.

“That set the national precedent,” says Ulbrich. “It [had been] blatant gender discrimination. And I don’t think people today understand how blatant. Just reading it in a book – I don’t think you can really understand. But in these video oral histories, you can really get a picture of peoples stories – that these are not isolated incidents.”

Tales for a New ERA

The Pittsburgh Press case will form the first short-video story that In Sisterhood will tell – to debut in October, when the PA Governor’s Conference for Women is held in Pittsburgh. Other stories and interviewees will discuss the founding of Pittsburgh Action Against Rape (PAAR), only the second rape-victim’s advocacy organization in the country, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Women’s Studies program – another second in the nation. (Both were founded in 1972.)

“In 1977 [KNOW, Inc., the country’s first feminist press] documented that there were 48 feminist organizations in Southwestern Pennsylvania,” says Ulbrich. “I’m looking at the ones that were really cutting edge – and what prompted those people to start them.” Recent events have shown how vital it is for In Sisterhood’s work to be done immediately. On June 25, Jean Witter – former president of the Pittsburgh chapter of NOW, and the author of a historic 1979 legal opinion regarding the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) – died at age 80. “We had invited her to [be interviewed],” says Ulbrich, and she had agreed to participate. “I had a story about the ERA that I really wanted to tell as the second video,” says Ulbrich, “and she was the only surviving person who could tell that story. I’ll just have to find another way.”

Ulbrich hopes that the stories of people like Witter, Heide, Gardner, Evansgardner, and many others, can not only provide important historical information on the region’s contribution to the women’s movement, but perhaps inspire a new generation of activists. In addition to a series of multi-media exhibitions on college campuses, Ulbrich hopes to take In Sisterhood deeper into the community in 2009, with exhibitions throughout the region.

“I want to make this accessible to school kids,” says Ulbrich. “They’ll find it inspiring, I think, that people from right here in Pittsburgh – people from working-class backgrounds – were these kind of change agents.”

Turn right onto Pittsburgh Street in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, and tick off a mental checklist of the reasons people give for walking in this, the era of the three-car garage: health, weight loss, the price of gas, the environment – a litany of self- and world-betterment calculations.

A few hundred yards further on sits “God’s Feeding Place,” a house-turned-church whose designation comes not from a spire or bell, but from hand-painted lettering on its solitary window: “Come 3 p.m. Sun. and be fed / Both of the Physical and SPIRITUAL bread / of Life.” God’s Feeding Place isn’t on the new Connellsville Heritage Trail walking tour – nor should it be: it has little in common with the century-old historical sites on that circuit. But this tiny wonder of hope and self-sacrifice would never register a blip from the car window. Perhaps it’s a different reason to get out of the car and off the bike; as the contemporary British poet of pedestrianism, Iain Sinclair, says, “the whole point was to walk … and thereby suck out information slowly and gradually from the ground.”

A range of projects supported by Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections are using the simple act of walking to link people together and reintroduce them to their communities. Grassroots projects such as the 2008 Walkers Festival in Allegheny County, which is creating community walking groups, promoting walking for better health, and The Main Street Classic Walk / Run for the Homeless in Uniontown, which will use walking as a means to raise awareness and funding for homelessness in Fayette county, are bringing people closer together with their neighbors and fellow members of their community.

Other projects are using walking to connect people to the landscapes and cityscapes of Southwestern Pennsylvania. In Armstrong County, the Roaring Run Watershed Association secured a Grassroots grant to create a brochure with trail maps and information about environmental action in the area, and in Bedford County, a Grassroots grant is helping to construct a trail along the Juniata River and into Old Bedford Village, connecting Bedford’s tourist destinations by footpath.

From a tramp around a photogenic rural trail that also serves to protect our waterways, to historic hikes in towns you may have only ever driven through in the past, like Bridgewater, Connellsville or Waynesburg, Community Connections is helping people around the region to create new ways of seeing their environments – on foot.

