Work Hard Pittsburgh has been hard at work these past couple of months. We have gained multiple new members and want to welcome and share more about them! We will share 3 in Part 1 and another 3 in Part 2. We asked each of the new members to talk about their business and what they hope to achieve in 2017 along with why they chose Work Hard Pittsburgh as their cooperative space of choice, and how you can contact them. Read more below.
Green Party of Allegheny County
The Green Party of Allegheny County is an eco-socialist political party working to protect the environment, fight for social justice, promote grassroots democracy, support anti-imperialism, and peace. Our members can be found marching in the streets for social justice and police accountability, walking in the pride parade, protesting fracking and pipelines, working for healthcare for all, running for local office and speaking at public forums. The Green Party of Allegheny County is the local chapter of the Green Party of Pennsylvania and part of the Green Party of the United States. At the international level, the Green Party of the United States is a member of the Global Greens and the Federations of the Green Parties of the Americas. We are part of a global movement that values people, planet, and peace over profit.
Over the course of 2017 we hope to be able to assist our communities inside of Allegheny County by being an active force in those communities by participating, promoting, and creating grassroots movements in our area that that are supported by our four pillars. We also hope to run Green Party candidates for Allegheny County/City of Pittsburgh political offices so that we can become a legislative arm of the environmental, social equality, peace and grassroots democracy movements in our region. We are also hoping to better organize in the area, and to incorporate new members that also struggle to promote a better world for us all.
Work Hard PGH is an amazing work space. Work Hard provides everything we need to hold our meetings and planning sessions, and also offers a great deal of resources beyond what we had hoped to find when looking for a work space. Beyond that, having a shared community based work space is very in line with what the Green Party stands for. A cooperative work space builds community, lowers environmental impact, and can even help spark creative collaborations. As an eco-socialist party, these things are very important to us. Anyone interested in the Green Party of Allegheny County, or the Green Party in general, is welcome to contact me or request to be added to our e-mail list at jason.berteotti@gmail.com. You can also check out our website and our Facebook Page.
Inside Our Minds
Inside Our Minds is an anonymous and uncensored storytelling project working to share the experiences of people affected by mental illness in Pittsburgh. By sharing these stories, we hope to inspire open discussion about mental illness and foster connection among members of our community. Last month Inside Our Minds launched a new podcast, The Mental Illness Spotlight, which is supported in part by a Seed Award from The Sprout Fund. The Mental Illness Spotlight fights the stigma of mental illness by featuring the stories of Pittsburghers living with mental illness, focusing on a different diagnosis each month.
Inside Our Minds’ goals for 2017 are to 1) create and deliver an engaging podcast that promotes positive discussions about mental illness, and 2) host a series of live events that will bring open discussion of mental illness into the public sphere. We will keep everyone updated as we work toward our second goal!
When looking for a cooperative space, our team needed access to a high-quality recording studio that would fit into a nonprofit budget. We were also looking for a tight-knit community of experts to help us out with the process of learning how to produce a successful podcast. Because of these reasons, we chose Work Hard PGH as our new home. You can find us at at our website, or on Facebook and Twitter. Our podcast, The Mental Illness Spotlight, is now on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, and Stitcher.
Jacqueline Roebuck Sakho
We specialize in designing culturally responsive restorative justice processes that intersect community to schools and higher education. Specifically, our work focuses on assisting community-centered organizations operating at the grassroots level to (a) engage vulnerable and/or destabilized school communities in tailoring culturally responsive restorative justice processes to achieve deep systems change that is sustainable and (b) activate their capacity as participants in networked improvement processes alongside schools and researchers.
In 2017, we plan to create instructional design toolkits that organizations can access and build upon to create context specific curricula.
Why we chose Work Hard PGH is simple; we are all about local and accessible. We live in the community, literally. On a nice day, we can walk to Work Hard PGH. Also, Work Hard cultivates a space of inclusion, consistency and development. More information about what we do can be found on our website.