Equitable Community Development Tools for Funders: A Learning Series with Pittsburgh’s PLACES Fellows

GWP Members Only Program
When: 
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
12:00pm to 1:30pm EST
Where: 
The Heinz Endowments
EQT Plaza
30th Floor
625 Liberty Ave
Pittsburgh
PA 15222
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Join us for the second in this two-part learning series with PLACES Fellows Karen Abrams, Diversity & Community Affairs Manager at the Urban Development Authority of Pittsburgh, and Mac Howison, Senior Program Officer for Catalytic Funding at The Sprout Fund.  This session will be facilitated by Kate Dewey, President of The Forbes Funds.

During our first session, Mac and Karen shared their experiences as part of the year-long PLACES fellowship cohort, a national program for grantmakers whose work includes community development.  They described valuable insights gained and lessons learned from site visits to other cities, and also shared national context that is influencing the course of equitable development in each one.

We hope you will join us for this second session during which Mac and Karen will share some practical tools to aid in the personal, organizational, and community work that needs to happen to advance grantmaking in community development using an equity lens.  We will also discuss what some of the obstacles to this equity work in our organizations and community might be , as well as how some of these tools might be implemented to help advance equitable development in our region.

Please note: During the registration process, you will have the ability to pose questions to the presenters for discussion during this session.  We encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity to help us shape a meaningful discussion that addresses the issues that you would like to discuss.

* Lunch will be served.


About the PLACES (Professionals Learning About Community, Equity and Smart Growth) Fellowship Program:

PLACES, hosted by the Funders Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities, is designed to help funders use an explicit equity lens in supporting community development.  With this framework, funders can better engage and leverage residents’ own perspectives in improving their communities.

In 2016, the PLACES Fellowship cohort included 14 individuals drawn from communities across the United States. Thanks to the generous support of The Heinz Endowments, two of our local colleagues participated as PLACES Fellows.  Through a year-long series of site visits and learning activities, they had the opportunity to interact with effective local change agents in other cities who are leading the transformation of other marginalized communities, looking beyond established methodologies and seeking out innovative, community-appropriate solutions that deliver results. PLACES Fellows also learned about new tools to leverage philanthropy to create more equitable communities through convening, targeted grantmaking, and applied research in their home cities.