Community Impact: Community Connection and Social Support
The Pittsburgh Study
The Pittsburgh Study works with an alliance of community advocates, practitioners and researchers to learn about child health and well-being and to address the root causes of inequity through developing and testing interventions at different developmental stages for children and families in Allegheny County from before birth through high school.
Pitt Sustainability: Urban Agriculture
Urban agriculture is the various practices of cultivating, processing and distributing food in urban areas. It’s also the name of a Pitt program that seeks to enhance sustainable urban agriculture in Homewood. The Urban Agriculture program was established in 2016 by The Oasis Project in Homewood and David Sanchez in the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation.
Family Check-Up
If parents are able to thrive, then their children can thrive. Through brief, strengths-based interventions, Family Check-Up works by helping parents to improve their parenting practices—such as positive behavior support, monitoring and setting limits—and by enhancing the quality of all of their family relationships.
Center for Analytical Approaches to Social Innovation
Since George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, the Center for Analytical Approaches to Social Innovation (CAASI) has held weekly open meetings between Pittsburgh grassroots leaders and Pitt students to nurture long-running “communities of the eager” around social justice issues.
Legal Clinics
Since 1990, law school and reality have met head on in the Pitt School of Law’s in-house Legal Clinics—for both community members and students. Under the supervision of full-time faculty who are practicing attorneys, law students offer a wide variety of services, such as data for brief advice, brief services and direct representation, across seven clinics.
Community Leisure Learn
Health, wellness, safety, fun: these are the focuses of the Community Leisure Learn program, created in 1969 to provide outreach activities on the University of Pittsburgh campus for youth to adults from neighborhoods near campus.
Pitt Sustainability: Food Recovery
Each year, nearly 119 billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States. Much of this food could otherwise be diverted to organizations working to fight hunger and food insecurity. To help fight food waste in the Pittsburgh region, dining staff and student volunteers help to safely recover surplus food from campus dining halls and on-campus restaurants that is then donated to other organizations.
Center for Civil Rights and Racial Justice
Achieving equity among our communities is a difficult task. Understanding how to do so while inspiring future generations to continue the work can be even more challenging. The Center for Civil Rights and Racial Justice within Pitt’s School of Law not only hopes to change that mindset but make it easier for communities to understand and achieve racial equity.
iServe
iServe, within the School of Computing and Information, is a community-engaged, project-based program that matches SCI students with external partners in need of technical assistance, including designing and building websites, creating databases and videos, providing data analytics and maintaining social media accounts.