Posted October 28, 2009 // 0 Comments // add yours
The Pittsburgh Foundation would like to thank you for your incredible response to PittsburghGives and today’s ‘Match Day’. Your efforts are to thank for raising over $1M for area nonprofits today.
With all new innovations, there are growing pains. We want to also thank you for your patience today. We are currently looking into the issues that were experienced in the process today. We will give you an update in this space tomorrow, as well as through our other communications.
Thank you again for participating in PittsburghGives.
Posted October 23, 2009 // 0 Comments // add yours
By Mary Newman
2009 Genesis Awards Reception Held During National Sudden Cardiac Arrest Awareness Month to Raise Awareness about the Nation’s Leading Cause of Death
High school hero, Mike Piccione, was honored at the 2009 Genesis Awards Reception hosted by the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation, on October 15 at Hyde Park in Pittsburgh. Mike, a physical education teacher and coach at Rhinebeck (NY) High School, was recognized for his role in saving the life of Kaitlin Forbes when she suffered sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) at the age of 15 in 2005. He gave her CPR and used the school’s automated external defibrillator (AED), which restored a normal heart rhythm. (Read more…)
Posted October 20, 2009 // 0 Comments // add yours
By Kevin Jenkins
Senior Program Officer
The Pittsburgh Foundation
As I hunched inside my umbrella and trudged through a cold, windy rain-swept Downtown one evening recently my thoughts were of home, warm comforts and family. Then a measure of guilt and remorse kicked in as I remembered that I was headed to an event to support our community’s valiant efforts to combat homelessness.
It is an issue that is real and growing, locally and nationally, in the aftermath of the worst economic crisis in my generation. But I take enormous strength from the tireless work of our nonprofit organizations and funding partners in anticipating the human costs of homelessness and their attempts to alleviate its devastating consequences.
One such organization is Community Human Services Organization which on that cold and rainy evening I referred to earlier staged its annual ‘Sleep-in’ for the homeless. Scores of men, women and children from all walks of life huddled in their sleeping bags to bed down in the portico of the City County Building on Grant Street as a demonstration of support for Pittsburgh’s homeless.
As well as representing The Pittsburgh Foundation, I was there on behalf of Neighbor-Aid, the emergency fund we established nearly a year ago to aid nonprofits facing unprecedented demand for human services assistance as the result of the recession.
(Read more…)
Posted October 7, 2009 // 3 Comments // add yours
By Grant Oliphant
Two of the lessons that life teaches most of us are that decisions have consequences and that you can only stretch a dollar so far. I was reminded of those lessons by today’s terrible news that funding shortfalls are forcing the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh to close several branches, merge others, and make major cuts in service, hours and personnel.
Years ago this community made a responsible choice to support the libraries through the regional sales tax that funds the Allegheny Regional Asset District. That choice was followed by another decision to use a significant portion of the RAD’s resources to support debt service for the regional destinations on the North Shore. I favored the stadiums then and would again, but let’s not kid ourselves about the choice we made: Unless the RAD continued to grow year after year, funding for core assets like the Library would remain flat or go down.
As it turns out, that’s precisely what has happened. That would be fine if the Library’s costs didn’t have the nasty habit of going up every year, but since the Library lives on the same planet as the rest of us do, it has been dealing with the same escalating prices and aging infrastructure we all have experienced. And to add new insult to old injury, the same economy that is flattening RAD’s resources also diminishes the money available to the Library from the state, foundations, corporations and individual donors.
(Read more…)
Posted October 6, 2009 // 0 Comments // add yours
By Grant Oliphant
I ran into my friend Joe Lagana at Starbucks early this morning. Joe runs an outfit called the Homeless Children’s Education Fund a nonprofit that works to keep homeless children from falling through the educational cracks and missing out on school. He was poring over this morning’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and he had already cut out an article 4 kids’ problem is school minus a home from the front page detailing the plight of four homeless children who are having to go to court to gain the right to attend school in the Carlynton School District. (Read more…)
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