So it’s not surprising that Steve Roberts, SRU’s coordinator of outdoor adventures, gets his feathers ruffled seeing students driving their cars on the short trips from housing to campus. Which is why, three years ago, he helped the school to launch its Green Bike Initiative.

“We wanted to cut down on petroleum use and help alleviate the parking problems on campus,” says Roberts, “and, of course, to promote a healthy lifestyle.

“The president of the Cycling Club and myself went and got some donations of bikes – pretty bad bikes – painted them green, and got them out on campus [for students to use for free]. But the bikes were so bad, they kept breaking down, and we were fixing them so often that they weren’t on campus much.”

When a new Student Government administration came in a year ago, the Green Bike Initiative coupled its work to the students’ plan to green the campus more literally, with a series of new tree plantings. The joined projects applied for and received a Community Connections Grassroots grant for Slippery Rock Green and Growing – to combine the tree plantings with the purchase of new, better bikes, to be leant out at the University library just like a book.

To Green and Growing, the $5,000 the school received from Community Connections was much more than just a financial grant. Attention from outside their immediate community and participation in Pittsburgh 250 helped the group to leverage further grants and grow the project beyond their initial plans.

“We’ve been able to get a lot of unrelated groups involved, from the University’s president on down,” says Diana Wolak, SRU’s Cooperative Activities Assistant and one of the writers of Green and Growing’s Community Connections grant. “The President was so impressed by the prestige that came from this grant, and he has really bought in to the idea. He provided matching funds from his own budget, and then we got a matching grant from the Campbell Bus Lines company.”

Another grant came from the PA Film Institute, which sponsored SRU’s Leave It Green Bike and Music Festival in April, which featured live bands, and workshops on bike repairs, safety, and other green and cycle-related topics.

“It’s been a really unique experience to see how this money has allowed us to grow,” says Student Government Vice President of Public Relations Tyson Johnson. “We can now check out bikes at the library like a book; in the springtime, the trees will be blossoming, and we’ll be able to [ride] bikes. And [in October], Steve Roberts and I participated in the PNC Legacy Trail Ride, which was really a neat way to tie all these things – Pittsburgh 250, the bikes, everything – together.”

By the time the project officially launched at the end of September, Green and Growing had already surpassed its dream goal of 10 new bikes (there are 14 new and plenty of refurbished green bikes on campus today), and had planted 100 trees on SRU campus. In addition, the extra funding garnered by leveraging the publicity and community awareness from the Community Connections grant has allowed Roberts to commit paid student hours to bike repair and other project-related work. Which, he points out, will make the project even more appealing to future student participants, and allow for a vital sense of continuity.

Even having succeeded beyond their goals, Green and Growing’s activists see this as only the first step in a continual process of greening Slippery Rock University.

“I really want to see the cycle take off as a real form of transport,” says Roberts. “I want to find some more money to buy enough bikes to lend out for a month or a semester, and really build those skills and attitudes. It’s a trickle down effect – we educate a lot of educators at Slippery Rock, and this is the perfect place to get that mentality to spread further and further amongst future generations.”

The simplicity of a sign, like the Twin Hi-Way Drive-In Theatre’s classic sign in Robinson Township, can be both its greatest beauty and its kiss of death: Why keep something built for a function after that function has passed? But to the four founding editors of the Pittsburgh Signs Project website – and the more than one hundred photographers from around Southwestern PA who contributed images to the group’s new soon-to-be-published book, funded by a Community Connections Regional project grant – that simplicity has a beauty worth capturing and savoring.

That’s just what Jennifer Baron, Greg Langel, Elizabeth Perry and Mark Stroup have been doing on the Pittsburgh Signs Project website since 2004: Capturing images of the signage that dots our landscapes, both urban and rural, and sharing them with the world. According to Stroup, who began the project, it’s a way of examining and celebrating the things that comprise our places – just as we examine and celebrate the cultural affectations that we, as people, are comprised of.

“We hope to kind of push the conversation about where we are,” say Stroup. “’Pittsburgh-ness’ is a good subject; Pittsburgh’s a fun place to be to talk about this process, of constructing [the idea of a place]. If you’re ‘here,’ you should take a closer look into the mythology of place that surrounds that ‘here.’”

Over the past four years, Pittsburgh Signs Project has done that in a number of ways. Notably, its website, to which people around the city and the region can submit photos of signs to contribute to its archives and its conversations, and in a series of art shows and collaborations – from walks around various sign-heavy locations, to shows of their photographs at galleries and group events. For Pittsburgh 250, however, the group saw a need to expand its collection in a new – and yet, much older – direction.

Pittsburgh Signs Project: 250 Signs of Western Pennsylvania, the book, is a logical step backwards for a previously internet-based project. With 250 photographs of signs from all 14 counties of the region, taken by photographers both professional and amateur, the book will provide a look at a unique microcosm of this region’s landscape. Signs like the Twin Hi-Way Drive-In Theatre are obvious choices – displaying the beautifully garish Americana of ‘50s and ‘60s design and color. Others are far less obvious: A farm’s sign, made of tires, or hand-written roadside notes on rural roads that make the Project’s use of GPS coordinates (rather than addresses) more a necessity than an interesting conceit.
For Jennifer Baron, removing the project from its web-based environment only heightens its power.

“I love tangible things, small things you can hold, I love the preciousness of this,” says Baron. “And yes, it’s [been] a web-based project, and we want to develop all of that [further]. But that being said, there’s nothing like going through a stack of postcards; it’s the reason I love records [over CDs].

“The book is about capturing and documenting in a tangible way this aspect of the visual culture and our built environment, and then giving it room to breathe, which you can’t [do as well] on a website. This is something permanent and personal – you can have a personal experience with this, and then go on the website and talk with everyone around the world about it.”

To give the project “room to breathe,” the Pittsburgh Signs Project has employed designer Brett Yasko. Stroup had seen his work, “which had a really communal aesthetic, and I thought, ‘yeah, that’s us.’” So when it came time to create the book, he was the obvious choice for such a communally created, collaborative design project. His task has not been an easy one: To take the 250 photos chosen by the editors, and build a 200-page book from them, giving as much space as possible to each photograph. That kind of detail is vital to the project’s success, according to Baron.

“We wanted to hand over all these images and allow the designer to create this conversation,” she says. “Which is something you can’t do on the web – in this, you can control that conversation as you turn the page, or by placing two on the page together. We didn’t want [that connection] to be purely sentimental – a section of motels, or of beauty salons. It can be color, or shape, or from a design standpoint.”

Discovering Yasko, who has already done one project – a poster – for Pittsburgh Signs – wasn’t the only serendipitous meeting the Project has had. Through the team’s relationship with Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO For Creative Inquiry, The Carnegie Mellon University Press became aware of the book, and this fall agreed to act as publisher – which comes with the added benefit of a distribution relationship with the powerful Cornell University Press. So upon its December publication, the book will be available, via Cornell, in Barnes and Noble’s online and brick-and-mortar stores, as well as many other mainstream outlets. The Project directors, however, will retain the ability to place the book in non-traditional venues – Museum book stores, the burgeoning do-it-yourself crafts network, and other outlets.

But Pittsburgh Signs Project: 250 Signs of Western Pennsylvania isn’t about selling books so much as it’s about creating a book – joining together with the regional community to look closely at one aspect of our landscape. That’s a goal that’s reached by both the people – from professional photographers, to college kids, rank amateurs, and even an autistic teenager – and by medium: the thoughtfulness that goes into building something tangible and permanent.

“You never look at the world in that way,” says Baron, “where you just pick apart one little thing over and over. Our [culture] is always about millions of things, all going at once. But there’s something poetic about just looking at one little thing.”

“It’s backwards technologically, and it’s backwards socially,” says Stroup, about going from web-based to paper. “There’s a ponderous nature to creating the book that’s not part of the instantaneous web [environment]. We get really excited when there’s something that makes all of us say ‘wow’ – those little moments. And now we get to take those moments and turn them into a ‘thing’ – this book.”

