Erin Trithart found it difficult to readjust to a small-town lifestyle after she moved home to Kittanning from Baltimore two years ago.

So when Downtown Kittanning, Inc. started showing free movies once a month on a large screen at Riverfront Park, Trithart was excited.

“I think it’s a great way for family and friends to spend a nice evening out in the park,” she said.

Downtown Kittanning Inc. began the venture this summer after receiving a $5,000 grant as part of a 250th anniversary celebration throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania in 2008. Projects and activities are being held in 14 counties all year in conjunction with Pittsburgh 250 — a regional celebration of the naming of Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Read the full article here.

Henry Clay Frick probably never imagined DJs pumping up the crowd in his crown jewel Downtown shopping arcade.

But that’s what happened Saturday night during Hothouse, a gala benefit for the Sprout Fund at the ornate Union Trust Building.

The Garfield nonprofit organization gives grants to support public art projects and other civic engagement initiatives.

More than 2,000 guests were expected, plunking down $50 a head — half that for students — to dance to local music acts; chow down on food and drink from dozens of local restaurants, bakeries and breweries; and browse a showcase of nearly 50 Sprout Fund-supported projects.

…

The Unseam’d Shakespeare Company presented vignettes from its summer sellout revival of “Out of This Furnace,” a story of Slovak steelworkers in Braddock based on the 1941 novel by Thomas Bell.

Filmmaker Chris Ivey showed an installment of his ongoing documentary series “East of Liberty.” The films deal with gentrification of Pittsburgh’s eastern neighborhoods and its effect on black residents there.

Partyers got a sneak preview of a large sculpture that is to be unveiled this fall along a riverfront trail on the South Side. The Industrial Arts Cooperative showed models of the work its artists are building at the former LTV plant in Hazelwood. Its bulky, 20-foot-tall stick figures, representing steelworkers from the city’s industrial past, use beams recycled from the Hot Metal Bridge.

Read the full article here.

Apocryphal, perhaps; historically plausible, no doubt. Walking through the doors of the Cambria County Historical Society’s museum on Sunday, visitors encountered this “folktale,” inscribed on a card and posted near the museum’s entrance, which is appropriate, if tongue-in-cheek. It’s with a similar mission - though from a more populist perspective - that the Society welcomed ‘the natives’ into the magnificent A.W. Buck House that serves as their museum and office. There, scores of visitors were the first to see a new exhibit of artifacts and interpretations of Ebensburg’s history, from the lofty monogrammed place settings of the Ebensburg Inn to the helmets and blackened textiles of the more recent “coal is king” days of Cambria County. And welcoming visitors to the building was the carefully trimmed hedges of the site’s new Victorian-era garden - recreated in detail from period photographs by Kendall-O’Brien, a Pittsburgh-based firm of landscape architects with ties to Ebensburg, with help from a Community Connections Grassroots grant.

The house was purchased by the Society in 1990 - after 50 years as a private home, and 50 years as a convent. In 2000, a Keystone Grant allowed the group to redo the house’s interior - and it shows, particularly in the spectacular music room, with its refinished original floors, and in the stained-glass windows that face out of the sitting room. But the house’s exterior remained staunchly 20^th-century - an annoyance to an organization intent on replication of their mandated era. (A stained-glass window, for example, may soon be changing - a photo has emerged that may show the window’s two parts were transposed at some point.)

“None of the [period] photos show the whole yard, but you get a good picture of it,” says Historical Society Secretary Dave Huber. “But we have an etching of the house from 1890, [with] a lot of detail. There was a courtyard centerpiece, and the whole property had a six-foot tall wrought-iron fence,” which the group has restored.

Much of the garden’s actual flora won’t be fully developed for at least a year or two, to allow it to grow to its potential. But that centerpiece, the replaced courtyard, is there, crowned with an arbor under which visitors now enter, and containing iron benches and lawn urns. The effect is to move the focal point of the museum’s exterior to this courtyard, and to provide it with an outdoor setting for visitors to gather. It also connects the Buck House to Ebensburg’s downtown, just six blocks away.

“We really strived to tie this in to the recent downtown revitalization, which had a Victorian theme,” says Huber. “Similar trees, similar iron work - we’re hoping that will help lead people into the museum from downtown.”

When George Washington and Gen. John Forbes carved the Forbes Trail from Carlisle to Pittsburgh 250 years ago, they crossed present-day Boyce Park in Plum.

That local connection with the French and Indian War will be revisited with a look at 18th-century life in October when the Allegheny Foothills Historical Society presents re-enactments during the weekend of Oct. 4 and 5.

Read more in the full article.

