Everyone Leads: Building Leadership from the Community Up

7

FACILITATING COLLABORATIVE ACTION

Pittsburgh: Collaborators Who Put the Community First

Each year, teams of seven to ten Allies work on projects that they design, implement, and evaluate. This is a way for them to have impacts on neighborhoods. But it is also where they learn how to collaborate. The process challenges them to work together to plan, set goals, delegate, and share as well as to manage their relationships and neighborhood politics and hold each other accountable.

In 2010, our Pittsburgh Allies chose to work in Larimer, a largely African American neighborhood on the eastern end of the city. When the Allies approached the Kingsley Association, originally established as a settlement house and now a community center serving the neighborhood, ...