Thank you for attending the first EJPP Neighborhood and Topic meetings! Both meetings provided a brief overview of what this initiative is and featured break-out sessions to learn about what was going on in your neighborhoods and issue-areas. We truly appreciate your attendance and participation. We look forward to your continued participation as we move forward towards a more equitable and just Pittsburgh.

Cross-Neighbor, Cross-Sector Participation

One of the key objectives of the EJPP work is to bring together people and groups that haven't been all that connected to each other. These first two meetings were great steps in that direction, with over 50 people in attendance from many geographical areas and issue areas! Here are the distributions of individuals who attended each meeting:

Our neighborhood groups meeting included participants from all of our geographic areas, including several from outside of the city!

Our topics groups meeting included participants from many different issue areas, with the most representing climate and environment.

Takeaways

1. Our neighborhood meeting participants identified a number of challenges that they are currently facing, although the impacts were varied across neighborhoods. Regardless, food access, housing instability, and job security/loss were continually mentioned. Other noteworthy concerns that were brought up related to the access to technology, youth-related activities and challenges with back to school preparations. 

2. Our topics meeting participants highlighted the many equity-related challenges in their areas. Across the range of topics represented, COVID-19 has made a lot of the existing inequities worse. There are pressing funding concerns in multiple areas, including transportation and food. Concerns about equitable access to resources, capital, services, healthy homes/jobs/neighborhoods, and other issues came up in every conversation. 

3. On the whole, participants in both meetings were excited about getting to know people that they hadn't worked with before and about working across our neighborhood boundaries and issue silos to promote equity and justice in the region!

Over the next few weeks, our project team will be reviewing the information from our past two meetings, following up with several of you, reaching out to others, and planning out the strategy for building out the platform. We're planning on another set of meetings in early September, so be on the lookout for an invite soon!