After all, when one thinks of Greene and Fayette counties, it’s not ‘the arts’ that first spring to mind - not in a region known more for the coal and steel than paint and canvas. But in Ralph Jannini’s mind, the way forward for these small riverside communities isn’t so much a radical departure from the present, as a return to the way things were in the past.

“Greensboro’s always been a very arts-centric town,” says Jannini, vice president of the Nat Greene Foundation, as it’s locally known. “Glassware, and then pottery, were the trades here [from the 18th century] until mining took over completely - the last potter in Greensboro was in 1920.”

Jannini himself acts as a good example of what could be Greene County’s future: He comes to Greensboro from Boston, via Pittsburgh, and operates his business - creating unique, hand-crafted statuary for awards ceremonies - from his new home where, “the only noise is the occasional barking dog.”

“All of my work is e-commissioned - I can live anywhere,” says Jannini. “Why not move to an area where I have an improved quality of life?” It’s a lesson he hopes the annual Creative Communities Conference, and its new monthly Second Saturdays series funded by a Community Connections Grassroots grant, can model for Greensboro and other Southwestern PA locations.

“We’re acting as a model [of what] any rural community has in leveraging its natural assets and lower cost of living,” says Jannini. “This is what you have available to you, this is how you can leverage it.”

This year’s conference will provide an interesting array of success stories and advisors experienced with just such a perspective. John Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock, PA, has gained national recognition of his efforts to create a ‘community that focuses on the arts’ (the topic of his discussion at the Conference). Peter Lambert, operator of Millvale-based Red Star Ironworks, was awarded the U.S. Small Business Association’s title of Western PA Entrepreneur of the Year. And the presence of PA State Rep., and Majority Leader, H. William DeWeese, will help produce something Jannini thinks is vital to the progress of building arts-focused communities: confidence in the project’s momentum.

“[Artists] are acquiring buildings and starting businesses,” in Greensboro, Waynesburg, and other Greene and Fayette locations, “because of Nat Greene Foundation’s presence - they feel like it’s building to something. What we’re doing is stimulating ideas and growth by communities outside of us. And that’s the grassroots that [Community Connections] is helping to produce - the idea that there’s more to our livelihood than coal and gas.”

You’ve expressed so much enthusiasm for Interval: Why is a night like that so important?

I can see where it’s leading, and I’m really excited about it. A lot of young people ask me, ‘Where did you discover jazz,’ and I just say, ‘huh?’ It was in the air when I was born; it was the soundtrack of the community. [My generation] was very fortunate to come along at a time when jazz was appreciated, and I want to transmit that experience to the younger generation. Interval is starting to feel like the jazz clubs of the highlight era, where you never knew who was going to walk through the door. I met Miles Davis just standing at the jukebox at the Crawford Grill - I want the young people to have something like that. It’s starting to get that feel - people aren’t there to eat, they’re not even there to meet up with people, they’re there for the music. They’re there to get exposed to the creative act, in vivo. The other throwback is, out on the sidewalk [at Interval], there’s a virtual university going on, with musicians talking about music, and fans talking about music.

Is building those connections one reason you’ve started the online networking site, the Pittsburgh Jazz Network?

Social networking [sites are] really what we musicians have been dreaming of. Jazz music has been changed to a model that’s not part of its tradition - promoters have really been keeping the musicians and audiences separate, and that’s anathema to the music; this isn’t the Symphony. One of the reasons jazz musicians get paid less now - in actual dollars - than we did in the highlight era is that nobody knows what we do! You never see a panel of people talking about music the way they’d dissect the ‘immaculate reception’ or something. We talk about [music] every time we get together, but we haven’t been sharing it in the public eye. Now, if the fans want to get to an artist, they don’t have to go through layers of third parties - on the network, we can go directly to anybody. That’s why my project has morphed to the internet: I thought I was going one direction but now, with Web 2.0, I can manage all of the [photos and histories] online. I can take a picture or a movie in a club and send it right to the site.

What’s the next step for the Pittsburgh Jazz Network?

I have the fortune of being both historically aware, and having been an active participant. I have thousands of photos and tapes - I’ve begun going through Crawford Grill photos, and just that is hours and hours of work. On the Network, I can post things from my archives, and they’re all annotated - the web will take all of that; I am converting photos and tapes to [images and] MP3s. If something were to happen to me, it’d be just like Teenie Harris’s photos [which were never annotated or cataloged in his lifetime]. I know what [these tapes and photos] all are, but there’s no catalog; the catalog is in my head. This project puts it all out there for the world to see.

Parker’s the kind of city beloved by its residents - in this case, all 799 of them - and McCall’s no different. In fact, he’s fallen for Parker enough to take on the task of Parker City Mayor, a job that comes with responsibilities but no paycheck. This summer, he’s overseen the beginnings of a new amenity for Parker: the Community Connections Grassroots-grant supported Postage Stamp Park - no misnomer, according to Mayor McCall.

