For Good

From Pittsburgh park habitués to people who wouldn't know an Oval from a Blue Slide, everyone wants the same things once they go deeper into city parks and hit the trails: a trail map and the locations of bathrooms and water fountains. They also want a schedule of park activities and some way to report a park issue to authorities, a recent Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy survey found.
 
So it's high time for a Pittsburgh Parks app, says Conservancy Vice President Mike Sexauer. "There are psychological barriers to people walking on a heavily wooded trail," he notes -- especially in Frick Park, where there are no interior roads. "Once people take a few steps down a trail and can no longer see where they're parked, [they] sometimes need extra reassurance that they can find their way back."
 
The app is being funded by UPMC Health Plan -- "a natural partner," Sexauer says, given that the app will try to "get more people into the parks for the mental and physical health benefits" -- and designed by Deeplocal for smart phones. It will cover Schenley, Frick, Highland, Riverview and Emerald View parks.
 
"There is a place for technology in the natural world, especially with the implication that technology can enhance someone's experience in our parks," he says, adding, "we'll put some surprises in." For instance, park officials are currently rating trails for stroller and wheelchair accessibility, and noting natural sites and the best views. They are also planning to use the 311 system to let park-goers email a photo of problem areas.
 
The app still doesn't have a name, however, so the Conservancy has set up a Facebook page where people can vote for the moniker. Names the Conservancy suggests: PGH UrbanParks, PGH ParkScout, PGH Parks, ParksBurgh, MyPGHParks or PGH Park Pal. Concludes Sexauer: "We're looking for write-in votes …"


Writer: Marty Levine
Source: Mike Sexauer, Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy

"We made a lot of great friendships with other writers," says Women Read/Women Write Book Festival co-founder Gwyn Cready, about last year's event. "I'd say we built a kind of sisterhood among the writers and a lot of the attendees -- but there were a lot of men, too."
 
Cready and fellow organizer Meredith Mileti have even higher expectations for the second annual free festival, this year to be held Oct. 27 at the Galleria in Mt. Lebanon. More than 35 authors are expected -- mostly women, and mostly local -- for four panels this year. They include: "Fifty Shades of Blush: The Reverberations of Fifty Shades of Grey in Bedrooms, Book Clubs and Mainstream Fiction"; "Hermoine vs Lisbeth: Brains, Brawn and the Modern Heroine"; "Mining Your Life" (about turning our lives into fiction and memoir) and a repeat of last year's very popular "Getting Published, Staying Published."
 
"Most readers are women," Cready says. "They are the heart and soul of the literary world …"
 
Although the focus is women's writing, the authors in attendance range across many genres, from memoir and mystery to romance, literary fiction, young adult and children's books, self-help and historical fiction.
 
"What genres of the book world don't women read?" says Cready. "Maybe military suspense. We're pretty open."
 
"Women's fiction?" adds Mileti, pondering what defines her own genre. "Often there is an element of romance, but really the focus of the story is the difficulties of the heroine as she faces personal challenges." The Harry Potter vs. Millennium Trilogy panel is intended to assess the place of the heroine in today's fiction.
 
"We intend to keep on doing this," concludes Cready. "We would love to see it grow and grow and draw more and more authors and more and more attendees from other states."
 
Writer: Marty Levine
Sources: Gwyn Cready and Meredith Mileti, Women Read/Women Write Book Festival

"There's a lot of negativity displayed in the media toward the Hill District youth, and I wanted to give Hill District youth a chance to be better than the stereotype," says 17-year-old Dynae Shaw, leader of a group of 12 high-school students who together form the first Youth Philanthropy Initiative (YPI).
 
YPI participants, ages 13-18, come from the Oakland Planning and Development Corporation’s School 2 Career Program and are looking for young entrepreneurs to support in the Hill, Uptown and West Oakland. The group raised $614 this summer and program co-sponsor McAuley Ministries, part of the Pittsburgh Mercy Health System, matched it 5 to 1.
 
"When I found out about the money I was really excited," says Shaw, a Garfield resident and senior at Pittsburgh Obama, "because I really wanted to help the Hill District. Youth should be decision makers. We wanted to make sure it was for bettering the Hill District, so we want little projects that can turn into something big." She envisions youth with artistic talent teaching classes in inexpensive or donated spaces, "or a lawn business to make the Hill District look more appealing," she says.
 
