Knowledge Bank

The speaker will introduce the University of Pittsburgh's Community Engagement Centers initiative, an effort to develop a series of neighborhood-embedded community engagement centers. Pitt is a premier research university, located in Pittsburgh—a post-industrial city becoming known for its technology and innovation revitalization. Within the larger city are neighborhoods that have not experienced this same renaissance. These neighborhoods have a sense of place, culture, assets, and challenges that intimately inform the development of neighborhood-embedded, community-university engagement efforts. In addition to sharing the scope of the centers, the speaker will also present the four frameworks informing our approach to this work: 1) familiarity with community development theory and processes; 2) attention to boundary-spanning capacity building; 3) embracing a democratic engagement orientation; and 4) responsiveness to the agency of place.