“It’s small,” chuckles McCall. “But it overlooks the Allegheny River, and it’s a beautiful location to watch the river; to just sit and have a picnic with your neighbors.”

The Postage Stamp Park might be tiny - “two tables, a seven-foot bench, a trash can,” says McCall. But its location makes it more than just a picnic spot, with easy access from the Allegheny River Trail’s hiking and biking opportunities, and from the North Country Trail, a long-distance hiking path that runs through PA near Parker.

Like Parker, Armstrong County is a small Pennsylvania county (population 70,000) with big ideas - enough big ideas, in fact, to garner seven Community Connections Grassroots grant awards. And it couldn’t have come at a better time: With Armstrong only becoming officially counted as a part of the Pittsburgh Metropolitan region in 2003, Pittsburgh 250 is a perfect moment to connect Armstrong County with the rest of the region.

That’s just what the Worthington West Franklin Community Library helped to do with Allegheny Echoes, a Community Connections Grassroots project that saw the Mainstreet Music program come from the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh to four different Armstrong County public libraries in June. The programming uses folk and indigenous music and instruments from the Pennsylvania area to teach about the region’s history. But another aspect of Allegheny Echoes was simply to connect Armstrong to its much larger neighbor down the river.

“Our intention was to bring something from outside the county,” says project coordinator, librarian Timi Kost. “This is a low-income county, and a lot of people aren’t aware of what’s available to them in Pittsburgh, or they can’t afford to go.”

Other Community Connections Grassroots projects taking place in Armstrong County have concentrated on bringing together local communities in similar ways. Sugarcreek Community Day, also held in June, saw the Sugarcreek Community Coalition bring together the small Armstrong County town’s people, along with their nearby neighbors in Clarion and Butler County, to restart a defunct annual celebration of the town’s past and present. Meanwhile, in Apollo, PA, the 100-year-old Apollo Memorial Library is using its Grassroots grant to celebrate its centenary year by reacquainting the Apollo community with its own historical identity.

Whether it’s hiking, biking, or just sitting in the summer sun, Armstrong’s outdoor activities play an important role in the life of the county - or, as Allegheny Echoes’ Timi Kost refers to it, “the forest.” That’s certainly true of Roaring Run Trail and Rock Furnace Trail, two rails-to-trails locations near Apollo, PA. Operated by the Roaring Run Watershed Association, the trails offer miles of hiking or biking tempered by the beautiful - and, ironically, often tranquil - Roaring Run river. With the Watershed Association’s new Roaring Run Natural Area Hiking and Biking Brochure, supported by a Community Connections Grassroots grant, people from around the region and across the state can learn about and navigate the trails, and discover Armstrong’s diverse beauty for themselves.

Another rails-to-trails path, near Freeport, PA, has been designated by the Audubon Society as an “Important Bird Area.” Such a designation, as given to the Buffalo Creek Valley, represents a site that - according to the Audubon Society - “is part of a global network of places recognized for their outstanding value to bird conservation.” Imagine What You Can See Here, a project operated by the Freeport Renaissance Association and funded by a Community Connections Grassroots grant, informs the public of the Buffalo Creek Valley’s designation through signage along the rails-to-trails paths.

Finally, for Spotlight On the Community, we see Armstrong County taking the opportunity to sit back together, as a community, and enjoy the summer evenings. Downtown Kittaning used their Community Connections Grassroots grant to facilitate a series of outdoor film screenings in Kittaning, PA. According to Downtown Kittaning President Marilyn Cressler, the monthly film screenings have proved more successful than they’d ever hoped, with as many as 450 people attending. Local businesses have joined in on the project, financing the licensing fees for more films, and they’ve already added an extra, September date. Based on the response of the community, it seems that Spotlight on the Community will continue on long after 2008.

“People here are excited just to have something fun to do on a Friday night that won’t cost them anything,” says Cressler. “As far as we’re concerned, this is now an annual event for as long as we can see!”

The man Louis Lipps stoops to hand a dollar to is actually Tommy Lafitte, a veteran local actor with credits in a score of major productions, from Dawn of the Dead to Silence of the Lambs and The West Wing, and he’s portraying Steeler Santa for Werner’s short film Tommy and Me. But even that sole fictional aspect of today’s filming isn’t far from the truth. At one point, director Gregory Lehane’s filming is interrupted when the Strip’s infamous sidewalk flute player calls out: “Louis Lipps with another touchdown!”

That’s just the kind of honesty that Tommy and Me wants: The film is about the Strip District, and could only be about the Strip District. And that’s the key to Greetings From Pittsburgh: Neighborhood Narratives, the omnibus feature-film project, supported by a Community connections Grassroots grant, which Tommy and Me is a part of: nine films that exemplify a specific Pittsburgh neighborhood. Together, Neighborhood Narratives’ creators hope, they’ll tell us something about Pittsburgh.