Mine Control

Rebecca Slak stands a few feet back from the edge of a ravine, looking at the colors. There’s the dusty blacktop of Tanoma Road, the kind of Indiana County country lane that seems as much part of the landscape as forest or farm; there’s the green glint of rain-slickened long grass and the bed of the ravine – a rusty red more befitting Crayola than countryside.

“Anyone who grew up in the Pittsburgh area before about the mid-‘80s, they know these colors,” says Slak, pointing to the gusher of rust water spurting from the ground a hundred yards below us. “The rivers were brown.”

This gusher is comprised of water pumped out by natural pressure from an abandoned mine, deep beneath our feet. The water’s metallic tint is from the tons of iron it has absorbed from the mine, which then flows down into Crooked Creek – a tributary of the Allegheny. By the time the Allegheny River hits Kittanning, the iron below has entered the region’s water supplies.

Or at least it would, but for a relatively simple, beautifully natural, passive treatment system. A quarter of a mile from Tanoma Road, just off the idyllic Rayne Church Road, Slak leads me on a walk through tall grass and over small streams around three ponds, each almost unnoticeably lower than the previous. The Evergreen Conservancy, a non-profit organization on whose board Slak sits, owns the Tanoma wetlands, and the path she’s trodding will soon be open to the public, signposted to explain the way the wetlands’ work.

Slak explains that water is directed from the old mine into the first pond, eventually to trickle through all three, during which the natural actions of native wetlands vegetation helps to remove metals from the water. The entire process is natural and simple, and requires almost no upkeep – current work being done on the system that pipes water into the ponds is the first upkeep in ten years. Yet even here in Indiana County, where coal is king, this kind of Abandoned Mine Drainage (AMD) system is little understood, even by the people it impacts the most.

“People who live in this area, traditionally worked in mining,” says Slak, a Western PA native recently returned to the area. “They’ve benefitted, of course, from the profits, but they’ve also borne the brunt of its [side effects]. The energy produced gets sold on, but the air quality, water pollution, that all stays here.”

The Evergreen Conservancy was established four years ago; in 2006, ownership of the wetlands site was transferred to the all-volunteer organization. With help from a Community Connections Grassroots grant, the Conservancy has now begun the process of cutting trails and designing signage to lead visitors around the ponds, explain the AMD process and teach about regional flora and fauna.

Standing at the edge of the ponds, ducks skirting the water, cattails swaying in the breeze, it’s easy to conjure a subtle sublimity: This AMD process, when mechanized and performed by a chemical method, is expensive and difficult, yet these mere ponds of cattails can do the same job, naturally, calmly.

Right Here in River City

Valentine Brkich’s relation to Beaver County history is more than a hobby – it’s in the beams of his Bridgewater home, and it’s in his blood. Brkich’s grandfather spent nearly four decades as mayor of Bridgewater – Brkich now lives in the house his grandfather built; the one his father was raised in. But while his love for and pride in Bridgewater and Beaver County is obvious to anyone, Brkich sees it as a trait missing from too many local residents.

“I have a big interest in getting people to take pride in this community,” says Brkich. “To recognize the treasures they have. So I wanted to take these [Beaver County] river towns, bring attention to them, and connect them.”

Towards that goal, Brkich – a published memoirist who is currently finishing a history of Bridgewater – has concocted the Beaver County River Town Community Walking Maps project, creating a map for each of ten communities along the Ohio and Beaver rivers illustrating a walking tour of that town’s history and amenities. With support from a Community Connections Grassroots grant, Brkich has designed walks of varying lengths for each of the ten communities – including Beaver, Rochester, Monaca, and others. The walks combine the town’s downtown area and historical sites, plus a brief historical overview of the town. While Brkich himself has assembled the histories, choosing the walking routes and points of interest have been a collaborative effort with the downtown-partnership organizations of each town, linking the river towns in a very palpable way.

But while history, commercial-district revitalization, and even the health benefits of walking all play their part in Brkich’s project, perhaps his loftiest goal is something less tangible: Reclaiming the ground he and his neighbors inhabit, together, by walking it.

