Thinking of the city as your campus

Do something good that will have an impact in a local community.


As an assignment of their Urban Research and Design class, it sounded simple at first to the three groups of seniors at Winchester Thurston, a private school in Shadyside.

But upon closer inspection, it became clear that while the directive was straightforward, the seniors were to take on much more than a simple community service project.

“The first month and a half was really interesting for me,” says Sam Schreiber, a senior who participated in the course. “We spent a lot of time researching how both local communities, and others areas, including Detroit, recovered (or didn’t recover) from difficult economic times. We looked at what people have done to bolster communities that were struggling, and from there we started looking at local communities to determine where we thought we could have the most impact.”

Urban Research and Design, a post-AP social studies course, is part of WT’s City as Our Campus initiative, which utilizes Pittsburgh’s organizations, businesses, universities, and neighborhoods to create authentic and challenging learning experiences for students.

“The goal of the course, and of City as Our Campus projects, is to engage students actively in the curriculum beyond the classroom walls,” said Michael Naragon, WT’s social studies department chair, who teaches the course. “We want to apply their critical thinking skills to create solutions to recognized problems right in their own communities. The experience is preparing them to be thought leaders in college and in their professional careers.”

After researching Pittsburgh’s urban neighborhoods to identify need, and studying best practices and successful revitalization models from other communities, two of the groups, including Schreiber’s, chose to work in Braddock, a community where WT has developed a number of partnerships.

Schreiber’s group met with representatives of local organizations to determine how they could make the greatest impact, and set out to bolster activity at the neighborhood’s underutilized community spaces, including Braddock’s Nyia Page Community Center.

They took a four-pronged approach to reaching this goal that included: raising money for and building awareness of the Braddock Youth Project (BYP), a Braddock nonprofit that hires teens from the area to work in the community; creating an outdoor seating area for the Braddock Café; hosting a community service day in the Braddock Community Garden; and enhancing the Community Center’s game night.

The first part of their vision came to life when games and toys that the group had collected during a toy drive were used for a March 13 game night held at the Community Center in partnership with the BYP. In early May the group brought 40 student volunteers to work in the BYP gardens to prepare for spring and jump-start the growing year. They raised money for by selling BYP t-shirts, and donated the proceeds back to the organization. And they accomplished their final goal when they designed the outdoor seating area and donated outdoor furniture to the Community Café.

BYP Program Coordinator Jessica Schmid considers the collaboration between the students and the BYP a success, noting that the students had the opportunity to gain a true understanding of the challenges of community development.

“The students came to us with an idea of the project they were going to do, but after meeting with local organizations and finding more about what the community’s real needs are and what Braddock’s youth are already doing, were able to step back and redevelop their plans to create a meaningful project that would really benefit Braddock,” says Jessica Schmid, BYP Program Coordinator.

“The group implemented projects that we can carry on. We plan to host more game nights at the Community Center, and the outdoor seating at the Community Café is used regularly and enhances the street scape.”

The other group focused their efforts on encouraging healthy eating habits in Braddock’s youth population, and set out to find ways to encourage kids to incorporate healthier food and activities into their daily lives. The group hosted a food fair at the Braddock Community Center for local families where they distributed healthy, donated food. The event featured cooking demonstrations, and games and activities for the kids. Attendees took home a cookbook that the group produced that featured healthy, kid-friendly recipes.

“Through this process we’ve met community and business leaders, learned about systems that are currently in place and figured out what some of the problems they are facing are so we could find ways to make improvements,” says senior Jeannie Kirk during a meeting with a local advertising firm where she was finalizing the layout of her groups’ cookbook. “I really enjoyed the hands-on aspect of learning and to be able to do something positive for the children of Braddock. We hope that the healthy habits that they learned will become part of their everyday routine and will help to create a healthier community,” she adds.

After studying local models of redevelopment that have benefited struggling communities, the third group focused on the Hill District. Having researched and visited mixed-use developments that have succeeded in revitalizing struggling communities, including Bakery Square and the South Side Works, the group pitched the idea of creating a film to encourage the development of a similar business district in the space that was formerly the Mellon Arena to a developer.

While that film did not come to fruition, the group made connections with local leaders of the business and nonprofit community as they sought to revise their project vision based on the feedback they received. The group then produced a how-to film for next year’s Urban Research and Design class that shares lessons learned through the process with tips and suggestions for building community support for a vision.

“By completing this project, I’ve learned that people really can have a tangible impact in our communities if we focus our efforts,” says Schreiber. “We realized that by starting small-scale, we could really accomplish things and make something positive happen for the community.”

Photographs of Downtown Pittsburgh and Nyia Page Center copyright Brian Cohen