Grants of $500 or $1,000 will be given to applicants, who must attend a two-hour workshop on Oct. 27, from 10 a.m. to noon at the Hill House Association. The workshop, run by Hill-based UrbanInnovation21, will help hopefuls devise their business plans and learn to run a thriving business. Applications will be due on Nov. 19 at 5 p.m. via the POISE Foundation.
 
YPI members spent the summer getting acquainted with the grant-making process and are learning now how to evaluate applicants' presentations.
 
"I hope that it will inspire other youth to stand up and follow their dreams," Shaw says about the YPI program. "This will give them not only the chance to do something they haven't been able to do without the money, but to tell them that people care about their community." Shaw hopes YPI will be done again in the future, and that perhaps it will expand to East Liberty and other neighborhoods.
 
"We're not looking at overnight change," she adds, "but we hope people will look at the businesses and say, 'I can do that.' We hope they will look for other grants or say they can volunteer in their community. We also hope to inspire other businesses and other foundations to give youth a chance."
 
Writer: Marty Levine
Source: Dynae Shaw, Youth Philanthropy Initiative

Back when there wasn't quite as much science to popularize, Francesco Algarotti was the popular science writer of his day -- the 1700s -- and Isaac Newton was the guy whose theories he was intent on making accessible to the masses. His book, despite its title -- Newtonianism for Ladies -- wasn't just for women either.
 
"He wanted women to be a part of the [readership], but the intent was to make a book that was accessible to a wide, regular audience," says James Lennox, professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. In fact, Lennox says, that's also the intent of a new lecture series and publishing endeavor about to be undertaken with help from a $600,000 grant from the A.W. Mellon Foundation.
 
Lennox and the department's fellow faculty are ranked fifth in the U.S. by the prestigious Philosophical Gourmet report, tied with Harvard and right behind NYU, Rutgers, Princeton and Michigan. The Mellon grant is intended to help Pitt bring greater attention to its strongest academic offerings. It will fund fellowships in the department and Pitt's World History Center, in addition to the new lecture series chronicling how Algarotti popularized Newton's theories, which will be the basis for new University of Pittsburgh Press publications. Paula Findlen, a professor of Italian history at Stanford, will give the first three free lectures Oct. 22-25.
 
Algarotti's era, Lennox says, "was only 100 years or so after people were becoming educated enough that scientific [books] were written in the vernacular rather than Latin," which had reached only the elite. And although his department's focus may sound daunting to some, the department's undergrad courses regularly pack them in, Lennox reports. Thus, echoing Algarotti's hopes, he says, what the department desires for these and future lectures in the series is to reach the widest possible audience.
 
Writer: Marty Levine
Source: James Lennox, University of Pittsburgh Department of History and Philosophy of Science

One Young World has concluded, but the impact will be felt for a long time -- not only by the local delegates but by the local youth reporters who covered the gathering at Pittsburgh Youth Media. As previously reported by Pop City, the  Pittsburgh Youth Media project recruited 32 local high-schoolers from 26 districts to cover the One Young World Summit and to give a youth perspective to other future events in Pittsburgh.
 
Following a boot-camp training on journalism earlier this month, the students converged on the summit, meeting in their own press room at the David L Lawrence Convention Center. For four days they reported on a range of stories, from speakers such as Bob Geldof and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey to the 50 breakout sessions held through Pittsburgh for the 1300 delegates attending from around the world.
 
Want to know what One Young World was like from a young person's perspective? The more than 80 stories at Pittsburgh Youth Media tell the tale from a multitude of angles:
 
An Experience of a Lifetime by Prem Rajgopal, Grade 12, Fox Chapel Area High School.
 
Inspired Delegates Have Hopes For Future Conference, by Sophie Belch, Junior, Riverview High School.
 
Nutrition and Education in Schools, by LaTionna Russell, Pittsburgh Obama 6-12.
 
Youth Summit Delegates Propose Behavior Changes, by Daly Trimble, Freshman, Fox Chapel Area High School.
 
An Apple for an Angel, by Brana' Hill, Senior, Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12 and Kendre Blue, Junior, Pittsburgh Milliones University Preparatory School.
 
Best of 2012 Summit, by Elianna Paljug, 10th Grade, Fox Chapel Area High School.
 