Engaging Action

Jennifer Zilla stands at the front of a Grove City College classroom, casually throwing out figures and statistics related to her organization – Mercer County Head Start – that land like bombshells on her captive audience. Here’s just one, the demographically average parent of a 3 or 4-year-old Head Start student in the county: A single woman, 21 years old, with 2.2 children, earning about $20,000 per year.

Let that sink in for a moment.

That’s what Jennifer Scott’s Professional Speaking and Writing class does. But while the rest of us can ponder the implications of these statistics, these two-dozen Grove City College students don’t have that luxury, and Katie McLay is quick to get pragmatic.
“How do you assist these children, specifically?” Other students chime in: “What kind of private-donor funding do you have?” Teacher Jennifer Scott lends her hand, too: “Tell us about Head Start’s local leadership?”

These questions and many others are important to the Grove City class, because in their next classes, after having heard presentations from Zilla and five other Mercer County-area charitable organizations, the class will have to make a tough decision. Thanks to a Community Connections Grassroots grant, the Grove City College Philanthropy Project has $4,000 to give to local charities this semester. But do the math: with a minimum grant of $1,000, and six charities to choose from, these students are learning an important lesson in philanthropic giving: It’s hard work.

The idea for the Grove City College Philanthropy Project appears simple: Give a classroom of college students money, and let them invest it in the community as they see fit. But the process, as designed by Jennifer Scott – and modeled on a similar project at Northern Kentucky University, launched by Cincinnati’s Mayerson Foundation – is complex. First, Scott says, the students had to figure out what was needed.

“To begin, I had them work on a personal mission statement,” says Scott, herself a Grove City College graduate. “What are your strengths? Where do the world’s deep needs meet with those skills and abilities you have?”

Scott presented the class with a list of social issues and possible ways in which to impact the community, and let the students research Mercer County’s needs. While many of Grove City College’s students come from Western Pennsylvania, a large number attend from out of state, and even locals like McLay – from Indiana County – frequently knew little about Mercer County.

“Mercer doesn’t have a big population,” says McLay, “and our first response was, ‘what in the world kind of organizations will there even be here?’ Turns out, there are a lot. That research paid off.”
Organizations such as the YMCA’s teen center, Mercer County Head Start, and the Bair Foundation – a Christian foster-care agency that helps find homes for medically needy children – made their case for support in the classroom. And Scott gave the class different ways of approaching the decisionmaking process: Objective means, such as the level of experience of an organization’s staff, and its readiness to effectively utilize the donated money.

“It’s a very difficult process,” says McLay. “Especially the past two classes – we deliberated in class about which ones to fund and how much, and a lot of us have become so attached to [a] program. Each one has something to offer – they all have a mission we want to support.”

The results, the class believes, are the right choices, even if not always wholly satisfying. One organization – which McLay herself personally supported, and has in fact volunteered for – didn’t make the cut, though she understands why and agrees with the decision.

Grove City College’s project isn’t the first class of this kind in the country, but it could be on the cutting edge of a new educational trend. George Dougherty is the public service degree coordinator at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), and is currently teaching a similar class for graduate students there, also inspired by Northern Kentucky’s Mayerson project. (Dougherty has also worked with Jennifer Scott and Grove City College Development officer Brian Powell to share ideas for such a project.) He believes that this type of project could quickly become a movement.

“It could become a national trend,” says Dougherty. “The key is trying to convince folks that, even if you go into the business world, you still have a responsibility to serve in your community. And one thing to make people more comfortable with that, is to give them an experience as to what grantmaking is like – there’s research to show that if people do so in the protected environment of a classroom, they’re more likely to do so later on.”

Jennifer Scott has seen these kinds of benefits already in her Grove City classroom. Within the first weeks of the class, she says, a third of the students spoke to her privately about non-profit work as a possible new career goal. Even students not interested in such a bold move already see philanthropy as a new facet to their future lives.

“It’s definitely shown me the needs of these non-profits,” says Katie McLay, a communications and political science double major. “I don’t know about working in the non-profit world, but now I hope that, someday, I’ll be in the position to be able to help organizations like these myself.”

“For a lot of these students, Philanthropy had this almost negative connotation,” says Jennifer Scott. A connotation less about helping people and serving the community, and more about “fundraising, selling something. But now they’re learning it’s so much more, a notion of being a responsible citizen, and living out your life in a way that benefits your family, your community, and the nation.

“It’s not just the volunteer service that you do over Easter break, but a daily thing to revitalize your life. It’s just something that you do to be a community member, and whether you work in the non-profit sector or not, that’s something that I think all of these people will be much more alert to.”

Guitars and Cameras

As program director at the Butler County Family YMCA, Corinne Coulson sees a lot of teenagers come and go: to swim in the pool, to play sports, to attend gymnastics or other classes. But she also noticed another group of teenaged kids in Butler’s Y.

“There were always teenagers who didn’t take advantage of those things,” says Coulson. “The teen population is always in need of productive things to do – so that they don’t spend that time in, well, non-productive ways. And I didn’t want to see those kids sitting around or hanging out, and for those kids, art and music were always two things that they want, and maybe aren’t always offered in school anymore.”

The Butler County Family YMCA consulted with its national parent organization, and learned that other Y’s around the country had had success with two specific programs: guitar lessons and digital photography. So Coulson and Development Director Andrea Jones applied for, and received, a Community Connections Grassroots grant to begin the Acoustic Avenues (now the Gibson Music Program, thanks to an equipment grant from the Gibson guitar company), and Pixel Perfect programs at the Y.

Throughout 2008, the Butler branch of the YMCA has offered seven sections of the guitar program, with small classes of ten or fewer students learning the basics of the instrument with musician teachers from the community – including, for at least one section, Coulson herself. Forty students have participated already, each receiving six lessons for a total cost of $10 – “a steal,” as Coulson points out – with the final section just now underway.

With Pixel Perfect – which has only been around for the two most recent programming cycles – students are introduced to the basic parts, functions, and techniques of digital photography over the course of six classes. At the end of the section, students get the chance to display their work in the Y’s lobby.

Six lessons might not be enough to produce the next Jimmy Page or Ansel Adams, but it does give that famously fickle teenaged demographic an affordable opportunity to give photography or guitar a shot.
“They get a chance to try it, see or prove to parents that they’re dedicated – plus, regardless, they’re learning a skill that they can keep forever,” says Coulson. “What we’ve seen in this initial year of the program – you can tell from the first class that they might be kids who [need encouragement to progress]. By the second or third class, an adult from the community is telling them that they’re doing something good, and you can see the difference.”

Computer Reboot

When Richard Riley brings young people in to learn about computers, it’s not quite the kind of technological knowledge you might expect. He’s not teaching them how to use Powerpoint or install new hardware – in fact, by the end of the training these young adults receive at Job Training for Beaver County, where Riley serves as Program Manager, it’s just the opposite.

“The intent was to expose some of our youth to computer de-manufacturing and recycling,” says Riley. “We’re partnering with Goodwill of Southwestern PA, taking donated obsolete computers, breaking them down, reusing parts that still make sense – still have a market value – and the rest we’re breaking down for recycling.”

Teaching young people to take computers apart, rather than put them together, might seem counterintuitive. But the YouthCares Computer Recycling Project, which started in 2008 with the help of a Community Connections Grassroots grant, is actually far more prescient than you might expect. Combine the rate of obsolescence in technology with the kinds of toxic chemicals released by personal-computer hardware components when they enter a landfill, and you’ve got an increasingly important financial and environmental issue to solve.

“The chemicals in these things are nasty,” says Riley. “And there are a lot of materials that do have legitimate value – gold and nickel – and that’s all recoverable.”

The skills that YouthCares Computer Recycling participants learn are as valuable as those materials, making these low-income young adults, many of whom have limited or no job experience to begin with, much more viable employment candidates. So far, in its first year, the program has trained over 50 youths, and helped put them on the road to a better employment future.

“A lot of the youth we work with have no job history at all,” says Riley. “This gives them a first job, the first opportunity to experience just being somewhere on time everyday and working, and it goes on their resume. It puts them in a manufacturing atmosphere, so they’re more desirable for people going into that line.”