“We’re hoping that each individual film expresses what it really means to be in that particular neighborhood,” says Neighborhood Narratives project co-coordinator Kristen Lauth Shaeffer. “But even though these films aren’t connected in terms of character, or story, we really see the project as a tapestry of Pittsburgh - all those stories combined together [will] come across as a feature film that tells what it means to live in Pittsburgh.”

Last year, Shaeffer and Andrew Halasz were both students finishing MFA’s in film at Chatham College. The two filmmakers already knew they were on the same wavelength - despite Halasz’s fictional-narrative leanings, and Shaeffer’s work on experimental documentary films, each recognized the other to be a good, honest judge of their work. But it was when discussing the 2006 omnibus feature Paris J’Taime - for which a group of famed directors created short pieces about Paris neighborhoods - that they realized it was time to work together.

“Something that really stands out [about Pittsburgh] is that all of the neighborhoods have a unique identity,” says Shaeffer. “So we thought Pittsburgh would be an ideal location for a project like Paris J’Taime. And because it was Pittsburgh 250 - the timing just worked perfectly.”

The pair assembled an advisory committee of well-known local film-world icons - Lightning Over Braddock filmmaker Tony Buba, The Bread, My Sweet director Melissa Martin, and Women in Film and Media Executive Director Faith Dickinson - and began soliciting treatments from any filmmakers who wished to participate. And while they didn’t have much to offer in the way of financial support beyond their Community Connections grant money, Neighborhood Narratives received 30 submissions, from which the advisors chose a promising subset.

Former advertising executive - and unofficial “Mayor of the Strip District” - turned filmmaker Ray Werner at first only submitted his short-story-turned-screenplay Tommy and Me to get some feedback from the readers. But, despite the lack of budget, Werner soon discovered that Neighborhood Narratives had something else to offer.

“At first I thought, ‘it takes some gumption, staking people to produce their own films,’” for such a project, says Werner. “But then I met Kristen and Andrew. I looked into their faces, and - well, they’re caught up in filmmaking. They didn’t have much money - but they had an idea. And I thought, ‘I’ll find a way to do this.’”

That same spirit - a passionate, almost self-sacrificial, attitude towards collaboration - seems to pervade Neighborhood Narratives’ process. As Shaeffer says, “everyone we talk to - if they can’t help us, they give us five other people to try.”

It’s one of the elements of that essential Pittsburgh nature that Shaeffer and Halasz hope is captured in the films - which is one reason why, rather than the obvious choice of documentaries, Neighborhood Narratives is comprised entirely of fictional narrative films.

“There are a lot of great stories you can tell in a documentary format,” says Shaeffer. “But there are certain things you can’t capture that I think you can capture when you can exert creative control over the story.”

Like in Milk Crate, John Rice’s film about a lifelong South Side resident whose neighbor - a young Japanese man, and recent South Side transplant - makes the cultural faux pas of moving the crate used to mark the South Sider’s parking space.

“How do you capture that in a documentary film,” says Shaeffer. “But John is a South Sider, and he’s written that story - about that unspoken understanding, and being the person coming in who doesn’t know [the rules].”

Other films in the can for Neighborhood Narratives include Justin Francart’s tale of young love blossoming in Oakland, Jason Georgiades’ exploration of Bloomfield’s church fairs, Tim Hall’s film about the Hill District - comprised entirely of still photographs - and films about Regent Square, Homestead, Downtown and Lawrenceville.

On September 25, Neighborhood Narratives will debut with a screening at Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ Regent Square Theater, after which, Shaeffer and Halasz will take the show on the road with screenings in each of the neighborhoods highlighted by films. In fact, it’s those screenings - and the collaborations with community spaces and organizations which will make them happen - that perhaps marks one of the most important aspects of Neighborhood Narratives: That each film must show the indelible mark of its neighborhood, but also speak to the city’s whole.

“Each screening will be as a whole,” says Shaeffer. “We want it to be about Pittsburgh. But we know that filmgoers will go see this, whatever the location. People in these neighborhoods have so much pride in that identity, their neighborhood, and their neighborhood’s experience - and that’s something we want to show, too.”

So when the Bradford House in Washington, PA, or the Arcadia Theater in Windber looks at restoration and preservation of their cultural assets as a part of Community Connections, they’re looking not just to save a wooden foundation or rebuild the kitchen in which the Whiskey Rebellion was planned. They’re looking to use those facilities and their histories as catalysts that will help drive the region forward, towards the next 250 years.