Successful Failures: Geldof Shares His Vision at One Young World Summit; article by Megan Fair, Senior, Hempfield High School; photo by Christian Snyder, Sophomore, Riverview Junior/Senior High School.
 
Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, by LaTionna Russell, Pittsburgh Obama 6-12.
 
Op-Ed: Lessons Learned on the Roberto Clemente Bridge: One Young World Bridge Party, by Lily Zhang, Senior, North Allegheny.
 
Opening Ceremony Electrifies the One Young World Summit, by Lily Zhang, Senior, North Allegheny High School. 

Writer: Marty Levine

"We have kids who graduate from high school with no plans," says Mary Kay Babyak, director of initiatives for The Consortium for Public Education in McKeesport. "They wake up the day after graduation with no idea what they are going to do," or with incomplete, or completely unrealistic, plans. "We found that a lot of kids didn't know that their grades counted. They'd get to junior/senior years and they hadn't taken the right courses. And they hadn't had adult support along the way."
 
Getting a C- in science in your junior year is bad enough if you're a kid hoping for a career in medicine, she notes. Rather than thinking, at that point, "What else can I do with my life?" wouldn't it be better if, as a freshman, this student had been coached to ask, "How am I going to change my study habits so I can achieve what I want?"
 
To help kids create a smart plan for college and/or career attainment, the Consortium has just unveiled a new program called MAPS (My Action Plan for Success) being piloted this school year by eight local school districts.
 
Through MAPS, says Babyak, students will be able to create a viable post-secondary plan. MAPS connects each student with adult mentors -- teachers, guidance counselors, school administrators and of course their own family members -- who help devise a realistic and achievable course of action. And it introduces planning software -- eMAPS -- that helps kids lay out the various facets of their plans: How do my skills fit my college and career plans? How about my clubs? My community activities? What specific efforts do I need to make to get better results?
 
Babyak witnessed several students speaking to their schools' Freshman Academy recently. One of the kids hoped to be a surgeon. Only after using MAPS, she says, had he realized it would be useful to look at specific colleges' entrance requirements so that he could know what to take in high school. Plus, he hadn't before realized that his extra-curricular activity -- drawing -- could be anything other than a hobby. She recalls him commenting, "'I didn't really think about some of those things, beyond listing them on my college application. I didn't think, what am I learning from them?'"
 
After the pilot program, MAPS will be refined and expanded over the following four years.
 
"The dropout rate of four-year colleges is even higher than the failure-to-matriculate rate in high schools," says Consortium spokesperson Pamela Gaynor. MAPS, she says, will "potentially help kids have a sound enough plan that they won't need remediation on a subject in college. It's about saying, 'How do I get there? What do I need to do?'"
 
Babyak laughs at the memory of her own daughter, who switched college majors after she had already completed three years of another program. "I wish my daughter had had this eight years ago," Babyak says. "It would have saved $100,000."
 
Writer: Marty Levine
Sources: Mary Kay Babyak, Pamela Gaynor, the Consortium for Public Education

When it comes to the annual TechNow conference for nonprofits, headed for its 9th incarnation on Oct. 25, "Every year is different, because tech changes so fast," says Cindy Leonard, technology services manager for the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management at Robert Morris University, which runs the conference. "Tech isn't something you get good at and then you're done. There are always new tools out there, new hardware, new software and new techniques."
 
And new reasons to go, she says. This year's keynote address features Rosetta Thurman, Cleveland-based co-author of How to Become a Nonprofit Rockstar, 50 Ways to Accelerate Your Career, who will speak on “Social Media for Thought Leadership,” including how to create a social-media mission statement and which social-media tools work best.
 
The day includes sessions on leadership, IT management, communications and fundraising, presented by:
 

• Andre Bouchard, Co-Editor in Chief for www.technologyinthearts.org at CMU
• John Carman, owner of Avenue Design Studios
• Kelly Carter Uzzo, Marketing Communications Manager for Pace School
• Tim Cook, founder and director of The Saxifrage School
• Joe Glackin, Information Systems Manager at Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force
• Scott Hollander, Executive Director of KidsVoice
• Tom Joseph, Chief Executive Officer of Bookminders
• Ashli Molinero, Assistant Professor, Pitt's Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology
• Donna J. Myers, director of TowerCare Technologies
• Lindsay O’ Leary, web content editor, Carlow University
• Dan Rossi, Chief Executive Officer, Animal Rescue League of Western PA
• Sandy Sturgulewski, Technology Systems Manager at Family Resources
• Sherri Titus, account management team leader, Visvero
• Ray Wolfe, Chief Operating Officer, Pittsburgh Mercy Health System

Also new this year is a larger location, at the airport's Holiday Inn, as well as lunch discussions and a final dessert reception.
 