Job Training for Beaver County has a contract with the Dell computer company to track their materials, so they can be sure none of it winds up in a landfill rather than a more eco-friendly final destination. And Riley hopes that placing an importance on that, as well as the employment options, makes an impression on the young people they help, so that the program doesn’t just result in employed Beaver County youths, but conscientious ones.

“We make clear to the participants how important it is that this doesn’t wind up in a landfill. Hopefully it’ll give them the attitude that, this [environmentalism] is important, too – it’ll remind them that this is the only earth we have.”

Just like in all of these Community Connections projects, Riley’s organization faced a challenge in serving the needs of its community, and used it as an opportunity to change that community’s own perception of itself. As we wind down Pittsburgh 250, it’s this kind of ingenuity that we can feel confident in as a vehicle with which to enter into Pittsburgh 251.

What makes this location important to approach, artistically?

Cindy: It’s not just a blighted [neighborhood], it’s the first impression of Johnstown – it’s right off of the Route 56 exit, which is the entrance to town from Johnstown’s two primary suburbs, where all the traffic has gone. Because of that, it’s not only [visitors] first impression, but Johnstowners themselves see it every day – 16-20,000 cars per day, according to one study. In our [initial] talks with the city, we found out Kernville is one of the prime areas designated for renovation [through the Johnstown Artist Relocation Program] – we’ve met with the designers for that citywide master plan, Kairos Group in Harrisburg, and our plans fit in perfectly with their plans for the location.

How has that led to changes in your plans?

Cindy: When we first met [with an architectural advisor] in February, we took all the location’s aesthetics into account, and decided the sculpture needed to be twice as large – 20 feet, not 10. And that’s when the whole project began to expand. Now we’re looking at five total lots [in Kernville] for sculptures – John’s working on further designs, but we’re hoping to [be able to bring in] other artists for those projects.

John: Once this first piece goes up, we’re going to get a lot of publicity out of it – of course, I’m an egotist, but I believe it’s beautiful. Hopefully we’ll be able to get more artists interested, and if this could become a place to really show your work, that’d be wonderful. We’ve established a review committee, and I’ve put myself through that process – the first criteria for me is something I’d consider museum quality art.

All these project expansions must cost a lot?

Cindy: When we went to Sprout, the budget was $15,000 – it’s a lot bigger now! The Community Connections grant gave us the shot in the arm to proceed and look for more funding: Northrop Grumman, who recently moved into the building across from the underpass, gave us $1,000, and we got $1,541 from the Pennsylvania Rural Arts Alliance [and $4,341 from the Community Foundation for the Alleghenies]. State Representative Ed Wojnaroski – we’ve been talking to him all year, and that intersection drives him nuts: He’s a Johnstown native, and he really believes in us. He [secured] a $20,000 state Department of Community and Economic Development grant. And because of all this support locally for the project, the George Sugarman Foundation grant came through – he was an abstract sculptor, and it goes to an artist working on a collaborative community public art sculptor. A hundred sculptors applied nationally, and they felt John was an artist of merit, they liked the city’s support, they made him the 2008 sole recipient - $10,000!

It seems like you’ve really put the “public” into “public art”?

John: We want to help the city any way we can. And that willingness to work with the city has really helped us – with so many artists, it’s ‘my way or the highway.’ It’s really important to communicate with the city for a large, expensive public art project like this, so it meets everyone’s needs. If the art helps clean up the area, and serves as a symbol for artists in the area, then it also helps with [Johnstown’s arts rejuvenation] project.

Cindy: This project’s been a lesson in seeing things grow; in how a seed can grow into something much, much bigger than we’d imagined. And in this case, the Community Connections grant was that seed.

As Pittsburgh 250 draws to a close, we’d like to encourage all the people, organizations, and advocates who’ve made Community Connections a success to take a look back at what you and your neighbors have accomplished this year - and maybe glance forward to see where we might go in Pittsburgh 251.

On Monday, December 15, the co-chairs of Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections - Aradhna Dhanda of Leadership Pittsburgh, Inc., Cathy Lewis Long of The Sprout Fund, and George Miles of WQED Multimedia - invite you to join them for the Community Connections year-end event, Pittsburgh 250: Making the Connections.

Join them at the Carnegie Science Center, from 3-7 p.m. on December 15. The program will begin at 3 p.m., and be followed from 5-7 p.m. by a networking reception, at which you can continue the discussions with the other project coordinators, funders, and invested community advocates involved in Community Connections.

Pittsburgh 250: Making The Connections

Monday, December 15, 2008

3:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.

Carnegie Science Center

One Allegheny Ave.

Pittsburgh, PA 15212

Directions to the location are available here.

Please RSVP by emailing CommunityConnections[at]sproutfund.org or calling 412-325-0646 by Wednesday, December 3, 2008.

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.

Pittsburgh 251: Community Connections events and projects look forward

On January 1, 2009, there will still be women and children in Grove City, PA, who need Lizette Olson and Jaimie Kratochvil’s help. Just because Pittsburgh will have watched the sun set on its 250th anniversary, Olson and Kratochvil’s Community Connections project, bringing their work at AWARE – the Mercer County Center against Domestic and Sexual Violence – to Grove City, will be just as important as the day before.

In the Making: 250 Years / 250 Artists will be almost finished that morning, with the Fe Gallery exhibit of regional artists closing January 10, but Jill Larson’s work will have only just begun. With 1,000 copies of the In the Making catalog to send to curators across the country, Fe Gallery Artistic Director Larson and her fellow volunteers will have plenty of envelopes to stuff in 2009’s first few weeks.

Neither does the work of revitalizing tiny Parker, PA, have a December 31 ‘sell-by’ date. No one had a ribbon at the October 18 ‘ribbon-cutting’ for the Postage Stamp Park in Parker. Instead, members of the Parker City Revitalization Corporation (PCRC) used black-and-gold ‘caution’ tape – a moment of necessity, but a poetic one: With little to lose for “America’s Smallest City,” its tiny population dwindling still, the PCRC wasn’t finishing a park, but starting a process, and throwing caution to the wind.

As it took shape a year ago – through the ideation sessions, the decisionmaking panels, the hours of volunteer time put in by you and your neighbors – there was little doubt that Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections would succeed in finding new and innovative ways to celebrate the anniversary of the region’s founding.

But in case after case, the initiative’s projects have exceeded their goals in many other ways: By plugging into the wider Southwestern Pennsylvania region, bringing together disparate elements of the region to act as one community. And in so many cases, the simple act of acknowledging a project’s relationship to the region – rather than their smaller, individual geographic radius – has allowed those projects to flourish and expand their work into the future.

“We’ve had 12 articles published about this project since receiving our [Community Connections Grassroots] grant,” says Diana Wolak of Slippery Rock University’s Green and Growing project. “Which is a lot, particularly [in Slippery Rock]. And a lot of the attention we’ve received is because we received this grant from Pittsburgh. And now, the fact that there’s money being spent on the project that isn’t coming from the grant, that speaks to how people think this will sustain over time.”

“The original plan was to focus on senior men,” says Joy Starzl, of Lemington Community Services’ Fisherman’s Tale project. “But the women have come out, and now the children are involved – Mount Ararat Baptist Church [gave us a] $5,000 grant to include them.” And through the connections of senior men and young people, Starzl and Fisherman’s Tale coordinator Arnold Perry have begun a new project to connect the generations in other meaningful ways such as community gardening.

On December 15, The Sprout Fund will hold Pittsburgh 250: Making The Connections, a one-day event at which Community Connections participants, funders, and advocates can tell the stories of their successes, and their challenges over the course of the 250th year. But more than that, by connecting the committed folks who’ve made Community Connections succeed, The Sprout Fund hopes to keep the initiative’s regional, grassroots spirit progressing into the new year. Panel discussions will explore the process, projects, and future of Community Connections, with a celebratory networking reception to follow.

“Pittsburgh 250: Making the Connections will be an opportunity to meet the people who made Community Connections happen,” says Dustin Stiver, Community Connections program coordinator at The Sprout Fund. “But more than just looking back, we want to look forward – to ‘Pittsburgh 251,’ to see what we can do to continue bettering our communities and our region.”