Recipe for History

In 18^th-century Western Pennsylvania, it wasn’t too difficult to guess that David Bradford was fairly well off. The easy tip-off is the size of his house: 12- and 14-foot ceilings, the hand-carved imported mahogany railings on the grand staircase, or to be historically accurate about it, the number of closets. “He had four closets in the house,” says Clay Kilgore, historical director of the Bradford House in Washington, PA. “This from a time when you were taxed by the size of your house, by the number of rooms, and closets counted as rooms.”

For Kilgore, there’s another perspective that’s missing from the house - a 1788 construction that proved to be, along with its owner, an important central point in the 18^th-century conflict known as the Whiskey Rebellion. As Kilgore says, the huge original kitchen that would’ve crowned the back of Bradford’s property, which probably burned down by 1798, would really show “just how far above regular people’s status David Bradford lived.” But more than just an 18^th-century status symbol, the kitchen will represent a new, proactive direction for the small Bradford House museum.

“When I started working here as director two years ago, I saw that the house had never done any major project,” says Kilgore. “When the Bradford House itself opened in 1965, it had been restored. But from 1965 until today, there hasn’t been anything major that’s changed. If you came in 1965 and came back today, I’m the only major difference - and the new information about David [that has been discovered].”

For the Bradford House, the rebuilding of an 18^th-century detached kitchen with the help of a Community Connections Grassroots grant represents the beginning of a new era in the museum’s activity. The kitchen’s fireplace will allow for demonstrations of period cooking and daily life, and the building will lend a more full representation of Washington’s, and Western Pennsylvania’s, history. What’s more important to Kilgore, though, is that it will open up a host of opportunities for the House to try different streams of programming - so that rather than once every 40 years, there’ll be reasons for patrons to come back again and again.

“We want to do something different every year,” says Kilgore. “In that back kitchen, we’ll have the chance to do it.”

Theater Dreams

When Denise Mihalick walks the aisles of the Arcadia Theater, built in 1921, she imagines those in whose footsteps she’s following: TV and movie star Loretta Young, for example, and Depression-era film star Joan Blondell, both of whom paced the Arcadia’s stage in its vaudeville days according to tickets stubs found in the building.

But as executive director of the Arcadia, located in tiny Windber, PA, along the Somerset and Cambria county border, Mihalick tempers those dreams of Arcadia’s heyday with nightmares of its dilapidated recent past. Photos of the Arcadia prior to its 1998 restoration show an interior brutally wracked by age and neglect, its ceilings caved in, its walls practically melting under their own weight.

Today’s Arcadia is full of past glory. Restored to its gilded-age appearance, based on artifacts as small as a piece of long-gone carpeting or a photograph highlighting an exterior feature, the Theater is once again the crown jewel of the Windber area. And, with the recent memory of the Arcadia’s dilapidation in tow, Mihalick says the Arcadia’s community is dead set on keeping it that way.

“The people of Windber are so proud of this theater in their community,” says Mihalick. “To give you an example, I am the only paid employee - the entire theater is run by volunteers, from the box office to the ushers.”

Today’s Arcadia Theater has the success it needs to keep running happily: According to Mihalick, 10 out of 12 monthly performances sell out the 690-seat theater, and participatory performances like the Missoula Children’s Theatre and the Whalley Charitable Trust’s “Coal-ala-Bear” kids theater performances are highly anticipated dates on the local calendar. But while ticket sales and corporate sponsorships cover the performers and operational expenses, the Arcadia’s needs for future renovation and preservation are, so far, going uncovered.

“The building is 96 years old - we need a new roof, and everything from the constant need to upgrade technical equipment, to slowly replacing all the toilets. If we can raise enough money to start a sizable endowment, we’ll live off the interest whenever we need some capital improvements.”

With the help of a Community Connections Grassroots grant, the Arcadia will kick off its endowment campaign on October 25 - ten years nearly to the day after its first post-restoration performance - with an anniversary fundraising gala at the Cambria County War Memorial featuring ‘60s teen legends Frankie Avalon and Bobby Rydell.

The trip from Windber to Johnstown isn’t just because Frankie and Bobby are bigger than the Arcadia’s 690 seats - it shows just how far the theater has come. “We’ve become regional,” says Mihalick. “From Johnstown to Somerset to Altoona, our reputation isn’t just the quality and diversity of entertainment, but the warmth - the magical appearance of the theater. It’s is referred to as the ‘gem of the area,’ but it’s not just the theater - when we have show nights, every restaurant is full, everything’s busy. And that can’t help but give visibility to the town.”

The anniversary fundraising gala is a first step toward ensuring the lasting legacy of the Arcadia Theatre. And, if Mihalick has anything to do with it, there are many more steps to come.

