Pitt's Community Engagement Framework
Pitt is a partner in our region’s progress—progress that belongs to everyone. We work to improve lives at every scale through powerful collaborations: combining Pitt expertise, resources, and institutional energy with communities’ wisdom, experience, and assets. We strive to be a partner of choice for all of the various communities that call the Pittsburgh region home.
Guiding Principles for a Welcoming and Engaged Pitt
- We care with and about our communities using the tools of learning, research, service, programming, and innovation.
- We know that, ultimately, people have relationships with each other, not an institution.
- We're striving to be more transparent, accountable, and accessible to our communities.
- We're dedicated to solutions that can take root and build long-term community capacity.
- We are determined that opportunity can and will be more widely shared in Pittsburgh.
ECA: The Starting Point
Everything that ECA does ultimately has a single purpose: to make it easier for communities, public leaders, faculty, staff, and students to forge meaningful and more effective collaborations.
ECA serves as:
- A hub and convener for faculty, staff, researchers and community engaged programs—meeting systemic problems with coordinated, holistic responses.
- A designated listener for Pitt in community and civic conversations across the region.
- A facilitator of partnerships and coalitions based on a shared vision of action.
- A connector for regional economic growth and planning to local educational, workforce and business development opportunities.
- A leader, coordinator and maximizer of Pitt’s expansive commitments in Oakland, the Hill District, Greater Hazelwood, and Homewood.
- And an impact multiplier—working with organizations that are working for stronger communities, throughout the city and the region, and sharing the resources and capabilities of Pitt.