Shatara Murphy will serve as the Assistant Vice Chancellor for Anchor Initiatives within the Office of Engagement and Community Affairs, effective Aug. 28. In this new role, Murphy will lead the ongoing coordination, management and development of Anchor Initiatives at the University of Pittsburgh.
As Assistant Vice Chancellor for Anchor Initiatives, Murphy will serve as a strategic leader, thought partner, project manager and collaborator to foster relationships with University and community-based stakeholders that advance the University’s role as an anchor in the region.
Murphy will also play a pivotal role in supporting the Buy, Build, Hire LOCAL program—Pitt’s commitment to hire more of our neighbors, help businesses grow and award more construction, service and purchasing contracts across the region. The program is guided by a task force of key University leaders from Purchasing Services (Buy), Facilities Management (Build) and Human Resources (Hire). Murphy will coordinate program efforts in collaboration with the task force. Additionally, Murphy will steward Pitt’s housing affordability initiatives and its Walk to Work program and serves as a convener and resource partner to non-degree workforce development efforts across the University.
A Pittsburgh native and Pitt alum, Murphy comes to the University of Pittsburgh from Highmark Health, where she served as the Community Health and Employee Engagement Programs Manager. In this role, she led direct community health initiatives throughout the multi-billion-dollar organization’s footprint, leading company volunteerism and employee engagement programs in ten regions across four states.
Relationship building and engaging directly with communities is at the forefront of Murphy’s work. “It’s not rocket science; it’s reaching out to the employees in those regions, visiting them, having conversations with them, having conversations with community members. Learning about the causes that they care about and then making sure we’re tailoring programming to support those causes,” says Murphy.
In 2022, under her leadership, over 28,000 employee volunteer hours, equivalent to over $850,000 in in-kind donations, were made to communities.
Prior to working at Highmark, Murphy served as the Deputy Director for the City of Pittsburgh’s Department of Public Safety Division of Community Affairs. This division, comprised of five offices with a focus on community and economic engagement strategies, was created after Murphy led an initiative to connect Public Safety’s focused deterrent model of policing—a combination of law enforcement, social services and community mobilization as a way to reduce crime—with additional programming, investment and capacity building strategies that keep residents at the center of what Public Safety does in a way that is positive and impactful.
Murphy collaborated closely with key stakeholders, from elected officials to community residents, to convey the crucial role that public safety plays in supporting the economic growth and vitality of a region, helping answer the often-asked question of ‘what’s in it for me?’
“I’m always focused on collective community impact,” Murphy says. “I realized I had to find a way through my leadership to convey how [these strategies are] a win or progress for all stakeholders or entities involved. You have to listen to people. You have to garner trust.”
As a result of these collaborations, Murphy spearheaded the establishment of a $10 million community trust fund to provide grants and capacity building assistance to diverse nonprofit organizations to support community and economic development efforts in high-crime areas throughout Pittsburgh. Awardees were encouraged to hire from the community, partner with community organizations and collaborate with city government. Encouraging leaders to think beyond enforcement, Murphy met with developers to ensure that Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design concepts, a training she developed, were included in proposal and building plans to serve as a non-enforcement strategy to reduce crime.
Of these efforts, Murphy notes, “It took a lot of collaboration, a lot of advocacy and a lot of leadership to shift our strategies to make sure that we were keeping the community at the focus of all that we do.”
Murphy received a Master of Business Administration from the Katz Graduate School of Business and a Bachelor of Science in Business Management from Pitt-Bradford. She is eager to bring her knowledge, skillset and familiarity with the region to her role as AVC for Anchor Initiatives.
“The ability to help align the Anchor Initiatives with the University’s focus on equity is so important to me. Making an impact for our underrepresented communities, for our communities beyond Oakland—that’s what drew me to the position. I want to be a part of that.”
About the Anchor Initiatives
The Anchor Initiatives are a community-centered, place-based suite of strategies developed to leverage Pitt’s role as an anchor institution, which acts as a key convener for investment, ideas and impacts that are vital to the health and success of our region and the areas of greatest need. As an integral component to the Plan for Pitt, the Anchor Initiatives amplify Pitt’s regional impact in the areas of buying, building and hiring locally; community engagement and partnerships; placemaking and real estate development; and life sciences innovation.