Barn Storming

For years, when Jack Maguire saw one of Saltsburg, PA’s historic buildings threatened with demolition, he had a simple answer for the problem: Buy it. A commercial building from 1913, the old academy built in 1851, the town’s high school - each time one of these buildings was targeted by the wrecking ball, Maguire bought it, refurbished it, and found contemporary uses that maintain the historical integrity of the building.

So when talk began about pulling down the circa-1850 W.R. McIlwain Store and Warehouse - known across Indiana County by the historical misnomer, “The Mule Barn” - Maguire understood what it would take to get something done, even if some public opinion would be against it.

“It just doesn’t look good,” says Maguire, a semi-retired civil engineer and lifelong Saltsburg resident. “There’d been a fire at the back of the main structure, and the roof was collapsing and it was an eyesore. I can see how people don’t have an appreciation for it. But in my mind’s eye, I can see how it’d look if it was [restored]. And in Saltsburg, what you’ve got to do is just step forward and do the work - don’t just talk about it.”

Which is just what Maguire did: He volunteered to tear down the rear section of the Barn, to help “some of those eyesore complaints go away.” Now, with the help of a Community Connections Grassroots grant acquired by Saltsburg Borough, Maguire and other volunteers have been able purchase materials necessary to stabilize the Barn, which had been listing to one side.

To Maguire and fellow preservationists, the Barn represents an important part of Saltsburg’s history, dating as it does from the period of the mid-19^th century when the Harrisburg-to-Pittsburgh canal went through the town. Now, with the building’s timber frame stabilized, further work can safely begin - if the Borough can find more funds.

“There’s been talk we could move the library in there,” says Saltsburg Borough President Elizabeth Rocco. That, however, will only happen “if we can get the grant money.” Unfortunately, “there are members of this community who wouldn’t care if the whole thing were just torn down - and that’d be just one more piece of our history that we’ll never get back.”

Rocco’s sentiment runs throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania during Pittsburgh 250 - that our history is an asset to be defended like any other aspect of the region’s economic or cultural portfolio. Other Community Connections-funded projects are working to restore or preserve historical sites, as well. With Planting Connections: Our Cambrian Garden, the Cambria County Historical Society is recreating a Victorian-era garden at the A.W. Buck House in Ebensburg, PA. And the Succop Conservancy in Butler County has rebuilt a 19^th-century hay wagon, part of a period barn on the Conservancy’s land.

It’s all part of what Jack Maguire calls “our historic fabric” - the legacy of 250 years of history, the future of which is in our hands. “The historic fabric is one thing we have to offer,” says Maguire. “And believe me, people will be interested in [these sites] if they’re brought back.” With the kind of passion for the past that these projects display, that fabric will be around for a long time to come.

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.

Meet and Greet: Community Connections events are more than just a good time

When over 300 community leaders from around the Southwestern Pennsylvania region came together at the top of the Regional Enterprise Tower in Downtown Pittsburgh last December, it was more than just a chance to celebrate the distribution of $1 million in Community Connections grants. It was a part of the process. All-too-rarely in the region’s history has such a breadth of agents from the government, non-profit, community, business and media sectors come together in one place. And just as Community Connections has turned grantmaking and fundraising into means of producing new relationships, the press launch of Community Connections became an opportunity to catalyze connections within the region.

So it should come as no surprise, then, that when The Sprout Fund hosts Hothouse 2008 - its sixth-annual fundraising benefit slash “live annual report” - the event will prove to be more than “just” party of the summer.

Held each year in a different, unique site within the city of Pittsburgh - often in locations undergoing radical shifts in status - Hothouse serves to showcase the projects assisted by The Sprout Fund over the past year. With the region’s eyes focused on Pittsburgh 250, this year’s event will feature approximately 25 Regional and Allegheny Grassroots Community Connections projects, as well as another 25 of The Sprout Fund’s other grant recipients, throughout the upper floors of the Union Trust Building in Pittsburgh’s ever-changing Downtown. But as much as it is an opportunity for the public to learn about, and enjoy, the work of Sprout-related projects, Hothouse can also prove to be yet another means to connect the community leaders and citizens of our region. With that in mind, according to Community Connections Program Coordinator Dustin Stiver, Sprout mapped out the various exhibition and performance spaces being used in the Union Trust Building in a way that has proven catalytic to project collaboration.

“We hoped that, by placing projects with similar or complementary goals in the same space, we would help propagate an exchange of ideas and the building of new relationships,” says Stiver. “It’s really an extension of what we’ve done with Community Connections events in the past - such as the ideation sessions and community decisionmaking forums, where people with similar goals for the region met to create new ideas through collaborative thinking. It’s using the process of Community Connections to facilitate the meshing of ideas from different people and places.”