“One of the things that has taken away the community aspect of our towns is that people don’t walk,” says Brkich. “It used to be that, if you lived in Bridgewater, you walked to the store, you talked to your neighbors on the porch, you passed people on the street. You walked to stores on your streets in your town – and because of that, you knew things. Because we have these walkable downtowns, these river towns still have that opportunity.”

Greene Buildings

“Gateway to the West” is a historical title with many contenders: Pittsburgh, of course, and St. Louis, with its famous arch. But according to Waynesburg native Mary Beth Pastorius, her Greene County hometown was the first launching pad for westward expansion.

“Greene County was really the road to the West,” says Pastorius, a Waynesburg property owner and committed preservationist. “A lot of people in Greene County are proud of their pioneer heritage, and we have wonderful genealogical resources – there’s a great historical understanding of the people. What we want to do is spread that to the buildings.”

When he bought the piece of land that would become Waynesburg, 18th-century pioneer Thomas Slater referred to his plot as “Eden.” That acreage that became Waynesburg has retained its historical foothold, and now stands as a remarkably dense grouping of historical architecture, with fine examples of High Victorian Italianate, Georgian revival, and other 19th- and early-20th-century architectural styles. Over 600 Waynesburg structures, both commercial and residential, are on Pennsylvania’s historic register.

With Rediscovering Eden: The Historic Waynesburg Walking Tour, Pastorius hopes that Waynesburg residents can, perhaps, re-appropriate their own neighborhood, and find a new sense of their own history, and pride in their community.

“There’s an educational objective,” says Pastorius, “to help both the local residents and visitors appreciate and understand the importance of this architecture. A third of the [downtown] district is on the national [historic] register, but there’s a huge disconnect in understanding the significance of this district.”

The walking tour’s brochures include original artwork done by Greene County artist Kyle Hallam, who has taken the bold step of adding color to historic images (photos and drawings) of Waynesburg buildings. (The image at the top of this article is of Waynesburg’s Messenger Building.)

Pastorius believes that , in doing so, Waynesburg begin using its greatest asset –its history and architecture – to draw people back into downtown Waynesburg.

“[We want] to create Waynesburg as a destination,” says Pastorius. “It’s a basic marketing principle: You can’t be known for everything, so what’s special about [your town]? For us, it’s that streetscape.”

Trail Mix

Outside of Michael Edwards’ house on Pittsburgh Street back in Connellsville, the turn-of-the-last-century home of First National Bank Vice President Porter S. Newmyer, a freestanding sign is posted, explaining the history of the block’s grand historic homes. It’s easy to see why Edwards and his partner moved here from Washington, D.C., seven years ago – the Newmyer house is the kind of property that would command multiple millions of dollars in a bustling city’s market. “We drove up one day from D.C. to take a look at it,” says Edwards. “We didn’t even stay the night,” before deciding to move.

Edwards has since devoted most of his time to helping Connellsville emerge from a post-industrial-boom slumber that’s lasted decades, with projects like the Connellsville Cultural Trust and the Main Street Program. With the Connellsville Heritage Trail, a two-mile walking tour of the town including 11 informational signs at historic locations, Connellsville hopes to take advantage of other D.C.-to-Pittsburgh travelers – this time, however, they won’t be coming in cars.

“Connellsville is the only [sizeable] town where the [Great Allegheny Passage] bike trail passes right through the town,” says Edwards. “We want to get people off the trail, and into town.”

Pedestrian Crossing

Walk Connellsville, and you can almost feel a common weight shouldered by the Western Pennsylvania ground beneath your feet – a land struggling to cope with its own history. Like the grand homes of Pittsburgh Street, contrasted by closed storefronts less than a mile away – the same lingering imprint of industrial boom times you see in Waynesburg or Bridgewater; the same environmental history from which Evergreen Conservancy is wresting Tanoma’s wetlands. But just as it’s hard to understand that legacy without walking its trails, it’s only on foot that one can fully understand the efforts of the region’s people to grapple with these issues – and to use their past to benefit their future.

A hot Pittsburgh summer evening, dusk falling; 40 m.p.h. on Liberty Ave., Strip District: Tim Meehan points emphatically at a PAT bus shelter.

“That’s it! That’s the one – the poster that started this!”