"The biggest value" of TechNow, says Leonard, "is that it gives [attendees] the opportunity to network with their peers at other nonprofits who are interested in leveraging technology to meet their missions."
 
Writer: Marty Levine
Source: Cindy Leonard, Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management

At last year's international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competition, one group of college students entered the contest with a bit of synthetic biology that broke down glutens into sugars in the stomach, potentially defeating their harm to the gluten-intolerant. Then the project came to the attention of a pharmaceutical company.
 
"They looked at the students' project and decided it was better than the product they had spent millions of dollars developing," reports Tom Richard; the students' project has since become part of the company's research protocol.
 
That's the great potential of these synthetic biology creations, says Richard, a Penn State professor of biological engineering who led a team, and helped organize, the eastern North American regionals of iGEM at Duquesne University on Oct. 13 and 14. Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pennsylvania and more than 35 other teams with 275 undergraduate students from Canada and the U.S. also competed.
 
Richard has seen undergraduate team projects with practical applications in medicine, nutrition, energy and the environment, plus games and puzzles. Biological mechanisms can map the most efficient route among stores for deliveries more easily than can computer programs. His PSU team developed a test device that signals whether the body's normal response to oxygen shortage -- creation of more lactic acid -- had started properly or not.
 
Ideally, more projects will turn into ideas businesses can use, he adds. iGEM has just started an entrepreneurial division to match venture capital with students' projects.
 
"The biology is something that has taken our civilization a long time to figure out," says Richard, "but once we figured it out, it's not so complicated." In fact, iGEM has also just begun a high-school division. About 40 high-school students from seven high schools in the Pittsburgh region and across the state attended the competition.
 
"Hopefully some of these schools will have teams competing next spring," he says. "It's a fantastic hands-on science and engineering project for high school students. Most high schools don't teach engineering. Engineering is about design and making things. We're really excited to be able to push science into high schools. We know that in our society, to be successful over the next 100 years, we have to create more people excited by science, technology, engineering and math subjects."
 
Writer: Marty Levine
Source: Tom Richard, international Genetically Engineered Machine Competition

The newly minted Pittsburgh Youth Media project has recruited 32 local high-schoolers from 26 districts to report on this month's international young leadership conference -- One Young World, Oct. 18-22 -- and to give a youth perspective to other future events in Pittsburgh.
 
The project began with the formation of the Pittsburgh Youth Media Advocacy Project (YMAP) at Carlow University a year ago. Deciding to focus on One Young World as their first reporting effort, YMAP recruited nearly three-dozen young journalists for a boot-camp training at the studios of SLB Radio Productions, Inc. on Oct. 4 and 5.
 
Larry Berger, SLB executive director, says the experience was "amazing -- just great kids, eager to get started." Lessons focused on everything from effective storytelling to how to meet a deadline, fact versus opinion, and how to secure and conduct a good interview.

The group practiced their interview techniques first on Post-Gazette writer Tony Norman, who was aiding in the training and the overall effort, along with representatives from Carlow, SLB, the Consortium for Public Education, World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh, Allegheny Conference on Community Development, Pittsburgh Community Television and WQED Multimedia. The stories the kids produced next, about preparations for One Young World, are already on the Pittsburgh Youth Media Website (pghyouthmedia.com) in audio, video and print formats.
 
"They were given technical mentors, [although] the kids had plenty of expertise already," Berger notes. At One Young World, the young scribes will have their own press room and plan to gather on its first morning to devise their assignments and take off into the field, "more or less given free rein to cover what they want to cover," he adds.
 
Pittsburgh Youth Media project already plans to help guide the group organizing next year's One Young World, in Johannesburg, South Africa, to form their own student media corps. But Berger says the Pittsburgh Youth Media project will continue long after the 1,500 reps from 190 countries have left Pittsburgh, and will be great Burgh ambassadors themselves. "Next year there will be another international convention here," Berger says. "The eyes of the world will be on Pittsburgh. Our kids will become a story for someone."
 