One example is the so-called “green room,” in which three different Sprout-funded projects approach the challenge of utilizing Pittsburgh’s vacant lots in new, environmentally proactive ways. Engage Pittsburgh award recipient GTECH - Growth Through Energy and Community Health - is a CMU spinoff project seeking to utilize vacant urban spaces with new “green economy” strategies. Meanwhile, Seed Award recipient Grow Pittsburgh, a partnership with Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, approaches vacant land with an urban-farming strategy. And Community Connections Grassroots-grant recipients New Sun Rising, creators of the Millvale Public Library project, is looking to build the Grant Avenue Pocket Park - an urban green space along Millvale’s main drag.

“Our exhibit will show visitors the many options they have for dealing with blighted, abandoned land in their community and the different strategies and outcomes people are using throughout the city,” says New Sun Rising’s Brian Wolovich.

“Hothouse is an opportunity for projects across Sprout’s network to learn about one another’s efforts,” says Stiver. “And perhaps, at the end of the night, new partnerships will be born. Already, it appears that GTECH and New Sun Rising - two projects that had not previously interacted - will collaborate in the future.”

The Sprout Fund’s sixth annual Hothouse event is set for Saturday, August 23, 2008 from 7pm-midnight on the upper floors of The Union Trust Building in Downtown Pittsburgh. Attracting more than 2,000 party guests in 2007 and 2006, Hothouse is an opportunity for a wide cross-section of business and social circles to come together in support of The Sprout Fund, its mission and its many funded projects. In addition to all the meeting and mingling, Hothouse features live music, enthralling performances, a magnificent silent auction, and Pittsburgh’s best food and drink. Tickets for the event are available online and at the door.

A group of artists will create large-scale gateways into Connellsville along the Youghiogheny River Trail with the support of a $50,000 grant.

A partnership among the Trail Town Program, an economic development initiative of The Progress Fund, Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections and The Sprout Fund, announced the artists selected to participate in the inaugural Trail Town Public Art Program.

In Connellsville, sculptor Steven Fiscus of Cumberland, Md., will create a metal and glass archway over the Youghiogheny Trail at Stewart’s Crossing.

In a separate project, Meeghan Triggs of Greensburg and Chris Galiyas of West Mifflin will create a mural on the three 30-foot high silos at the Youghiogheny Glass factory.

Read more in the full article.

Then came Pittsburgh 250, and the question how to bring the 14 metro counties into the mix, to celebrate what might otherwise have been seen as a local city affair. When the Allegheny Conference asked Long, Leadership Pittsburgh’s Aradhna Dhanda, and WQED’s George Miles to take a look, they handed the baton to Sprout.

Sprout’s answer was so simple it was profound – and may have enormous implications for the region’s future. “If you want people to care,” Long said, “you need to invest in them. How do we get 14 counties to care about Pittsburgh 250? Let’s celebrate what they care about.”

Fanning out into the hinterlands, Sprout reps convened local groups, empowering them, saying it was Cambria County’s decision, for example, how to spend its piece of the Pittsburgh 250 $1 million grant money. “Yes, we wanted to get people civically involved,” Long says, “but we were shocked at how many people were not the usual suspects. Grass-roots marketing brought in a lot of new people to the process.”

Adds project coordinator Dustin Stiver, “there were plenty of introductions between people that had never met before. They were geographically and culturally diverse.”

Read more in the full article.

A movie directed by a Homestead resident and written by a West Mifflin graduate is being filmed at the Carnegie Library of Homestead and surrounding facilities.

“Notes In The Valley,” a film by Matthew J. Fridg, is being filmed at the library, at Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area along Eighth Avenue, and other places in Homestead this week.

It stems from the screenplay by Jenn Golling.

The film is part of the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Narratives project, a Pittsburgh 250 initiative, to create short films that take place in various Pittsburgh neighborhoods. “Notes In The Valley” is one of roughly 10 films to be made this year.

Read more in the full article.

Cambria County Historical Society’s latest venture is all new, but visiting it will be like taking a trip back in time.

The society’s landscape/garden committee will hold a grand opening for its Victorian garden and newly landscaped propertyAug. 24 at the museum at 615 N. Center St., Ebensburg.

“This has been a couple of years in the making,” said Dave Huber, a historical society board member.

“The whole property has been landscaped, and we planted a lot of trees, but the centerpiece is the Victorian courtyard that leads to the back entrance of the museum, making it more welcoming.”

The project began when the Pittsburgh-based firm of Kendall-O’Brien Landscape Architects developed a garden plan for the A.W. Buck House, where the historical society is located. However, nothing could be done to improve the property because of a lack of funding.

Huber said the historical society applied for a grant from Community Connections – Pittsburgh 250 because Ebensburg had strong connections to Pittsburgh during the latter part of the 19th century.

Read more in the full article.