Plastered on the side of the bus shelter is a photograph of a naked woman, cropped to nothing but a headless torso, her black-gloved hands covering her chest in a risqué cross, implying the nickname of a local radio station. (We’ll call her “Madame X,” all apologies to John Singer Sargent.)

Later that evening, Tim Meehan and Dan Vogel – two of the Pittsburgh artists behind impromptu art school The Academy of the South Side – stand at another city bus shelter, this time at the corner of Penn Ave. and Main St. in Lawrenceville, before another image encased behind bus shelter glass. Tom Mosser’s colorful, impressionistic portrait of Pittsburgh-born playwright August Wilson is by no means comparable to Madame X, but the two are linked in ways beyond just their common gallery, the cityscape of Pittsburgh itself: Advertisement, it turns out, proved to be inspiration for the art show.

“Tim passed one of those ads in a bus shelter,” says Dan Vogel of the radio-station ad. “It was so tacky, and he just thought, ‘why can’t there be something beautiful there?’”

The answer appeared across the city this June in the form of Citywide Salon, a show of 19 local artists’ work displayed in bus shelters sponsored by a Community Connections Grassroots grant. On a recent trip around the month-long show, driving a circuitous route from the South Side to Lawrenceville, Bloomfield to Oakland, Meehan and Vogel mapped the course that led to Citywide Salon – and, with a little luck, will lead back that way again.

Academic Pursuit: Opening a new school

At the intersection of Cherry Way and Boulevard of the Allies, Cory Bonnet’s “Gold Light: Pittsburgh” feels like an introduction; a handshake. Its impressionistic haze of hues and light lies somewhere between that of an optimistic summer’s morning, and the thick fug of history that hangs just out of reach in our city’s air. Across the street sits the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (housed in the old Equitable Gas building).

It was there that, at a friend’s art-show opening, Vogel and Meehan first struck on the idea for The Academy of the South Side.

“We were looking at this building, this amazing building,” says Vogel, “and we just said, ‘wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was something for [contemporary] realist painting that’s like [the Art Institute] is for graphic design?’”

Less than a year later, The Academy of the South Side opened, offering classes and live-model sessions to anyone interested in drawing and painting technique and theory, taught by Vogel, Meehan and other local artists at the South Side art space the Brew House. (Meehan is a resident and board member at The Brew House Association.)

Gimme Shelter(s): Navigating the city’s artists and street corners

Most mornings, Dan Vogel waits for a bus at the South Side corner of East Carson and 24th Streets. “I knew I wanted this one here, where I’ll see it every day,” Vogel says, looking at Pittsburgh artist Moze’s “Monkey Don’ts,” a painting illustrating the iconic see/hear/speak-no-evil monkeys. It’s what Vogel might call a “waiting” spot, as opposed to a “driving” spot: a bus-shelter location with high bus-rider traffic, as opposed to one visible from the road, at which the painting might be seen by drivers.

“That’s how I see these [locations] now,” Vogel says, “in terms of traffic, ridership – it’s a whole different way of looking [at the city].”

The Academy of the South Side started here with a bus-shelter ad purchased on Carson Street to announce their initial round of classes a few years back, funded by a Sprout Fund Seed Award. But more important than the classroom traffic that ad drew was the eye-opening possibilities of this citywide canvas: At less than $300 for a month-long rental, including the creation of a shelter-wall sized poster of their artwork, Vogel and Meehan realized how easily one could parlay a small grant into a Citywide Salon.

With a Community Connections Grassroots award, the Academy had enough to pay for 19 ad spaces for a month and began the process of accepting submissions and choosing shelter spaces. The initial idea of using just the city’s zig-zag 54C route quickly fell by the wayside – too many low-traffic, low-visibility stops would, as Vogel points out, leave many artists feeling short changed. The group eventually chose 19 high-visibility stops, and 19 artists (out of over 80 submissions).

Besides just quality work, Vogel says, “we looked for artwork that was somehow Pittsburgh-related, and that would [complement] the neighborhood it would be in, when possible.”

