With East Liberty booming, the comprehensive Larmier Plan for redevelopment underway, and multiple development projects underway in Homewood, the Kingsley Association is continuing its efforts to ensure the Black community is engaged and active in the process of defining what their community looks like.
Its recent Urban Transition Cities Movement conference featured three days of presentations and workshops focusing on just that: finding imaginative ways to increase residents involvement in shaping the environmental and economic future of their communities.
“One of the main purposes of the movement is to promote local leadership development, in this case around sustainability issues,” said Kingsley Executive Director Malik Bankston. “We have to identify the ever changing challenges of growth and development to position the neighborhood and the people in it to be better equipped to participate. These things will continue to evolve and change. Our concern is how to be part of it and not have it done without us or to us.”
The conference opened with representative from several of the presenting organizations to practice their “elevator speeches,” quick, pointed presentations about their projects, status and goals with an eye toward securing funding and/or establishing partnerships.
Some of those taking part in the three-day conference included the Larimer Consensus Group, the Larimer Green Team, Operation Better Block, GTECH, and Penn State University.
In keeping with Kingsley’s holistic approach to community enrichment, all participated in larger demonstration and workshop sessions over the following two days concentrating on community sustainability, economic development, community development, transferable work skills, small business development, community farming, health and wellness and social entrepreneurial skills.
Environmental presentations ranged from the macro scale, with “Climate Mama” Joylette Portlock’s talking on the dangers of global warming, to the more immediate, with GTECH demonstrating how growing certain plants can detoxify urban lots and others can be grown for biofuel synthesis and sale.
That tied into Jerome Jackson’s OBB presentation on its Cluster Planning development model in Homewood, which an entirely community-driven, section-by-section planning process. Jackson said his presentation was very well received because very few people beyond the New Pittsburgh Courier readership knew about the process, and no one from out of town did.
“No one across the country has done what we’ve done. We have more than 1,200 people directly involved with their community planning process. This is the “bottom-up” process people always talk about,” he said. “So everyone was like, ‘wow, how did you think of that?’”
Finally, at the individual level, the conference also highlighted several initiative involving community members improving themselves. One of the presentations featured a demonstration of the ongoing robotics programming partnership between Kingsley kids working with 4-H City and Penn State, and which previously included collaboration with CMU, Hampton University in Virginia and even the US Navy.
The 4-H City program also includes instruction and mentoring on leadership, civic engagement, entrepreneurship and education, and sustainability and architecture.
Bankston said keeping abreast of doing work involving workforce development education, and skills training, climate change, smart and affordable housing, is complex work. So informing kids about robotics or gaming or coding is critical.
“Here’s an activity, even a hobby, you can have a hand in that translates to real applications and possibly a career path people might not have ever considered because they weren’t exposed to it,” said Bankston. “Kids seem to be much more open to making their own job instead of looking for a job the way we did. They think about taking knowledge and applying it to something they want to work on and having employers pay them to do it.”
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Kingsley conference focuses on future