Towards a similar goal, that evening The Sprout Fund will officially announce the impending publication of Making The Connections – an art-catalog style book taking an in-depth look at 2008’s Community Connections initiative. Slated for an early-2009 publication, Making The Connections will follow the year’s process and projects, looking at the ways in which the people and organizations of Southwestern Pennsylvania came together to celebrate Pittsburgh 250 with ingenuity and a community-wide sense of pride in the past – and hope for the future of our region.

Pittsburgh’s 251st year promises to be as full of challenges and opportunities as its 250th. There may be less national press coverage and perhaps fewer and smaller fireworks displays, but the process of responding to those challenges remains the same. Hopefully, thanks to Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections, grabbing those opportunities will be just a little bit easier.

When the Confluence Trail Town Public Arts Committee first met in February, the group, minus several of the artists, decided to portray their community through local historical images and local natural resources using stone and metal mediums.

…

Confluence is the only trail town where a large work of art was created through a collaborative effort of several artists. Every trail town had an art committee for the planning and although there are more than one piece of art at several of the other towns, those pieces are independent of the others.

…

The public art pieces placed along the Great Allegheny Passage in September incorporated a theme of “Cycle of Renewal.”

The art project, part of the Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections and the Sprout Fund programs, can be viewed at six of the trail towns along the bike and hike trail in three counties: Somerset, Fayette and Westmoreland.

Read the full article here.

“We’ll have to drive.”

To get to the Sure Foundation - as Beck’s Church calls the strip-mall-like structure it has assumed ownership of - might be a few hundred yards away, but to get there takes a solid 5-7 minutes in the car, covering not much less than a mile of ground. It’s a common story in Mercer County, where transportation is far and away the number one issue faced by community and social service organizations. Without a working car, you can barely cross the street in parts of Mercer - nonetheless get to work or school.

That’s why, as part of the Sure Foundation, ‘Pastor Phil’ and company have established the new Car Care Ministry, opening for business on Sat., November 29. Around the back of the Sure Foundation building - behind the teen activity center, The Epicenter - a sliding garage door opens to reveal the small, single-car-sized car-care center, supported by a Community Connections Grassroots grant. It’s in here that Pastor Phil plans the next step in what he considers his ministerial work - social service: Not just “talking about the playbook … running the plays.”

The Car Care Ministry will provide cheap oil changes, small repairs, and consultation to those Mercer County residents who have car troubles, but little money to spare on such necessary work.

It’s just one part of the Foundation, of course. Inside the building, previously owned and donated to the Church by Jim Winner, the Sharon, PA, native responsible for inventing The Club anti-car theft device, Pastor Phil shows me the cubicle-riddled room that will soon serve as the Church’s offices. A multi-purpose room currently bears straw-filled targets used for practice by the “Grateful Archers” - a local chapter of the Christian Bowhunters of America.

Inside the Car Care garage, one of Beck’s parishioners - “Mr. Conley,” a retiree and father to several other parishioners - stands on a ladder, slapping drywall onto the ceiling, one of the people who’ve put hundreds of volunteer hours into the garage’s refurbishment. With only a few weeks until opening day, Pastor Phil points out that - despite the garage’s emptiness - they’re almost ready to go. “We’ve got [commitments for] donations from Rowes Auto Supply [in Transfer], and Greenville and Hittle Auto in [nearby] Greenville,” says Beck. “So we don’t have to stock anything - there’s no room here to store oil, parts, anything really. But when someone calls in, we’ll call the suppliers, and within three days they’re going to have [the equipment] for us.”

The commitment is there from Transfer’s community - besides suppliers, Pastor Phil has secured professional-level mechanics and hobbyists ready to staff the garage weekly. And three people have donated cars so far, for the Ministry to repair and sell cheaply, as a way of providing transport to the needy while also funding the garage.

Likewise, the need is becoming starkly apparent.

“It takes time for the word to get around about something like this,” says Pastor Phil. “But we’ve already had nine applications for people to get work done on their cars. And we’ve still got two weeks to go.”

Westmoreland County is an area steeped in history - and of particular historical importance to the founding of Pittsburgh, being a vital stop on the Forbes Trail. But the issues it faces, even within projects directly addressing that history, are as modern as anywhere else. Whether it’s Westmoreland Heritage’s speaker’s program, looking at ways to use living historians to address deficiencies in school funding and curricula, or the county’s Food Bank bringing fresh food to people in need, Community Connections projects are working to bring a vibrant Westmoreland County into the next 250 years.

Tom Headley points out that, while Westmoreland County is chock-full of historical sites and amenities the days when a school group’s field trip was a given are long gone.

“Schools don’t have a big budget for supplemental things these days,” says Headley. “Because of money or because it’s not a curriculum priority, some schools no longer do field trips [to these sites]. We’re empowering the sites to approach these schools, and tell them, ‘we have this grant, we can send a living historian into the school.’ When someone like [Native American living historians] Dr. Kinorea Tigri or Two Bears goes into a school, it’s a different way to get to kids about history, in a way that grabs their attention.”

Through the speakers program, Westmoreland Heritage and the Westmoreland County Historical Society are working to connect six school programs with living historians, and to bring other speakers to 25 historical and cultural societies across the county. Headley, who runs Westmoreland Heritage out of an office at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, sees this as part of Heritage’s mission to better market history as a regional amenity. The speakers’ project brings groups, patrons, and historians together towards that goal. “There’s an economic benefit to marketing history in a more unified way,” says Headley, “and alongside education, that’s another part of our mission.”

Marketing history is at the top of the agenda for the Ligonier Valley Historical Society’s Compass Inn Museum in nearby Laughlintown, PA outside Ligonier. An original stagecoach inn built in 1799, the Compass Inn doesn’t need to convince anyone of its historical worth - after all, the new part of the Inn dates from 1820. But with a wealth of living-history and storytelling events that occurred throughout the summer and fall of 2008, during Pittsburgh 250, the Society received a Community Connections Grassroots grant to enhance its marketing efforts. And the results are in.

“Attendance is up 14% over last year,” says Jim Koontz, the Innkeeper (read: curator) of the Museum, “and that’s over a summer where gas prices kept a lot of people from traveling.”

The Museum, which includes outbuildings like working blacksmith’s and carpenter’s shops and an outdoor kitchen, operates as a sort-of house museum for early-19^th-century life in Western PA, illustrating the 150 years the Inn was owned and inhabited by six generations of one Ligonier Valley family. Yet Koontz estimates that, from the Museum’s guest book’s entries, almost 65% of this year’s guests came from out of state - a success, it would seem, in getting the word out about Compass Inn and the weekend events it holds throughout the year. This weekend’s “Halloween Haunted Storytelling” event and November’s candlelit holiday tours round out the Compass calendar for 2008.

Marketing Westmoreland County was firmly on the minds of the county’s Community Connections grantseekers for 2008, and two other somewhat related projects won Grassroots grants for their work. The Greensburg Community Development Corporation received a grant to revamp Downtown Greensburg’s image, using existing streetlamps as the basis for a new system of banners both beautifying the neighborhood and providing advertising methods for cultural amenities. Similarly, as a way of maximizing the town-marketing potential of its location along the Great Allegheny Passage trail, Downtown West Newton received a Grassroots grant to bolster financing for its trailhead public art, as a part of the Trailtowns Public Art project that was backed by a separate Community Connections Regional grant.

Westmoreland County’s outdoors amenities - such as the Trail - are an important part of the county’s image. In April, St. Vincent College used a Community Connections Grassroots grant to fund Westmoreland Earth Day 2008, a one-day event encouraging environmental stewardship.

While Westmoreland County’s use of history and the outdoors may be moving the area forward economically, there are still very real economic problems faced in the area. The JAYS (Joining to Achieve Youth Success) voluntary after-school program addresses important issues for middle-school kids in the small town of Jeannette, PA, according to project manager Don Bartowick. Not only does the program help kids with their schoolwork, it keeps students with working parents from wandering into high-risk social activities before mom and dad get home.