In the Eyes of August: Looking forward to a new cityscape

August Wilson stares out onto the intersection of Penn and Main in Lawrenceville. Perhaps it’s less appropriate than, say, the Hill District that Wilson so elegantly memorialized. But somehow, with Tom Mosser’s “The Eyes of August” staring out at it, the nearby gas station takes on a theatrical turn, its customers entering and exiting from a landscape altered by Wilson’s portrait’s gaze into a local artist’s very public gallery space.

This kind of subtle artistic imposition on the landscape is Citywide Salon’s result; its legacy just might be a constant swirl of such work. Now that they know how to do it, Vogel and Meehan say, the possibilities seem endless.

“It’d be great to really plaster one neighborhood, one route,” says Meehan. “We’re hoping that, if we can get the grant money, we’ll be able to buy 30 ads, which could really create a [critical mass] in a neighborhood.”

“We’re trying to take ‘fine art’ into the street,” says Vogel. “I suppose that the medium is actually [Warholian], kind of pop, even if the art isn’t. We want to show people: this isn’t just gallery art.”

The history of Southwestern Pennsylvania has always been one of a people looking forward with a creative and industrious spirit—from the founding of Fort Pitt 250 years ago, to the medical and technological breakthroughs of the 21st century. When the Allegheny Conference on Community Development began planning to celebrate the region’s 250th anniversary, the organization knew it had to do so with that same forward-looking spirit.

The Conference charged a committee of regional representatives with a mission: To build a program that would actively engage the people of Southwestern Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh 250. Community Connections was developed to create relationships, provide community engagement opportunities, and spur regional pride through an innovative grantmaking model that ultimately funded 100 projects across 14 counties of Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Community Connections engaged the citizens of Southwestern Pennsylvania in a pioneering process to create, streamline, and invest $1 million in a diverse array of community projects. Each month in Making the Connections, we’ll take a closer look at the story behind Community Connections.

We’re All Deciders: The community decisionmaking process

Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections project ideas were spawned at community-based events, their participants based not on job titles or tax status, but by community wants and needs. So when it came time, in the fall of 2007, to decide which projects should be chosen to receive support, it would’ve been counterproductive to return to a method that might emphasize grant-writing over community needs.

“It was essential that the decisionmaking process create opportunities for local perspectives,” says Cathy Lewis Long, executive director of The Sprout Fund. “Butler County representatives needed to consider Butler County applications, for example. And, in the same way, Regional applications needed to be reviewed through a regional lens by the panel of decisionmakers. This type of decentralized decisionmaking ensured that the process was representative of all 14 counties of the region.”

That’s why The Sprout Fund called in, amongst dozens of others, Minnette Seate. As senior producer at WQED-TV, Seate is no stranger to the grassroots, non-profit world. But Seate possessed another trait that made her perfect to act as a member of the Regional project decionmaking panel: She’s no sucker for jargon.

“I brought a lot of my own baggage to the [decisionmaking] table,” says Seate. “Though I suppose I should call it ‘perspective.’ I tried to be as even-handed as possible – but with a heaping teaspoon of reality.”

In order to facilitate the review of funding applications with an approach similar to the initial stages of Community Connections – a grassroots approach, rather than the normal “top-down” funding approach – the community decisionmaking process took on a multi-pronged format. Grassroots project applications – those requesting $5,000 or less – in counties outside of Allegheny were routed through panels of seven to 11 decisionmakers chosen from each county, reflective of that county’s demographic makeup.

Each county’s decisionmakers rated project proposals based on criteria provided by The Sprout Fund, including projected impact on the community and intended audience, contributions to goals such as connecting communities and civic engagement, and of course, feasibility for success. Then, at decisionmaking forums held in each county, those applications were discussed and the funding decisions made.

The volume of applications received in Allegheny County and for the Regional grants called for an even more in-depth process. More than 230 applications were submitted for the 12 Regional grants, those around the $50,000 mark. And in Allegheny County, over 140 applicants were vying for only 24 possible Grassroots grants. In those two situations, Community Connections needed a process that ensured those numbers could be dealt with thoroughly and with appropriate community input.