The volunteer organization, armed with $8,000 in startup cash, is working on a “welcome garden” along heavily traveled Haws Pike just beyond city limits.

…

“It’s going to look nice,” said Marie Mock, the group’s secretary/treasurer. “Next year at this time, it’s going to be in full bloom.”

…

Donated labor has gotten the project started. And monetary contributions have played a big role: The group received $2,000 from private donors, $1,000 from Community Foundation for the Alleghenies and $5,000 from Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections.

Read the full article here.

Wild Waterways Conservancy, owner of the Rock Point Natural Area, hopes to install five canoe launches along Connoquenessing and Slippery Rock creeks by year’s end.

The launches, available only for non-motorized watercraft, are designed to blend in with natural surroundings of the creeks, according to conservancy trustee Frank Moone.

Instead of concrete, the organization will use natural sandstone when possible.

Moone said the conservancy received a $50,000 grant to build the launches from The Sprout Fund in conjunction with the Pittsburgh 250 celebration. It has contracted Beran Environmental Service of Boyers, Pa., to do the work.

The Slippery Rock Creek launch will be in Moore’s Corners near the old Yogi Bear campground.

Connoquenessing canoe launches will be at:

Connoquenessing Creek Park in Zelienople.

McKim Way in Franklin Township.

Connoquenessing Creek gorge near the old Ellwood City sewage treatment plant.

Rock Point Natural Area.

Read the full article here.

“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.”

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.

“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 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.”

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.

In “the smallest city in America,” work is expected to begin next week on Postage Stamp Park, an apt name for recreation space in Parker City along the Allegheny River.”The size of the park is about the size of a postage stamp,” said city Mayor Bill McCall, laughing.

The park’s creation is part of Pittsburgh 250, a year-long regional celebration of the 250th anniversary of the naming of Southwestern Pennsylvania. Large projects and community celebrations are being held in 14 counties in conjunction with the anniversary.

The Parker City Revitalization Corp. received a $5,000 grant through Pittsburgh 250, said McCall, who is a corporation member. Donations will be used to create the park in which about 50 people could stand elbow-to-elbow, he said.

Read the full article here.

On a blazing-hot July afternoon in Kitanning, Wible and an array of guests from Armstrong County commissioners and the Farm Bureau, to the state Dairy Princess hosted the debut of the new addition to the Ag-Ed Lab fleet: A Community Connections funded lab dedicated to Western PA. The lab appears RV-like from the outside; inside, it’s spacious classroom features multiple stations, each with a series of experiments based on various students’ grade levels. The lab’s theme - “A Day in Your Life with Agriculture” - seeks to directly address the disconnect Wible describes by showing students the multitude of ways in which every part of their daily life is impacted by agriculture, from pulling on their cotton clothing to sitting down for “Pizza Night.” “Asking kids about foods that don’t originate in agriculture, inevitably the answer is ‘pizza,’” says Wible. “But it’s more than food - there are [lessons] about agriculture-related jobs, all the commodities of agriculture, as well as what goes into successful agriculture.”

The need for the Mobile lab has already become obvious - 22 weeks out of its first year are already pre-booked by Western PA schools. Once at a school for its week-long engagement, the lab is tended to by teachers trained in its usage - 11 teachers in Western PA are already trained. Perhaps most importantly, the lab is designed for the age of No Child Left Behind and increased emphasis on testing and standards in public education. “It can be customized for each school,” says Wible. “We’re providing them with a resource to use, rather than just an ‘extra’ lesson - I can honestly say that we never do the same thing twice.”

“Our goal is to eventually cover the entire state,” Mobile Ag Ed Science Lab Program Director Tonya Wible said. “We want to increase student awareness as to how agriculture impacts their lives on a daily basis and we accomplish this through hands-on scientific experiments.”

With agriculture being the state’s No. 1 industry, the labs cover an array of related topics, such as dairy cows, beef, pork, grains, fruits and vegetables, forestry and aquaculture.

Since its inception, approximately 190,000 students in 31 counties have participated. The newest lab in Western Pennsylvania has the potential to reach an additional 19,000 students in the upcoming school year.

Read the full article here.

Rediscovery, regret, adaptation and a comedic twist on the city’s most beloved genre, the zombie movie, all will play out in a 90-minute film to be screened this fall as part of the Pittsburgh 250 celebration.

Ten neighborhood stories made the cut for “Greetings from Pittsburgh: Neighborhood Narratives” and are now being cast, rewritten or filmed in a neighborhood near you.

Kristen Lauth Shaeffer and Andrew Halasz, filmmakers and college instructors, initiated the project with a $5,000 Sprout Fund grant last fall. They put out a call for local filmmakers to send treatments of 10-minute narratives in which the personality of a neighborhood shines through its characters. They will unite all 10 stories in the final product.

Read the full article here.