The Blurgh

I attended a meeting of Students for a Sustainable Pittsburgh for the first time in a while last night, and I’ve missed a lot of stuff. The last thing I mentioned was how they were lobbying the city to enact the Open Doors Initiative, which is a program to make it easier for recent college grads to enter careers in city government. That did end up passing, so for those of you who are graduating and thinking about what the hell you’ll be doing with yourself in the coming months, contact SSP for details.

Given that it’s the end of the semester and a whole new batch of seniors is about to enter the “real world,” the topic of the meeting last night was how to stay involved with SSP and the university community after graduation. A lot of SSP alum have gone on to do amazing things, but I was surprised to find out that there was no official method being used to keep in touch with past members. Starting this year, though, there will be a new officer position created to do just that.

I think it’s a great idea, because I never really realized how important it is to keep in touch with people and maintain networks until just the past few months. The quality of the work you do is important, but the people who know the work you’re capable of doing is even more important. Or at least that was SSP’s pitch for the idea

So, in the spirit of helping those who will come later, I signed up for the SSP alum email list and to be a mentor for those who need one. Now I just have to get my shit together so I have something to mentor them about…

On Fridays, I have a nice 2-hour block between classes.  Usually I use the time to either pass out or do some emergency cramming, but last week when I exited Posvar Hall I saw a big crowd of SSP kids waiting at the bus stop.  I asked them what was going on, and they said they were going to a city council meeting downtown to lobby for SSP’s new Open Doors initiative.

The initiative is focused  on making it easier for students and recent grads to enter careers within the city government, which right now is a pretty time-consuming and complicated process.  First you have to go through their online system and create an account, then see if you have to take the civil service test.  If you do, count out even being able to apply for at least a month.  After you finally get to apply, you have to wait for the gears of bureaucracy to work, and you may or may not get a call for an interview in another month or so.

It’s a process that in the end up takes several months, and because of that lot of good candidates end up in other professions. SSP feels that the city should be the employer of choice in the region and needs to be doing a better job of recruiting talented applicants and getting them through the system as fast as possible.  The plan is to team the city with the OED to place interns in different city departments, which could fast-track them since they would then already be in the system, and then for a study to be done on how to streamline and revamp the HR process.

Mayor Conway is apparently a big supporter of the idea, but there is some pushback from the council, so we’ll see how it goes.

Last night, I decided to be a patriotic Pittsburgher and meet my City Council member, Andrew Marsdale. He’s a relative newcomer - only elected a few years ago - but I like him a lot and he manages to do a lot of good for the Downtown area.

The meeting was held at a small café near my apartment and by the time I got there it was already full and Mr. Marsdale had already begun talking about the work he’s been doing on City Council. He’s particularly interested in the high-speed rail initiative that Students for a Sustainable Pittsburgh has been pushing for, so he talked about that a lot. Basically, he’s excited for it, and so are the mayor and a few other council members, but there are still some voices on the council who don’t see the importance of the tri-state rail system for Pittsburgh. They think that other cities in the area should take care of it.

But Marsdale disagrees. He thinks that the city of Pittsburgh is one of the foremost leaders in the region, and that while of course we need to reach out to other major cities, we should be taking the lead in developing this project. Most of the constituents who were there agreed.

Afterwards, he answered a few questions from people. I didn’t get a chance to ask him about anything, but I was pleasantly surprised that he praised the work the Pittsburgh Women’s Foundation is doing with girls in the public school system. Not bad when your council person recognizes your organization for being so awesome!

I realized that while I’ve blogged about my job before, I’ve never really explained how the Foundation began or what all it does. And it is super awesome, so here goes.

Back in 2013, Alicia Mulraney, a sociology major at Pitt, and Janessa Crosby, a women’s studies major at Carlow, had internships at the Pittsburgh YWCA during their last semesters of college. They were impressed at the number of programs the YWCA offered women in the community, but they realized that there was more that needed to be done.

So they decided to take matters into their own hands. They applied for grants from the Sprout Fund, the Heinz Endowments and a few other places, and got them. They began renting a small one bedroom apartment in North Oakland and made it their headquarters.

The first program they began offering was the sports program. It’s basically a way for girls who normally are not encouraged to play sports to get involved in physical activities and build their self-confidence. And although the girls are not very athletically inclined when they begin the program, you better believe they’re true athletes within a few months. It’s pretty amazing.

