September: Loralyn Fabian

EAST LIBERTY DEVELOPMENT, INC. and SCA
Sustainable Community Fellow

Two main projects ruled the month of September: A last minute TreeVitalize application, and a last minute grant application to the Sprout Fund. We decided to apply for a TreeVitalize grant for the S. St. Clair St. and Amber St. area of the East Liberty neighborhood. This particular application was rewarding because I had the opportunity to work alongside community contact Stephanie Raufer who lives on St. Clair St. Due to her Urban Studies background at Pitt, she was very familiar with the Allegheny County Assessment website; if only I had known about this site this spring! It was a great resource for researching property owners and their contact information, as opposed to trying to go through renters to get homeowner info. With only about a week to accomplish the project, Stephanie and I got an incredible amount of signatures! We hope to be awarded the trees in the spring of 2011.

The second larger project for the month was a grant application to the Sprout Fund for their Spring funding stream. Katherine at ELDI has always been intrigued by the innovative concept of green roofs on bus shelters, and with new bus shelters already being proposed for the neighborhood, we thought it’d be a great opportunity. After a lot of research and writing, I was able to accomplish about half the grant in a weeks worth of time, while Katherine finished it up. This is a very exciting project and I do hope ELDI is awarded. If they are, I may have the opportunity to work alongside a landscape architect in the area who has a ton of green roof/ecology landscape design experience!