Grounded in Sustainable Urban Landscapes Grounded Strategies is expanding its grassroots stewardship and land reclamation programming to develop more sustainable urban landscapes to bring about healthy and resilient communities. The City of Pittsburgh suffers from chronic and increasing levels of vacant lots due to pressures exerted by macroeconomic forces including deindustrialization, urban flight, and more recently, worsening income inequality. The current parcel maintenance system structure does not allocate enough capacity to maintain all vacant parcels. This results in overgrown vacant parcels concentrated in our most…Read More
Gaining Ground: Vacant Land Justice Initiative Grounded Strategies Pittsburgh Advocacy PGH GroundedPGH Community Development Community Organizing Policy Resources environmental justice justice equity racial justiceRead More
Blight Working Group The Blight Working Group is a collaboration between technical assistance organizations and City of Pittsburgh municipal leaders that aims to bring information to communities regarding resident-driven actions against blight. Started in 2015, the Blight Working Group has held an annual "Blight Bootcamp" event to share resident-driven approaches, technical assistance, and showcase partner organizations in the fight against blight throughout Allegheny County.Read More
Resilience in Community Development In an effort to maximize the social inclusion, equity, and participation of Pittsburgh’s most vulnerable communities in The City’s new Climate and Resilience Plan GTECH, with financial support from Neighborhood Allies in partnership with The City of Pittsburgh’s Office of Resilience has conducted six months of targeted research to apply this planning process to a community development context. Through a range of national best practice benchmarking, primary interviews, expert testimonials, and local focus groups GTECH has honed overarching observations combined…Read More
Junior Ambassador Curriculum We created a Junior Ambassador curriculum to give youth in Pittsburgh the opportunity to transform vacant lots in their neighborhoods into well-loved spaces. The curriculum contains three modules, each suitable for a year-long program. What’s the context? In 2014, GTECH published a report called Youth in Green detailing the geographic gaps in environmental programming for youth in Pittsburgh. One finding of this report was that places with more vacant lots have less environmental programs for kids, and less youth programs in…Read More
Youth in Green Heinz Endowments Children Youth and Family staff posed the question of how to expand environmental awareness and skills available to youth services throughout Pittsburgh to GTECH staff. Simultaneously GTECH had been exploring how to increase collaboration and implementation of environmental programming in line with community based organizations and youth services with particular focus on addressing blight and vacancy in distressed communities. What resulted was the following report entitled Youth in Green. The primary objectives of this analysis were to: 1.…Read More
ReFuel Program ReFuel PGH was a program of GTECH that focused on a waste-to-energy solution that aimed to reduce air and water pollution and help fuel local economies by recycling waste cooking oil into a cleaner burning fuel. In 2010, ReFuel PGH in partnership with Give Energy and Whole Foods, installed their first oil drop-off bin outside the Whole Foods Market in East Liberty. The second one was installed in partnership with Oakland Planning and Development Corporation (OPDC) during the fall of…Read More