Combining the Giving Power of Individuals with Companies Posted on December 20, 2015 by wpengine An estimated $6 to $10 billion in matching gift funds goes unclaimed per year. - Double the Donation The GTECH Social Capital Council is a cadre of energetic and socially conscious professionals who actively support and promote GTECH. It is a way for those who don’t necessarily work in the social sector to connect with community development activities, green economy issues and other sustainability projects. Council members promote and support GTECH through projects, events and contributions. We find that many…Read More
The Power of Mapping Posted on December 18, 2015 by wpengine I’ve always been obsessed with maps. Something about being able to see the whole picture, looking down from an imagined space above, knowing where everything lays... As a kid, I’d look at maps and pretend - I’m hiking on this mountain, in these woods. I’m visiting this town, crossing that ocean. Or I’d make up lands of my own, the backdrop to some grand adventure. Later, as an architecture student, I started making maps to analyze real spaces. I’d plot…Read More
GTECH wins the Green Workplace Challenge! Posted on December 16, 2015 by Grounded Strategies We didn't just participate in the Green Workplace Challenge, we WON the Green Workplace Challenge. (And we have the trophies to prove it!) Green Workplace Challenge 2015 Results: Small Nonprofit Category Winner: GTECH –722 points Top Commuter Footprint Reducer: GTECH Strategies - 9.4% Reduction In case you missed the announcement - GTECH was the winner of the Small Nonprofit Category AND the Top Commuter Footprint Reducer of the 2015 Green Workplace Challenge (GWC)! You may remember the GWC from our September post,…Read More
Resilience in Your Community Posted on December 11, 2015 by Grounded Strategies So we've talked about resilience in a national context, about policies and million dollar grants and about resilience on a city level. But what does all of that mean for the average person? For someone just trying to get by, who doesn't work in sustainability or in disaster relief. How does resilience influence my daily life? Resilience is important everywhere. It gets a lot of attention in this day and age because of the looming threats of climate change, the increasingly…Read More
An inclusive design is the best design Posted on December 8, 2015 by Grounded Strategies It's Sunday afternoon, and the sun is pleasantly streaming through the autumn leaves on a vacant lot in Brighton Heights. Kids amble around the lot, playing with sticks and pine cones. Neighbors are chatting over cups of hot cider, looking on towards the woods around them. They talk about what this place was, and what it could be. The lot they stand on was once home to the St. John's Hospital, but the hospital was abandoned and demolished two decades ago. Now it's…Read More
Two New Green Playces Posted on December 4, 2015 by wpengine Last month we celebrated the opening of Green Playces:Homewood – the second of five Green Playces to be created by the end of next year. Every community is different. Every Green Playce ought to reflect that difference. We just hope to tie some common threads between these different Playces, the first of which is in the name. So let’s explore the differences (and the similarities!) between our first two Green Playces. It’s time to Venn Diagram: In the Northside, we took…Read More
Getting a Handle On Your Housing Stock Posted on December 2, 2015 by wpengine We've been talking a lot this year about the Pittsburgh LocalData Collaborative (PLDC), the need for accessible data in our region and GTECH's role in making sure accurate information is used in community development decisions. Many organizations, from PCRG to Lawrenceville United, have partnered with us through the PLDC to launch innovative data collection projects over the past year and the results have been astounding. Since 2014, partnering organizations in the PLDC have collected 35,252 data points across 44 communities on everything…Read More
Little Bets on #GivingTuesday Posted on November 30, 2015 by wpengine The power of Giving Tuesday really hit me during a conversation with Peter Sims during the CEO’s for Cities Cluster Workshop in Pittsburgh about the Innovative and Inclusive City. Peter Sims – keynote speaker at CEO for Cities and author of Little Bets – reminded me that breakthrough innovation that catalyzes positive change isn’t derived from singular, top-down, game-changing institutions; they come about through small, tangible, incremental iterations of ideas. Even more so, Sims pointed out that true cultural shifts…Read More
Online Shopping this Season? Make us smile with AmazonSmile Posted on November 27, 2015 by wpengine AmazonSmile is an easy & free way to to have your online gift giving give back. Will you be online shopping this Black Friday and Cyber Monday? If you happen to be on the Amazon.com taking advantage of the holiday deals, take one extra step and sign up for AmazonSmile -- GTECH gets 0.5% back on your items purchased. It isn't a whole lot, but here at GTECH we believe all big breakthroughs start with little bets and little contributions. Every little…Read More
Join the #GivingTuesday Movement Posted on November 25, 2015 by wpengine As the holidays approach, the “season of giving” is easy to mistake for the season of materialism. It’s easy to get ‘wrapped up’ in all of the incredible deals, just yesterday I caught myself thinking “That self-watering planter is 86% off? Until now I didn’t realize how much my plants needed to water themselves!” It then occurred to me that I’m spending more on myself than on gifts for others. I started to wonder if I’d lost sight of what…Read More
Pittsburgh’s First Blight Bootcamp Posted on November 24, 2015 by wpengine November 7th was the first ever Pittsburgh Blight Bootcamp where residents, nonprofit professionals and government representatives were able to meet, mingle, and educate each other on topics surrounding the issues of vacancy and blight in the Pittsburgh region. GTECH had the honor of being a central organizer of the Pittsburgh Blight Bootcamp as a member of the Pittsburgh Blight Working Group, a partnership between the City of Pittsburgh Office of the Mayor and Permits, Neighborhood Allies, PCRG, the Design Center of…Read More
Resilience in Pittsburgh Posted on November 19, 2015 by Grounded Strategies Our second resilience blog focused on resilience strategies in cities across the nation. This segment will explore some of the not so obvious (and some of the blatantly obvious) resilience linkages in the 412. A lot of organizations are working to build resilience right here in our own backyard - you might be involved in one of their efforts and not even know it! Some GTECH examples of local resilience building efforts. Our Methodology Investigate, Act, Connect and Sustain are…Read More