So before a project’s application was reviewed by decisionmakers in Allegheny County or for Regional grants, The Sprout Fund called in a number of experts in each field to review and “grade” those applications. In total, 75 expert reviewers from fields as diverse as education and agriculture, government and environmentalism, were brought in to help identify the projects with the highest potential for successful impact. One of those reviewers, looking in particular at neighborhood development projects, was Wanda Wilson.

“I reviewed quite a few projects basically in two categories,” says Wilson, program officer for the Pittsburgh Partnership for Neighborhood Development (PPND). “There was a cluster of projects that wanted to improve a playground at a school, or build a parklet in a community – neighbohood-park improvement projects. And another cluster of projects that wanted to document the history of a neighborhood.”

Wilson’s experience as an expert reviewer illustrates the importance of objective analysis to the community decisionmaking process. Because of her experience at PPND, Wilson was able to identify projects that were duplicative of efforts already underway in area neighborhoods, as well as what types of projects were most feasible for success with the funds and tools the Community Connections grant would provide.

“I evaluated projects against the criteria [Sprout] provided, which really led to projects that would have an impact on the [specific] community and also meet these broader goals,” says Wilson. “I read a lot of grant proposals in my job, and at this point – I can tell what’s strategic, and what’s feasible.”

Once proposals were examined and rated by the expert reviewers according the Community Connections evaluation standards, The Sprout Fund was able to compile the top tier of reviewed proposals and provide them to the decisionmaking panels.

Decisionmaking panels chose the funded projects for Allegheny County Grassroots grants in same manner as the other community decisionmaking panels. But for the Regional grant distributions, a further step was added: At the Regional decisionmaking forum held in Pittsburgh, in December of 2007, the 24 strongest Regional grant candidates – as chosen by Regional decisionmakers from all counties, out of the expert-reviewed proposals – presented their ideas live before the decisionmakers. After which, discussion ensued, and projects were chosen.

Lawrence County Tourist Promotion Agency’s Executive Director JoAnn McBride served as one of the decisionmakers on the Regional grants panel. Through that, she felt, she was able to make a positive impact not just for Lawrence County, but to keep Community Connections’ goal of being a truly regional initiative in sight.

“I thought all the projects we chose were really good,” says McBride, “but I’m really glad that the Mobile Agricultural Education Lab got funded. The agricultural industry is left out of a lot of things in our communities these days, so I really [took a stand] for that one, and I feel like I had an impact. The rural communities around Pittsburgh – we’re in constant contact, and we’re used to this compromise. Sometimes people feel like Pittsburgh bullies their way through, but in this process, every county got something – it was a big regional effort, and I felt honored to be there.”

At the Regional decisionmaking forum, Fellows from the Coro Center for Civic Leadership mediated small group discussions. To mediator and Coro alumnus Sujata Shyam, the program was not only successful in its function as a decisionmaking system, but in revealing the extent of the Pittsburgh region’s commitment to community progress.

“The process was amazing to see,” says Shyam. “The presentations by finalists, the round-table discussions, and the final large group discussion – it was an impressive operation to bring this large group of leaders to consensus. Having recently moved to Pittsburgh from San Francisco, I was inspired by the projects that made it to the regional forum. It offered a fantastic perspective on civic engagement in the region.”

The decisionmaking panels obviously had a huge impact on the entire Pittsburgh 250, deciding which of the hundreds of project applications would be funded during 2008. But Minnette Seate points out that this process also helped Community Connections reach its ultimate goal: To bring the community and grassroots leaders of Southwestern Pennsylvania a little bit closer to one another.

“I got a huge eye-opening as to how [provincial] I can be,” says Seate. “You forget sometimes that other people out there aren’t just people who vote and dress a different way from you, they want the same basic things for their communities that I do, but maybe with a different dressing on it.”