Writer: Marty Levine
Source: Larry Berger, SLB Radio Productions, Inc.

Creating new young leaders, particularly for the nonprofit community, is what Public Allies in Pittsburgh is all about. Four years ago, that prompted the organization to start the RISE ChangeMaker Awards.
 
"The RISE ChangeMaker Awards are really to honor the community -- and are chosen by the community," says the Allies' Site Director Misti McKeehen. "It's the opportunity for us to celebrate who the community sees as the change makers here in Pittsburgh -- especially those who may not always receive the thanks or the recognition that they are certainly deserving of." Both organizations and individuals were nominated, and voting lasts Oct. 10-24 online. The awards will be given Nov. 13 at the New Hazlett Theater on the North Side. Pop City is a media sponsor of the event.
 
Among the community organizations nominated for this year's awards:
 

• Girls on the Run of Magee Women’s Hospital
• Special Olympics
• North Hills Community Outreach
• Three Rivers Community Foundation
• Best Buddies
• Get Involved!
• Alliance for Police Accountability                 
• MGR Foundation                  
• Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse
• Saxifrage School

 
The individual awards will be chosen from among:
 

• Matt Arch: UPMC Center for Inclusion
• John Cheatwood: Cheatcodes Tutoring Service LLC
• Kristina Elias: Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Pittsburgh
• Nicole Domanov: St. Margaret Foundation
• Haeshah Cooper: New Hill District Business Association
• Raeann Olander: Goodwill of Southwestern Pennsylvania
• Erin Baker: Corporate and Institutional Banking Development Program, PNC
• Seth Corbin: Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Pittsburgh
• Michael Bodis, Department of Veterans Affairs
• Aimee LeFevers, United Way of Allegheny County            
• John Hagan: Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Pittsburgh
• Alecia Shipman, August Wilson Center for African American Culture

 
Several veterans of Public Allies' program, which partners here with Coro Pittsburgh, are up for Alumni Award as well.
 
Last year's winners were Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Pittsburgh; New Voices Pittsburgh: Women of Color for Reproductive Justice; Tom Baker (of BBBS) and alumna Bekezela Mguni. "They've been doing wonderful things in Pittsburgh," McKeehen says of the past winners.
 
Public Allies' main activity in Pittsburgh is an Americorps program that places young people, mostly 18-30, in a 10-month apprenticeship with local nonprofits. Overall, McKeehen says, the group hopes to help build the pool of talent in Pittsburgh through new Americorps participants: "We want them to stay, and we want them to be leaders in this community."
 
Writer: Marty Levine
Source: Misti McKeehen, Public Allies Pittsburgh

"We want to make a point that solar energy isn't just in California, but that it's all over Western Pennsylvania, in great quantities," says Evan Endres, project coordinator in PennFuture's local office. "Whatever neighborhood you're in, there's solar."
 
That's the reason PennFuture -- Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future -- has created the Pittsburgh Solar Tour on Oct. 13, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., guiding those interested in installing solar themselves, or simply in seeing creative uses, through homes and businesses in Allegheny County and beyond. A $5 ticket available online covers all the self-guided stops and the same tour Website has a full-color guide, map and smartphone app. The Solar Tour highlights 30 of the approximately 300 solar sites in the 10-county region.

"We could have put the most spectacular green homes on the tour, but that's not the experience most Pittsburghers are likely to have," says Endres. Instead, for most people, he hopes the tour lets them see homes that make them think, "'This is [like] my house. I want to go talk to the person and see how they did it.'"
 
Those homes may include houses featured in Mt. Lebanon and the South Hills, a first-time homeowner using solar in Point Breeze, and a South Side house turned solar -- although like two others on the tour, the residents of this small classic Pittsburgh dwelling also use their personal grid to power an electric car.
 
