Lauryn Stalter's March Update

A long-term goal for the Black and Gold City Goes Green campaign this year is to strengthen community ties by making information and communications more accessible and engaging. In March 2011, I created the first of what will be a series of monthly videos that will reinforce our written fact sheets and will focus on one or two energy-saving actions from the campaign. I focused on building up our social media audience by interacting with other Pittsburgh non-profits; posting relevant and interesting information frequently; directing members back to our website; and setting up accounts on various outlets (e.g. Twitter, local forums) to broaden our reach to new audiences. I also had a hand in updating the website and establishing a general information handout for the year to come. Now that we have all these great ways to communicate with the community, we hope to get others to do/talk about campaign actions.

March also involved a good deal of planning for the next couple of months and working on community projects. We met with the Mount Washington CDC to plan a Neighborhood Blitz for May. I also collaborated with a business in Lawrenceville on a microgrant to potentially fund a Business Blitz. Future videos with the Youth Community Partners have been planned out and will be filmed next month. I was lucky enough to work at two widely successful events: a planting event at Schenley Park with Taiji and the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy and a trail clean up day with Loralyn and ELDI.