“This benefits working parents, provides them with a service to keep the kids focused on their schooling,” says Bartowick. “We cover a lot of aspects [in the after-school program], from homework time to community cleanup and [sports] to get them motivated - not to mention helping with health.”

No one knows the county’s financial woes better than Deana Pastor, the program director for Westmoreland Food Bank. One of her projects - Operation Fresh Express - takes fresh and perishable foods into the county’s various communities, supplementing the non-perishable items that Food Bank “food box” recipients get monthly. But to do so, the Bank needs a sponsor in each community. And while the cost is low - around $350 per visit - for two years Operation Fresh Express had been without a sponsor in several key locales until this year’s Community Connections grant gave them the necessary funding to get their refrigerated trucks back into those neighborhoods.

“Greensburg is a huge area for us, the biggest population we could serve,” says Pastor, “and we hadn’t had a sponsor for two years. Monessen is an area with huge poverty, and we hadn’t been there [recently]. That’s why this grant was key - we have a few locations with regular church or rotary club sponsors, and the rest are hit and miss.”

Through Civil Rites, a Community Connections Regional project designed to collect oral histories across Southwestern PA, the Center hopes to accumulate that foundation of spoken tales. And they’re far from alone: Three of the 12 Community Connections Regional grant recipients are using Pittsburgh 250 as an opportunity to save and savor the stories that our region is built upon. Projects addressing Pittsburgh’s environmental impact and reclamation, and the history of the women’s movement that, in many ways, began here join Civil Rites in ensuring that the history of this region is here for current and future generations to learn from, straight from the mouths of the men and women who made it.

Everybody is a Star

Shay Wafer moved to Pittsburgh because of August Wilson.

Specifically, she came because of her new job: The position of Vice President of Programs at the August Wilson Center for African American Culture lured Wafer away from a similarly prestigious position at L.A.’s Cornerstone Theater Company (”…the closest entity to a National Theater the U.S. may ever have.” - Theater Journal). But Wafer’s interest in and knowledge of that position, and Pittsburgh in general, came almost exclusively from her love of playwrite Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle.

So to Wafer, the stories and histories of the African-American experience in Pittsburgh are more than just tales, they’re her reason for being here - and she’s made it her mission to let people know those stories are important.

“We’ve encountered that - ‘my story’s not important, you don’t want me,’” says Wafer. “We’re trying to teach people what it means to collect: Who deems whose stories are important? Why? And artifacts, too - why collect? What’s the value in keeping your grandmother’s jewelry box or quilt, things some people might just throw out.”

With Civil Rites, Wafer and the Center are establishing an oral-history collection of the African-American experience in Southwestern PA that serves not just as an archive, but as a proactive tool of the Center’s new building. A first-floor permanent exhibit, relying heavily on audio and visual components, will tell the story of black life in the Steel City including recordings of oral histories. The Center will switch the recordings regularly, contacting the interviewees to let them know when their story is being featured, hopefully lending to the sense that this Center isn’t just for the community, it’s of the community.

“We want the community to have a sense of ownership - about this exhibit, and about this building,” says Wafer. “As a new organization and in a new building, that’s critical for us, and what better way to achieve it than to tell people, ‘your story’s going to be in the exhibit; your picture’s part of the exhibit.’”

The method that Wafer and the August Wilson Center are using to collect histories is central to all of these goals. With a series of five “collecting fairs,” the Center is going into communities around the Greater Pittsburgh region and inviting people to share their stories, memories, and histories. (The next collecting fair will be held Sat., Nov. 1, at the Hill House Association in the Hill District.) But to bring people in, and counter that attitude that “my story’s not important,” Wafer admits that the group has had to change its marketing strategy.

“It took a moment for these to catch on,” says Wafer. “A ‘collecting fair’ - what is that?’ This is a new project, it’s experimental, and we had to refine our efforts. It’s not enough to put something in the paper and send out an e-blast - we’ve got to go, literally, door-to-door in the neighborhoods we’re doing next. You’ve got to hand someone a flier, face-to-face, and then explain it. But by doing that, we’ve created a groundswell, and our last fair was very well attended.”

Once people have sat down at a fair, the collecting process is smooth sailing, thanks in large part to a local resource that the Center has plugged into: Dr. Joseph Trotter, the chair of Carnegie Mellon University’s history department, and a nationally renowned collector of African-American oral history as director of CAUSE - the Center for for African-American Urban Studies and the Economy.

“Dr. Trotter is one of our key collaborators on this project,” says Wafer. “The questions he’s developed, which we use, have multiple points of entry, so we can really peel back the layers [in an interview]. What was it like when you were in high school? What was your community like growing up? Things are shifting here every day, so yes - your story is important.”

Time, however, is not on the side of Civil Rites - nor of oral history in general. As the death this month of legendary Pittsburgh Urban League director and activist Arthur J. Edmunds reminded us, the generations that experienced the civil rights movement are slipping away. For that reason, besides their collecting fairs, the Civil Rites project is targeting specific people within the community.

“Our list is prioritized - by age, by people we must get to,” says Wafer. “Who’s still out there, who is an elder in the community, and who is there that we really need to get to, and get to quickly.”

Depth Charged

Dr. Pat Ulbrich knows the importance of moving swiftly when collecting oral histories. She was well into the process of conducting interviews for In Sisterhood: The Women’s Movement in Pittsburgh, a Community Connections Regional-grant funded oral history project, when she learned of the death of interview subject Jean Witter, the author of a historic 1979 legal opinion regarding the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

But Ulbrich also knows the importance, in telling the little-known story of Pittsburgh’s importance in the women’s movement, of in-depth historical interviewing.

“We’ve spent five or six hours of interview time with each person,” says Ulbrich. “It’s a survey of the person’s entire life - a set of themes about family origins, how that shaped them; how they came to become involved in the women’s movement; what activities they engaged in.”

To date, In Sisterhood has captured 13 such interviews, with three more currently underway - including, in a major boon to the project, Eleanor Smeal, the one-time Pittsburgh-area activist who went on to be three-term president of the National Organization for Women and to found the Feminist Majority Foundation.

Despite ongoing work, In Sisterhood has already produced a multi-media exhibition of its work to-date, including photographs, memorabilia, and a video focusing on completed interviews: How the interviewees were recruited into the women’s movement, what they did, and what the outcomes of those actions were. After a preview at a fundraiser in late-September, featuring Smeal as keynote speaker, In Sisterhood’s exhibit debuted at the PA Governor’s Conference for Women in early October in Pittsburgh.

“At the Governor’s Conference, about 4400 women had an opportunity to see the exhibit,” says Ulbrich. “That was very exciting, as many of the participants were there that day, so people were aware not only of these women that they knew, but some of their history in terms of the movement in Pittsburgh.”

The exhibit next moves to Seton Hill University in Greensburg, and a show at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in January. But even as this exhibit tours the region and In Sisterhood continues interviews, Ulbrich is seeking additional funding to expand the project’s scope. With this set to serve as the resource on the women’s movement in Pittsburgh - and its important role on the national level - when In Sisterhood eventually becomes a permanent archive at the University of Pittsburgh, she’s confident that she’ll find the money to continue doing in-depth interviews.

“With just these interviews, we’ll be able to really chronicle that history,” says Ulbrich. “It’s going to be a phenomenal resource, because the lives these people led, and the stories they have to tell are so remarkable.”

Nature Tale

Cut in mid-sentence to the Allegheny Front’s interview with Sarver, PA, resident Donna Davis, and you’d be forgiven for believing she’s an ice-cream inspector or video-game tester. “I wouldn’t trade this job for anything in the world, even for more money,” says Davis. “It’s really the career I’ve dreamed of.”

But step back and remember that this is part of the Pittsburgh Environmental Oral History Project: A Community Connections Regional-grant supported project by veteran environmental-issues radio program, Allegheny Front. So what is it: Ski instructor? Are there professional Frisbee players? Try this: Sewage Planning Specialist Supervisor.

“I’d been working there maybe two or three years and [one day] we were slogging through mud up to our thighs to get to this break to sample it, and [Davis' co-worker] turned to me and said, ‘I didn’t know this job was going to be so glamorous!’ It’s not a job that a lot of people would do.”