Of course, there are more elaborate and involved solar uses featured on the tour as well. Those include stops at:

• A solar installer’s own solar house in Regent Square, which eliminates 100 percent of his electricity bill
• A Squirrel Hill green house that features other sustainability solutions and holds monthly Sustainability Salons
• A North Side loft that is completely green, using reclaimed materials. "That's a real standout and represents the renaissance that Pittsburgh is going through," says Endres.
• The EECO Center (Environment and Energy Community Outreach) in the East End that offers advice on greening homes and businesses
• A Friendship Victorian restored on the outside and retrofitted with sustainable technologies on the inside
• An Aliquippa home honey-maker gone solar
• Frankferd Farms Foods Inc. in Saxonburg and the Ferderber Farm and Frankferd Farms Milling in Valencia, an organic farm featuring a solar-powered milling operation, and
• A ground-mounted solar array used for a home in Rochester

Whether you're contemplating solar for the money or planet savings, says Endres, "an event like this helps people who made this investment talk to future solar owners in the area."
           
Do Good: Ready to go solar yourself? Find a guide at Three Rivers Solar Source.  
 
Writer: Marty Levine
Source: Evan Endres, PennFuture

Picture the Cannes Film Festival coming to Pittsburgh -- then imagine a Cannes all about kids' educational television.
 
That's about the level of excitement over at WQED, which is presenting what their Executive Director of Educational Partnerships Jennifer Stancil calls a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" -- a French festival called the Prix Jeunesse, or "Youth Prize," making its first-ever stop in Pittsburgh on Oct. 12-13. The free event, with the help of The Fred Rogers Center and the Toonseum, offers both workshops for kids' media professionals and for parents, as well as screenings of many award-winning children's television shows from around the world. (Click here if you want to attend one of the three Oct. 13 screenings for different age groups -- registration is required, due to limited seating.)
 
The family workshop, on Oct. 13 at WQED, lets you try your hand at cartooning and animation with the Toonseum's Joe Wos and the Schmutz Company, the local self-styled "performance and visual arts spectacle and arts education partnership." The Oct. 12 workshop for educational and other kids' learning pros delves into the essence and effects of quality kids' TV programming worldwide, and features presenters Sharon Carver (director of the Children's School at Carnegie Mellon University), Michelle Figlar (head of the Pittsburgh Association for the Education of Young Children), Jim Martin (children's television director and puppeteer), and Kevin Morrison and Michael Robb (The Fred Rogers Company's COO and director of education and research, respectively).
 
The workshops are run, and the festival is curated, by David Kleeman, president of the American Center for Children and Media. The selections include everything from game shows to serials and animation, and come from Brazil, Mongolia, Netherlands, Iran, Lebanon, Japan -- 15 different countries altogether.
 
Kleeman, says WQED's Stancil, "has done a super job of making sure that the world is represented. We're drawing from all the world's reaches and all of the storytelling that is done around the world," but with a selection chosen only for Pittsburgh, she adds. "It's really an exercise in learning. The kids and parents are not just watching, we're learning how television is a reflection of different cultures and different relationships."
 
Writer: Marty Levine
Source: Jennifer Stancil, WQED

There are a lot of reasons to celebrate the 25th year of Carnegie Mellon University's Master of Arts Management program, says director and alum Kathryn Heidemann.
 
"It's still a fairly new field," Heidemann notes. "In the past, there have been MFAs mostly focused on the creation of art and MBAs focused mainly on the management of business." CMU's program is "unique and innovative," she says, not least of which because it is housed in a management school and partners with a school of the arts. Not only does it offer students the chance to learn how to run an arts organization, "it prepares our students to excel in a variety of fields.
 
"Our program is focused on the sustainability of the arts organization and that the future of their organizations are in good hands," especially as they get older and their original CEOs retire. "This by no means replaces years of service in the field … we all have to pay our dues," she adds. "But this certainly provides you with a fast track education about how those two worlds work together."
 
As part of the year-long celebration, the MAM program will hold a symposium that looks at current ways in which arts programs innovate. All the presenters are alumni as well, including many who work for local arts groups, including Jeb Feldman (Unsmoke Artspace), Elliott Mower (Pittsburgh Public Theater) and Thomas Hughes (Attack Theatre), as well as CMU's own Andre Bouchard, Jocelyn Malik and Melinda Hungerman Johnson. The keynote speaker is Doug McLennan, founder and editor of ArtsJournal, the go-to arts management publication.
 