After the success of the sports program, they decided to band with Students for a Sustainable Pittsburgh and advocate for on-site child care in the majority of businesses downtown - a pretty big deal, since this was about the time when all the technology firms were making their way to the Golden Triangle. Through their efforts, they managed to have all new incoming businesses and 70% of existing businesses with 25 or more employees in the city commit to on-site child care.

By then, the PWF had been in existence for five years and their success had caused them to hire more staff and move to the present offices, in Squirrel Hill. They began their own grant program for women who wanted to start their own non-profits.

I was brought into the PWF to work on their newest program, the girls’ creative writing program. The CEOs (still Alicia and Janessa) realized that girls who aren’t really interested in sports had few options for afterschool programs, so they started working with the local middle schools to offer the creative writing program to interested girls. So far, the response has been great and I can honestly say I love going to work every day.

Last week I went to a Students for a Sustainable Pittsburgh meeting…I had missed a couple during the past few weeks due to other things going on, so it was good to catch up on what’s been happening. There were also a lot of new faces in the crowd, which surprised me, since in all the student groups I’ve ever been involved with, attendance was always high initially but dropped dramatically as the semester went on. Not so with SSP, but I digress…

During most of the meetings I’ve been to so far, I’ve been most drawn to the things the group has done in the past, which I guess is the result of me being a huge history dork. During this meeting, though, I got really into the new project they’re starting to work on. It’s one of those ideas that, after you hear it, you can’t believe it hasn’t been done already. SSP is planning on partnering with the city of Pittsburgh and other major cities in the tri-state area to beef up the inter-city rail connections by updating the lines to accommodate high-speed travel.

The basis for it is that since Pittsburgh’s economy has been doing so well during the past couple decades, the need for better transportation between the other nearby metropolitan areas has increased dramatically. Pittsburgh itself has its own extensive transit rail system, which has cut down on traffic significantly, but the airport is near capacity and the highways leading into the city are a mess. High-speed rail connections to nearby cities like Columbus, Cleveland, Wheeling, Harrisburg, Morgantown, Erie, etc. would help alleviate the traffic problems and also contribute to continued economic growth.

Maybe what interested me so much was this initiative’s connection to the past–back when steel was king, Pittsburgh was a HUGE rail hub, and there were trains traveling at all hours of the day to every city you can think of. In fact, a lot of those lines are still there, which makes implementation a lot easier than it could be. SSP was asking for volunteers to help them drum up support, and I decided to put my name down. I’m not sure what it’ll involve quite yet, but it definitely seems like a worthwhile thing to be involved with.

My mom and stepdad visited this weekend. After I graduated from high school in New Wilmington, they told me that they were planning on moving to Florida to join the rest of my family which has migrated down there, and by the time I finished college they had bought a house down the block from my grandparents. But they come back to good old PA every once in awhile to visit, and it doesn’t hurt that I have a free place to stay when I want to be a beach bum.

Every time they visit, they can’t believe all the things that have changed in Pittsburgh. When my mom graduated from college, back in 2000, young people were leaving the city in droves. They couldn’t find good jobs to keep them here, so they left for bigger cities like DC and New York. But this weekend my mom asked me where all my friends were moving to, and I could only think of one person - a friend of mine from college who’s moving to New York to go to grad school. Everyone else has stayed here. Sure, a few of them are continuing their educations, like my best friend Andi, who’s in law school at Pitt, but most of them have found good, stable jobs and are saving up to buy a house.

I think the work of organizations like Students for a Sustainable Pittsburgh and the progressive politics that have been on the upswing the past few years are mostly to thank for these changes. I’m glad that I don’t have to leave the region I grew up in to find a job that’s meaningful and pays reasonably well. I hope to never have to leave this place - although if I ever decide that hurricanes, bugs the size of small animals, and gaudy tourist attractions galore are for me, my mom has assured me I’m always welcome in Florida.

I haven’t mentioned anything so far about the mayoral race that’s been going on, but that’s mostly because no one in their right mind is planning on voting against the incumbent, Mayor Conway. Since her victory 8 years ago, the amount of stuff she’s gotten done makes it hard to believe that she’s slept. She was the real driver of the initiative to get the city’s books back in order, she cracked down on improprieties stemming from Pittsburgh’s casino and riverboat gambling operations, she worked with the former SSP members on the council to pass the Family First and Foremost policy (which went WAY beyond the federal Family Medical Leave Act), she pushed for city-run child care centers to provide support for families who couldn’t afford private child care…the list really goes on and on.