Glamorous, Davis’ position is not. But as a long-time employee of the State Department of Environmental Protection, she has overseen vast changes in Southwestern PA’s environment, from the industrial issues of the 1980s to today’s very different situations in the five counties she works. And within those stories are histories of a different sort, such as Davis’ anecdotes about being a woman inspecting the masculine-dominated world of the steel mills.

It’s just the kind of story that Allegheny Front Executive Producer Kathy Knauer hoped for when the group launched their oral-history project this year, and why the group sought out the DEP.

“We went to the DEP and talked to people about their jobs, and they were so excited to talk about what they actually do,” says Knauer. “They’re so used to talking policy, policy, policy, they really wanted to talk about why these jobs are such an important part of their lives.”

Some interviews were predestined: The DEP and Venture Outdoors. But the Allegheny Front has spent the past six months visiting outdoor-related locations and events with a troupe of interns trained in interviewing and recording looking for stories of everyday Pennsylvanians. There, they set up camp and begin asking for interviews: The result has been a breadth of people, places and stories that includes everything from outdoors professionals such as Venture Outdoors Assistant Executive Director Sean Brady, to farmer Frank Romeo, and Chuck Brehm, a Wexford man for whom family and outdoors activity are indivisible concepts.

Through these processes, the organization has collected over 125 interviews, and has edited and broadcast 15 so far on its weekly radio program. (All are available for listening in the show’s online archives.) The plan, according to Knauer, is to continue broadcasting one each week through the end of the year, and to eventually allow access to just about all the interviews at their website.

One interesting feature of the Environmental Oral History Project has been Allegheny Front’s use of other Community Connections projects as a means to uncover interview possibilities. Amongst their trips, the group has used projects including Fisherman’s Tale, Wild Waterways Conservancy, and the Mobile Ag/Ed Lab - all projects funded by Community Connections - to find unique perspectives on the relationships people in the Pittsburgh region have with their environment.

The message of these environmental oral histories is a simple one, and one that can extrapolate to all of Community Connections’ oral-history projects: Our everyday lives aren’t just worthy of history, they’re vital to history. And they’re stories need to be told, heard, and kept.

“I think the message really is that what we have in Western PA is pretty wonderful,” says Knauer. “There are a lot of opportunities for people to experience nature in different ways. The minister in Springdale is a good example. His everyday life involves birdwatching, and he talks about how his views have been shaped by that. These are ordinary people, and their normal routine involves the environment and nature. And over [the course of the project], that’s what I hope comes across.”

At Lawrenceville’s Fe Gallery, on a mid-September Friday night, both of these situations managed to converge into one of the remarkable sights in recent Pittsburgh art-scene history: A crowd numbering at least 700 (possibly as many as 900) streaming through the small one-room gallery, with lines stretching to the end of the block forcing a half-hour wait just to get inside. This was the opening reception for In The Making: 250 Years / 250 Artists, an exhibition containing one piece each from its eponymous number of artists (on view through January of 2009). And its chaos - and let’s be honest, approaching 1,000 people for a Butler Street gallery opening is chaos - was matched only by the vastness of the show itself. And this fall, thanks to a Community Connections Regional project grant to support the creation and dissemination of a similarly vast gallery catalog, In The Making will spread the word of Pittsburgh art across the country.

From the first steps into Fe Gallery, the artwork of In The Making seems almost to impose its will upon its audience. Hung salon style, from floor to rather high ceiling, 250 works of art by artists from every county of the Southwestern PA region make the gallery into a formidable challenge for even the most cursory gallery stroller. And this imposition, particularly when combined with the exciting chaos of opening night, is just what Fe Gallery artistic director Jill Larson was hoping for.

“I wanted people to be overwhelmed,” says Larson, still slightly giddy a month later. “I wanted them to have the same impression I had when I [moved] to Pittsburgh - to take a step back right when they walk in the door, and have that experience I had.”

That experience was an age-old Pittsburgh story: Drawn to the city for reasons beyond their control, an artist discovers that, rather than a smoggy culture-free zone, Pittsburgh boasts a thriving arts scene comparable to much larger cities. Upon arriving from Atlanta, Larson admits that, like so many before her, she didn’t expect much.

“I was shocked to find how many good artists were living in this region,” says Larson, herself a visual artist and former Atlanta-area educator. “I was shocked by the quantity and the quality of the work being done here, and I really wanted to show people back in Atlanta that I hadn’t moved to a cultural wasteland - as was peoples’ assumptions; mine as well, I’m guilty of that. I just wasn’t aware!”

Larson quickly organized an exhibit connecting Atlanta and Pittsburgh artists, which showed in both cities, including what was meant to be a one-time use of the Fe space, which Larson had talked the building’s owner into lending her for free. Five years and 30 shows later, Fe Gallery is a legal nonprofit organization, and a regularly staffed gallery.

When the opportunity to celebrate the region’s 250^th anniversary arose, Larson recognized not only a chance to celebrate the place that got her “addicted to curating,” but a chance to help counter those assumptions that so many people across the country hold about Pittsburgh’s arts community.

“I knew right away that we had to have 250 artists,” says Larson, “and I knew that this [region] could accommodate me with 250 quality ones.”

What Larson wanted to show gallery visitors was a critical mass: Rather than five shows of 50 artists each, or a show that stretched into the gallery’s backyard and basement, In The Making is an almost overwhelming panopticon. But the more subtle aspect of the show comes with its catalog of the artists and their work. By necessity it, too, is huge. But rather than a keepsake for the participants and a few libraries around town, the book serves as something of an actual catalog of Pittsburgh art - a reference guide to 250 of the region’s working artists, complete with bio’s and contact information, to be sent to targeted galleries across the country.

“The catalog is going to a thousand spaces across the country,” explains Larson. “So the work in there isn’t necessarily the artist’s piece from the show - otherwise everyone in America would think that Pittsburghers only make three-foot-tall, flat works of art!”

So an artist working on large-scale installation pieces, such as Tim Kaulen, needn’t be represented in the catalog by his four-foot, two-dimensional bird sculpture. When the catalog is then sent to a space similar to Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory - which specializes in installation art - Kaulen’s page in the book, and those of other local installation specialists, will be highlighted.

“We don’t want people receiving the catalog to be overwhelmed the way we want people in the gallery to be,” says Larson. “We want this to be useful as a tool - so that a photography gets introduced to Pittsburgh photographers, and then can use email or a web address to contact those artists directly.”

You can still get your hands on a copy of the In The Making catalog, even if you’re not a L.A. art-space curator. Fe Gallery has half of their printed copies up for sale at the space - open Noon-4 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday.

What sparked the creation of this organization all those years ago?

Mary Peck Bond, the daughter of an abolitionist, founded the organization when she discovered that Aunt Peggy [a former slave aged around 100], an old friend of hers, was living alone in a damp basement. So Mary brought her into her home, which was the beginning of her work taking care of elders in the community. In 1883, she started a home ‘for the frail elderly.’ Before the nursing home’s assisted living center closed [in 2005], we were the oldest African-American owned and operated [home for seniors] in the country. Now, Lemington Community Services, the service wing incorporated in 1999, is the only part that remains. But we still carry on Mary Peck Bond’s legacy, which was to care for the old and the frail.

Mary Peck Bond, the daughter of an abolitionist, founded the organization when she discovered that Aunt Peggy [a former slave aged around 100], an old friend of hers, was living alone in a damp basement. So Mary brought her into her home, which was the beginning of her work taking care of elders in the community. In 1883, she started a home ‘for the frail elderly.’ Before the nursing home’s assisted living center closed [in 2005], we were the oldest African-American owned and operated [home for seniors] in the country. Now, Lemington Community Services, the service wing incorporated in 1999, is the only part that remains. But we still carry on Mary Peck Bond’s legacy, which was to care for the old and the frail.

These days, the problem isn’t just frailty though, right?