Most arts organizations are nonprofit organizations, and specialized ones at that, so MAM uses cases studies from symphonies, ballets, art galleries and museums -- a perspective students might not get in non-arts management programs. Students operate Future Tenant art gallery downtown, founded by the program 10 years ago, and are eligible for exchange programs to Italy and Germany. They are also involved in MAM's Technology in the Arts research initiative, which examines the places where tech and the arts intersect -- especially how tech is used in arts marketing and funding.
 
It's a changed arts world out there, concludes Heidemanns, with audiences engaging in arts 24/7, not just in galleries, and MAM students will be prepared for it.
 
Writer: Marty Levine
Source: Kathryn Heidemann, Master of Arts Management program, CMU

The Pittsburgh Promise has completed its fourth year of awarding scholarships to Pittsburgh Public high-school graduates with a clear sense of accomplishment and "a ton more to do," says Executive Director Saleem Ghubril.
 
PPS now has a completion rate of 71 percent, up from 63 percent in 2007 (the year before the Promise began). The immediate goal remains to graduate 85 percent, which would exceed the national rate of 70.5 percent, and Pennsylvania's 79 percent average -- although Ghubril cautions that high schools across the state are only now standardizing how they count graduation rates. Some previously weren't counting those who left in 9th, 10th or 11th grade, for instance, but only those who started and completed their senior years.
 
So far, 59 percent of the scholarships have gone to girls and 41 percent to boys, while whites have received 53 percent while blacks have received 41 percent, with the remainder going to others. The Promise announced an effort to further diversify the recipient pool by attracting more Latino families to a city notoriously low in diversity. Immigrant-focused VibrantPittsburgh is leading this effort, with the Allegheny Conference on Community Development promoting the local jobs picture and the Urban Redevelopment Authority offering a guide to local affordable housing. Another new initiative to promote the $40,000 Promise scholarship is adding informative placards to area homes' "For Sale" signs, cluing non-city residents in to the opportunity that comes with moving here.
 
The Promise also introduced its first class of Executive Scholarship recipients. These scholarships for the highest-achieving high-schoolers come with the sponsorship of local corporations and nonprofits, representing an effort to connect students with prominent local organizations to increase student access to jobs and community involvement.
 
The Promise also reported that it helped increase retention rates 9 to 18 percent in schools with Promise Scholars, according to researchers from the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center.
 
Overall, the Promise, say Ghubril, is "bearing fruit [although] we were building the plane as we were flying it. I feel remarkably good about [being] four years into it. I can, with integrity, say we are fulfilling the Promise."
 
Writer: Marty Levine
Source: Saleem Ghubril, Pittsburgh Promise

"The views are spectacular -- people just don't know about it," says Melissa Gallagher about her Pittsburgh neighborhood of Fineview. Most people probably don't even know which side of town Fineview's on (it's the North Side) or realize a reason to visit.
 
Gallagher, president of the Fineview Citizens Council, hopes the Stepathon, and the SiX grant from the Sprout Fund this year, will continue to change that.
 
The first Social Innovation Exchange (SiX) event -- another was this week while the third is scheduled for the future -- is helping Fineview devise new ways to connect itself to other neighborhoods. The $10,000 grant from the Sprout Fund will create an inventory of Fineview's hillside steps -- of which the neighborhood has an abundance -- including a map, signage and trail markers, and will help devise a way to decide which steps to select for improvement.
 
"The steps were the things that connected people before they had many modes of transportation," says Gallagher. Today they are a fitness trail that goes from one area of Fineview to another and will soon be a viable connection between Fineview and its North Side neighbors. Fineview also hopes to add a Facebook page, Website and downloadable map app for the steps and trail, along with trail stops for various exercises and runnels for people to walk their bikes up the steps.

In the meantime, Fineview is about to have its 17th Annual Stepathon on Oct. 6, giving Pittsburghers a chance to discover this relatively unknown neighborhood. It's a run or walk, with 2.5- and 5-mile courses, covering more than 1600 steps (the equivalent of climbing the staircases in a 17-story building), including the finale of the 371 steps of Rising Main.

The course ends at the Catoma Street Overlook, which Gallagher describes as "a great finish. You actually get to see fine views of the city. In my opinion, Mt. Washington is a little harder to get to and a little more congested with cars. We see a lot more fitness [focused] people moving into our neighborhood."
 
Writer: Marty Levine
Source: Melissa Gallagher, Fineview Citizens Council