In May of 2005, filmmaker Chris Ivey stood, camera to eye, as the East Mall Tower high rise in East Liberty came crashing to the ground. It’s a vital moment in recent Pittsburgh history: The true beginning of “Eastside,” the re-envisioning of East Liberty and its surrounding environs into a new kind of place. Since that day in 2005, Ivey has released two installments of East of Liberty: A Story of Good Intentions, a documentary series following the changes in that neighborhood. With a Community Connections Grassroots grant to set up outdoor screenings of his film in predominantly African-American Pittsburgh communities later this summer, and parts three and four both under development right now, Ivey’s time is at a premium. But we managed to squeeze an introduction out of him for this month’s Q&A.

What is East of Liberty?

It’s a documentary about East Liberty, dealing with race, class and gentrification. The first chapter really dealt with the displaced tenants who lived in the East Liberty high rises – focusing on race and class as the redevelopment really ramped up. But during that time, while I was waiting for them to get into new housing, I started filming what was happening in some of the businesses. So the second chapter deals more with the businesses in the area – but still with regards to race, class and gentrification. This is a nationwide question – even international, like in London [regarding the redevelopment for the 2012 Olympics]. But since I’m here, I’m going to focus here. And I’ve really gotten to show that, yeah, race and [social] class have a lot to do with it, but when you get down to it, it’s just about who’s got the money and who doesn’t.

What’s the reason behind the community screenings?

It was really a struggle with the first part, getting the tenants to open up. The media, in their opinion, will always make you look bad – and that’s true. For the past two years, I’ve been documenting the Day without Violence [summit] at Peabody High School, and there wasn’t any media coverage at all. That’s the whole reason for the neighborhood screenings. One thing I’ve gotten really frustrated with is – 2,700 people have come to see the documentary. Of those 2,700, probably less than 500 were black, and that’s the target audience. So, if they’re not going to come out, I’m going to go to them. I know some local [media] people want to [cover these communities], and it’s frustrating for them. But for one thing, just because I’m black it’s easier for me to get access to those communities – because I am them, so I have [a real opportunity]. It’s all about telling the truth, about getting past that Pittsburgh politeness, and getting people to open up. And this is frank. Showing the documentary outdoors, I’m going to have to put a warning on it – ‘bring the kids, but be warned, they’re going to learn a few new words!’

What comes next for East of Liberty?

I’m editing together a version of Parts One and Two to submit to film festivals, and also for a DVD release. But we’re also filming the third and fourth chapters at the same time. The next chapter is about youth culture and violence, for a late-Fall release, but for that, I’m looking at neighborhood kids citywide, and what’s going on with youth culture around the city – Homewood, Beltzhoover, North Side – though the main part is with Peabody High School kids. I started out there, last year, mainly looking for kids to interview throughout the summer, and I started hearing the stories from these kids. Kids who’re in 9th, 10th grade, trying to stay out of gang culture; trying to duck the bullets, you know? But it’s a citywide issue, and I didn’t want to limit it to just East Liberty kids, because it’s something that’s really got to be addressed while there’s an opportunity. The fourth chapter will be a conclusion to the first one – some sense of closure. There are some happy stories, some good things that happened, but of course some people make it, and some people don’t. A lot of people fall through the cracks, and we’re going to see some really sad stories, too.

The Leader Times reported on the groundbreaking ceremony for Parker City’s Postage Stamp Park, a Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections Grassroots grant recipient. (more…)

In her time as the program manager for Pennsylvania’s Mobile Agriculture-Education labs, Tonya Wible has come to terms with the disconnect in kids’ understanding of agriculture’s role in their lives. Ask an elementary school student where eggs come from, “they say, ‘Foodland,’” says Wible. “What I didn’t anticipate was in rural Adams County - there was an apple orchard outside the classroom, but when I asked the kids, ‘What do you think comes from farms,’ not one kid answered ‘apples.’ They’re losing that connection.” (more…)

The Daily Courier reported on the unveiling of the Mobile Ag Ed Science Lab, a Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections Regional Project. (more…)

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on the status of Greetings from Pittsburgh: Neighborhood Narratives, a Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections Grassroots project. (more…)

The Herald Standard reported on the public art process taking place in Connellsville, PA as part of The Progress Fund’s Trail Town Public Art Project, a Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections Regional Project. (more…)