Isolation and depression are a constant struggle for us. [The neighborhoods we serve most directly] are neighborhoods where there’s a lot of crime - when you read the news, when someone’s been shot, that’s where it is. These people are actually afraid to leave their homes. When we had the home, there was a lot of activity all the time, guys coming to play cards and shoot pool, but now that we’ve moved we’re wondering - what’s happened to our guys? So we did a survey, and they said, ‘we don’t wanna play cards - we want to go fishing!’

So you came up with the idea for Fisherman’s Tale?

We have a ‘guys day’ - the fourth Friday of every month - and the guys come in and play cards and talk. We bring someone in that’ll talk about depression, but they don’t stand up and talk about it, they just sit around and play cards with the guys, and [bring up] grieving and depression. The men weren’t coming to the center, so we thought, we need to get them in a certain way to expose them to this information - so Fisherman’s Tale came together all at once as a similar way to educate these men and to get them to tell their stories. If we don’t get them to tell their stories, they’ll regret it, and so will the city and the whole country. What’s more, African-American men - these seniors don’t have health care, and if they do, they don’t go to the doctor. So we’ve had speakers coming to talk about holistic health education - just to begin those conversations.

Fisherman’s Tale is no longer just for senior men, though?

We were just going to focus on senior men, but the women have come out fishing and the men are enjoying it - I still want it to be their program, we’re just including others. We got an additional $5,000 from Mount Ararat Baptist Church’s Community Ties grant to include children in the program, too - working with children from the Paulson Community Center. And the kids that have come - I’m at a loss for words. They come and listen to the guys, they tell their friends about it, they want to do it again and again.

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.

A Big Enough Umbrella: Community Connections’ Affiliated Projects

As a grassroots component of Pittsburgh 250, Community Connections needed to incorporate as wide a scope of projects as possible - including events and projects that perhaps couldn’t be funded directly by the program, or that didn’t even require extra funding. With Community Connections’ Affliated Projects, the initiative has been able to bring other grassroots projects under the Pittsburgh 250 umbrella.

For Marty Ashby, Executive Producer of MCG Jazz, the inclusion of his Pittsburgh Jazz Legacy Big Band in the Pittsburgh 250 process was an important acknowledgement of the place jazz music has held in the city’s cultural history. The fact that the group - funded by Bank of New York Mellon - wasn’t seeking Community Connections funding shouldn’t keep it from being named as part of the initiative.

“We were thrilled to be a part of it,” says Ashby. “To perform the music of [Pittsburgh musicians such as] Billy Strayhorn, Stanley Turrentine, Ahmad Jamal around Western Pennsylvania this year - there was really a focus on getting the show out into the region [for Pittsburgh 250].”

Community Connections Affiliated projects are marketed and described in much the same way as funded projects. So, for example, when Pittsburgh 250’s events listings and other tools have gone out this year, local folk-music historians The Newlanders (whose Born of Fire project illustrates music of industrial-era Southwestern PA) were included. As was the Johnstown Folk Festival - a well-known annual festival in the Flood City which, this year, hoped Pittsburgh 250 might inspire more regional visitors. Richard Burkert, the director of the Festival’s parent group - the Johnstown Area Heritage Association - says that he’s unsure to what extent attendance from the Pittsburgh area, already the festival’s largest potential audience pool, was effected. But the group thought it important to get involved, at a time when regionalism is at the front of everyone’s mind. “Geographically, we’re close to Pittsburgh, but sometimes it feels like we might as well be on another planet,” he said. “Anything that brings us closer to being part of that region, we want to be a part of.”

Between Community Connections, its affiliates, and the broader Pittsburgh 250 initiative, this year’s anniversary has covered a lot of ground. But the groundswell of interest in celebrating our 250^th anniversary has by no means been limited to formally sanctioned events. “There’s an aura,” says Dustin Stiver, Program Coordinator at The Sprout Fund, “a sense that Pittsburgh 250 has permeated the regional narrative. Communities and organizations - with and without Community Connections support - have found many meaningful ways to join in the celebration. It’s pervasive, and we’re certainly not involved in everything. People are taking it upon themselves to get things started in their community - to become part of the momentum. That’s the beauty of it.”

The breadth of topics covered by Affiliated Projects is as wide as Community Connections itself: the Coal and Coke Heritage Music Festival, the 150^th anniversary of Rodef Shalom synagogue, the Friendship House Tour, a series of events at the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, and repair work on Frick Park’s tennis courts, to name a few. But all of these projects share the common theme of Pittsburgh 250 - people within Southwestern Pennsylvania creating efforts to showcase their communities while launching them proudly into the next 250 years.

Read posts about the Redd Up here and here.

The first of five canoe launches was dedicated near Zelienople on Saturday.

The five were made possible by a $50,000 grant from the Sprout Fund of Pittsburgh as part of the Pittsburgh 250 celebration.

The launches will be along the Slippery Rock and Connoquenessing creeks, located at Connoquenessing Creek Gorge in Ellwood City, Rock Point in Wayne, McKimm Way in Beaver County, the Slippery Rock Creek Natural Area in Butler County and at Connoquenessing Creek Park in Zelienople, where yesterday’s ceremony was held.

Read more here.

When Elizabeth Perry spots a sign, she sees more than metal, paint or neon.

“So much in our culture — for better or for worse — has become similar because of the growth of chains,” said Perry, 49, of Friendship.

“Signs? It gives you this amazing glimpse into the texture of our lives as individuals.”

By the end of the year, the group plans to publish a 150- to 200-page book spanning 14 counties and boasting 60 contributors.

Pittsburgh, whose signs date back decades, has proven fertile ground for such experiments.

“I don’t know that the signs are better here, but there are so many signs that really reflect the spirit of the place,” she said.

Some of the signs online at the project’s Web site - www.pittsburghsigns.org - are a testament to the region’s signage charm: the bold neon of Equitable Gas or the Heinz ketchup bottle, a purple elephant selling pools in Cheswick, the Byham Theater’s glowing marquee, the other-era charm of old motels.

“They say a lot about the distinctive qualities of a city, a neighborhood or a region,” said Greg Langel, 39, of Dormont, a project editor.

“Making a good sign is an art. And it’s an art form that’s practiced in every city and every state. … It’s part of our visual culture.”

It’s also part of the region’s history, according to The Sprout Fund, which awarded the Pittsburgh Signs Project a $50,000 Pittsburgh 250 grant for its book.

“This unique take on the history of Southwestern Pennsylvania will be new to a lot of people,” said Dustin Stiver, the fund’s program coordinator.

Read the full article here.

Trader Bob is, of course, spinning a bit of a yarn. It’s 2008, and the need for musket balls and wolverine pelts has gone the way of cheap gas. But he does so with such ease, and without the slightest break in character (”But what’s your name?” “Oh, Trader Bob’s just fine.”), that it’s easy to get caught up and forget that this is Boyce Park. The trading post is, in fact, just a stop along the trail of Washington’s Encampment, a Community Connections Grassroots-grant funded project sponsored by the Allegheny Foothills Historical Society to create a full-fledged, 1758-era encampment during the October 4-5 Pittsburgh 250 weekend.

Not all of the hundreds of living-history reenactors involved in the Encampment are quite as 110 percent as Trader Bob. Walking past a stepped-out-of-a-painting Indian, complete with Mohawk and face-paint, talking with a stovepipe hat-wearing sutler, the illusion faded a bit: “…I’m gonna be [mad] if Tomlin doesn’t start Ben tonight…”

But the experience of Washington’s Encampment isn’t immersion, it’s education, and that note rang out clear. The kids started getting their basics straight (”Why were their guns so long?” “I thought the redcoats were the bad guys?”), and even some of the know-it-all’s got schooled. (Well, can you tell me how the industrial revolution, the fur trade, and the French & Indian War are interrelated?)

Up at Boyce Park this weekend, it wasn’t hard to see what Western Pennsylvania life was like in 1758, but more importantly, it was possible to get a glimpse of why it was like that - and why this city came to be.

Cumberland resident Steven Fiscus and Jeff Dardozzi of Newport on Saturday completed a 16-foot-wide, 14-foot-tall, four-and-a half ton arch structure spanning the 10-foot trail bed of the Great Allegheny Passage as it enters the city of Connellsville.