Her biggest success, however, has been what she’s done to “green” the city. Pittsburgh has been known as a haven for green building for a long time, but most of that has been focused on large new commercial buildings. It was Mayor Conway’s idea to partner with Duquesne Light and other energy providers to provide incentives for people to remodel their houses for both efficiency and renewable energy. And, believe it or not, Pittsburgh neighborhoods were perfect for it. The plethora of row houses made it easy to install large arrays of solar cells, the many hills became perfect platforms for small, efficient wind turbines. But above all, the people loved it. It also didn’t hurt that most of the breakthroughs in renewable energy products were coming from local firms spun off from local universities.

Dr. Lemley likes to compare the emergence of renewable energy as a big industry to what the steel industry used to be like for Pittsburgh. It encompassed everything–it permeated the air, and you could taste it in the water, and it was people’s livelihoods. Now, you can’t walk down a street without seeing a solar array on a roof or a advertisement for new green products. Unlike steel, however, it’s permeating people’s lives in a much more healthy way. I’m just glad that Mayor Conway had the foresight to see the impact it could make, although she has admitted several times that she’s surprised at how important to the city’s prosperity it has become.

There was a SSP meeting this past week, and they were talking about something I never really thought about before, but might be a good opportunity. One of the more recent things SSP has worked on is getting an Office of Entrepreneurial Development started at Pitt, and to link it with similar offices at other universities in the area. The idea behind them is to work with researchers (both faculty and student) who want to spin their work off into companies or organizations and help them to develop their plans, assist with marketing, and to also connect them with big venture capitalist firms and grant makers in the area. It’s been operating for a few years now, and just recently they started a program focused on connecting undergraduates to these new start-up companies for internships and post-graduation employment.

It makes a ton of sense to me, because Universities are magnets for new ideas and one of their main purposes is to educate the future workforce. I’m really excited about it because most of the internships I hear about for liberal arts majors are for research or admin-type positions at non-profits, and nothing so far has really seemed very interesting to me. Anyway, I’m planning on going to the office tomorrow to see what sorts of places are looking for people, especially History & Psych majors who are clueless about where their life is headed!

I know, I’m such an attractive prospective employee…

I just got back from the first meeting of SSP, and I’m totally blown away. I knew about them before, especially how they really got involved in the city politics and government in the twenty-teens, but I didn’t realize how much they really did. Although I’m no expert, here’s how it basically went down:

• 2010, SSP founded by a group of law students in Pitt Law School to advocate for women/minority/family friendly policies into Pittsburgh’s law culture.

• 2011, membership started coming from other Pitt programs (Business School, GSPIA), and students from Duquesne, CMU, and Carlow also started to join. SSP held their first rally to promote sustainable policies in the region, which became a yearly event.

• 2014, The first SSPers entered the workforce, and started making a commotion. Former SSP presidents Susan P. Yorlowski and Stacey Shinbolt participated in the Wallace v. Gorley case, giving them and SSP national attention.

• 2020, for its 10-year anniversary, SSP released a report detailing their accomplishments, which included:

  • 35% of all law firms and major businesses in the region implemented SSP’s “Family First and Foremost” policy.

  • The pay differential between men and women was eliminated.

  • 40% of law partners in area firms were women

• In 2022, SSP members Kelly Garcia and Greg Oliver were elected to the city council.

• In 2024, as a result of Kelly and Greg’s efforts, the city adopted the “Family First and Foremost” policy.

In the past few years, they’ve focused on local government policy and public outreach to support progressive local politicians.

I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to get involved since this is my senior year, but I’m going to give it a shot.

Nothing says “school has officially started” like going to the activities fair…

Even though I’m a senior, I’ve never really gotten involved in any student groups. That’s never stopped me from going to the activities fair, though—where else can you get a bottle opener, a frisbee, candy, and listen to live music all in one place?

As always, I began the day with a stop by the Pitt African Drumming Ensemble table, since they always have the best jams. Maybe I’ll actually try going to a few meetings this weekend…but probably not. My dad has the musical talent, but I wasn’t fortunate enough to inherit any of it. After that I went to the Campus Women’s Organization, which always has good info available, and then I stopped by a table I’ve never been to before: Student for a Sustainable Pittsburgh.

I’ve definitely heard of them before (who at Pitt hasn’t?), but, as they told me when I talked to them, they usually only advertise to graduate students, so they’ve skipped the fair for the past few years. I signed up for their list, took some info, and I’m thinking I might actually get involved for once. Well, I’ll at least go to the first meeting…