The arch was one of two pieces of public art commissioned for the town as an outgrowth of the Pittsburgh 250th anniversary celebration this summer. The Trail Towns Program (www.trailtowns.org) administered the program for Connellsville and five other towns along the trail in southwestern Pennsylvania, with support from the Progress Fund and Pittsburgh’s Sprout Fund, which specializes in public art. The gateway arch was further funded by the Connellsville Redevelopment Authority.

Read the full article here.

ohn Debelak hopes that giving visitors a chance to talk with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin this weekend will ignite a passion for history.

Washington, interpreted by Brian Cunning, and Franklin, portrayed by Paul Stillman, will be among as many as 270 costumed participants taking part in a two-day free history festival in Boyce Park.

Mr. Debelak and Tom Klingensmith are co-chairmen of the event, which begins today and continues tomorrow. It commemorates the 250th anniversary of Washington’s Encampment in what became Plum.

Washington was a provincial officer in the Forbes Expedition, which crossed the Pennsylvania wilderness in 1758. It drove the French from Fort Duquesne and established Pittsburgh as a British settlement.

Re-enactors, craft demonstrators and sutlers — an archaic term for merchants — will set up camps that re-create life among Native Americans, provincials and French and British soldiers.

Other activities will include performances by an 18th century-style circus, English and Scots country dancing and daily re-enactments of the Battle of Grant’s Hill. British and Colonial troops under Maj. James Grant were overwhelmed by a French and Indian force near what is now Pittsburgh’s Grant Street in September 1758.

Read the full article here.

Melissa and Jason Julius reside in the Victorian house in Lawrenceville that state Sen. Max Leslie lived in for 40 years.

This weekend, their restored home will be featured on the “Lawrenceville Historic House Tour: Snapshots Through Time.” The Lawrenceville Historic Society and the Lawrenceville Stakeholders were awarded a Community Connections grassroots grant from Pittsburgh 250 to expand its house tour, according to Kate Bayer of the house-tour committee. So, in addition to the seven houses on today’s tour, and nine houses on Sunday’s tour, there will be re-enactments and living-history characterizations.

“This year’s tour is not an ordinary house tour,” Bayer says. “We have laid the tour out to give our visitors a snapshot through time from 1750 to 2008 and beyond. None of the other house tours is a Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections grassroots event like this one.

Read the full article here.

That first tube’s water is from just a few hundred yards away, at the start point of the new Tanoma Wetlands Educational Trail - a Community Connections Grassroots grant-funded project establishing a signposted trail along the Abandoned Mine Drainage-treatment site here near Tanoma in Indiana County. At the run-off point, where the second test tube is taken from, the same water empties back into Crooked Creek, empty of the poisonous iron that the water carries from an abandoned coal mine 120 feet below the surface.

On this beautiful Fall day, walking along the just-unveiled Educational Trail, Tom Clark explains to his tour groups the all-natural process that removes that iron and makes Crooked Creek safe for plant, fish, and insect life again: How the system of ponds in this former cornfield make the water move with subtle turbulence through densely packed cattails and other wetland plants, which naturally filter the iron out of the water. But when Clark’s not there, visitors to the open site aren’t left out in the cold: The new grant-funded signs posted by the Wetlands’ owners, the Evergreen Conservancy.

“This is taking almost 150 pounds of iron out of Crooked Creek per day,” Clark says to one tour group of about a dozen Girl Scouts and another half-dozen visitors. “That’s a whole person of iron every day. But we’re not only making cleaner water here, we’re creating a wetlands environment.” Clark points to the dense mass of cattails in one of the ponds. “That’s teeming with life - especially in the spring; you can’t imagine how much life is in there.”

The Educational Trail is just phase one of a multi-phase project - later stages include the building of a pagoda where sessions can be led, and a small parking lot. Clark points out that the Educational Trail, and the entire Tanoma Wetlands project, is doing something that many who work in science often forego: Public relations.

“There’s a need to explain what we’re doing,” says Clark, especially with such heavily public-funded processes as Abandoned Mine Drainage. “When I’m not here, [the signs] provide a self-guided tour, but it’s not dumbed-down - it’s not simplified. But we’re also just removing the skepticism - the idea that, ‘This creek has always been orange [from Iron], and it always will be.’ We’re showing that that can change.” And not just that it can change, but that it can be done relatively cheaply, and naturally.

From the Post-Gazette:

Pittsburgh will mark its 250th birthday with a million-dollar celebration on Saturday.

The busiest weekend of the region’s year-long “sesquibicentennial” will begin with a more-than-100-vessel Three Rivers aquatic parade and end with the city’s largest-ever display of aerial pyrotechnics. “Imagine Pittsburgh” fireworks will be launched from 17 sites on the Three Rivers, the North Side and Downtown.

From the Tribune-Review:

Pittsburgh’s role in the growth of a nation began at what now is Point State Park, the same place its first strides into the future will be taken Saturday.

Pittsburgh Celebrates 250, a daylong festivity sponsored by the philanthropic Colcom Foundation, will begin at 9:30 a.m. with a parade of more than 100 boats and end at 10 p.m. with one of the city’s most favorite events, fireworks.

In between at the Downtown park, there will be concerts, various ceremonies and historic re-enactments of the time when the site was home to Fort Pitt and is predecessor, Fort Duquesne.

Read more here and here.

Tom Klingensmith worries that the importance of historical education is underestimated.

“The wisdom of our forefathers and our founding fathers is all there for anyone who seeks it,” says Klingensmith, who lives in New Kensington. “Their writings are as relevant today as they were then.”

Klingensmith is a re-enactor who will take part in this weekend’s 250th anniversary celebration of Washington’s Encampment, during which frontier life from 1758 will be discussed and re-created at Boyce Park, Plum. There will be military camps of French, British, Provincials and American Indians, hundreds of re-enactors, Conestoga and Virginia wagons, an 18th century circus, English and Scottish country dancers and presentations by scholars.

Visitors will be able to meet George Washington and Ben Franklin re-enactors, says Klingensmith, who is coordinating the event with John Debelak of Plum.

“It is an excellent educational opportunity for students of the 18th century, both young and old,” Klingensmith says. “When a person is introduced to our past, perhaps by an event such as Washington’s Encampment, they see what they have missed and sometimes develop a passion for history.”

Debiak says it is and opportunity to learn about the birth of Pittsburgh, which is celebrating its 250th birthday.

“In order for people to get a full grasp of our rich history, they have to realize the importance of the area and what it meant to further expansion west,” he says. “The founding of Pittsburgh came about through a sequence of events that changed world history, and it all happened in Western Pennsylvania,” Klingensmith says.

When George Washington and his men carved the Forbes Trail from Carlisle to Pittsburgh 250 years ago, they crossed through what would become Boyce Park.

Klingensmith and Debiak believe that even those with a casual interest in history will enjoy the weekend.

“Pennsylvania’s October landscape is impressive, regardless of people’s interests,” Klingensmith says.

Read more in the full article.

The River City Brass Band will send out a crisp salute to the “good old” USA during its “Anthem for America.” Performances will be at 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 5, at Bethel Park High School and 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 9, at Byham Theater in Pittsburgh.

The string sounds of American Anthem, by composer/lyricist Gene Scheer, show his scope and versatility. In 1999, Scheer’s American Anthem premiered at the Smithsonian Institution’s unveiling ceremony for the restored Star-Spangled Banner flag.

Paul Lovatt-Cooper’s Where Eagles Sing will also be highlighted.

John Philip Sousa’s march, Semper Fidelis, is also on the program, best known as the official march of the Unites State Marine Corps. This is just a snippet of the stirring sounds to be heard on this concert.

Violin virtuoso Mikylah McTeer will also share her talent during various showpieces.
The RCBB will also present the commissioned work, “Black and Gold Overture” in celebration of Pittsburgh 250 by Pittsburgh composer David Stock.

Stock, who has commissioned several works throughout his career, is also the professor of Music and Composer-in-Residence at Duquesne University.

Read more here.

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