EcoDistricts Incubator brings together regional sustainability stakeholders

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Scott Wolovich

Author: Alyse Horn-Pyatt

The EcoDistricts Incubator is a program that was created by the national EcoDistricts organization in Oregon. Every year since the incubator began it has been held in Portland, but for the first time this year it will be held in Pittsburgh at the Millvale Food + Energy Hub.

The three-day intensive workshop brings together teams of people throughout the country and internationally to begin developing an ecodistrict plan for their neighborhoods and build on their existing plans. Ecodistricts implement sustainable development that are defined by communities and follow the EcoDistricts Protocol.

Zaheen Hussain, Director of Sustainability at New Sun Rising, said there are a number of different reasons for the incubator to be moved to Pittsburgh, one being that the area is the most active cluster in the country surrounding ecodistrict planning.

“It’s exciting to see something like this happening here and opening up the opportunity for teams to be able to attend that otherwise might not be able to afford the time, money, and capacity to take a week and go to Portland,” Hussain said.

In the past there have been six to 11 participating teams from as far as New Zealand and South Africa; this year will include: Beaver County, Beltzhoover, Etna, Hill District, Larimer, MetroHealth in Cleveland, Millvale, Oakland, Quaker Valley Council of Governments, Sharpsburg, Uptown, the Slavic Village in Cleveland, and Wilkinsburg.

Although Larimer was the first community in the region to start talking about ecodistricts, this will also be its first incubator. Uptown attended the EcoDistrict Incubator in 2014 and Millvale went in 2016, while Homewood participated in 2017. Hussain said Millvale and the New Sun Rising team were able to attend the incubator three years ago through a Neighborhood Allies grant with the stipulation that “‘If we fund you, how are you going to make sure what you learn can be shared with the Pittsburgh community?'”

In November 2016, seven months after Millvale attended the EcoDistrict Incubator, Hussain and Brian Wolovich hosted a mini-incubator that condensed the three-day program into one Saturday workshop. Two of the teams that attended from Sharpsburg and Etna had shown a lot of excitement and that sparked the idea for the Triboro Ecodistrict, an initiative of New Sun Rising which Wolovich is the director.

“Millvale had the opportunity to go to Portland [for the incubator], and we felt that Etna and Sharpsburg deserved that opportunity but we didn’t have the funding so we had to think about bringing [the incubator] here,” Hussain said.

Because EcoDistricts works with teams from all over the world, they focus on global facilitation of the protocols, but the upcoming incubator has been specialized for the region and will allow facilitators to dig into more localized issues.

The master facilitator for the event is Christine Mondor of evolveEA who originally helped the community of Millvale develop their Millvale Ecodistrict Pivot Plan in 2012 and eventually Pivot 2.0 in 2016. Hussain said during this incubator New Sun Rising and community stakeholders will begin developing its 3.0 plan while other teams will be focusing on 2.0 or constructing the first phases of their ecodistrict plan.

“What we and EcoDistricts are trying to do for the first time is be more intentional around who the facilitators are and setting up meetings in advance so that teams can relay what their needs are,” Hussain said.

The incubator will run from April 25-27, and on that Saturday the Triboro Ecodistrict communities will gather to discuss what has and has not been working for them thus far. Wolovich said he is keen on getting feedback from facilitators and to hear from others on how the Triboro Ecodistrict can move forward.

Daniel Rossi-Keen, Executive Director of RiverWise in Beaver County, is attending the incubator and said he is excited to be part of the conversation and think about sustainable community development “and learning from a mix of folks with similar problems.”

“There should be a wide range of conversations and the more we are able to expose communities to creative solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems, the more success we have moving forward,” Rossi-Keen said.

EvolveEA, New Sun Rising, and EcoDistricts have been working closely to plan this years incubator. Hussain said there will be 100 people or so packed into the Millvale Food + Energy Hub over the three-days and that “it’s going to be cozy, but good.”

“Moving this [from Portland] to the Millvale Food + Energy Hub speaks for itself about the level of commitment that we’ve been putting in over the years,” Wolovich said. “It’s recognition of those efforts.”

The annual EcoDistricts Summit will also be held in Pittsburgh this year on November 4-5.

For more information on ecodistricts, click here.

Cultural empathy creates opportunity for entrepreneurs

Posted on April 3, 2019 by Scott Wolovich

As an entrepreneur herself, Leigh Solomon Pugliano understands on a personal level the amount of commitment and sacrifices that individuals put into starting their business–especially women.

“I started my business pregnant with my third daughter,” Pugliano said. “I also saw that it was the best thing for my family, too, as scary as that sounds. And I was scared every day.”

Eight years ago, Pugliano founded Straightforward Consulting Co. that specializes in strategizing business operations and improving productivity. Four years ago, Pugliano started Barrels to Beethoven, which she founded to teach and preserve the history of the steel pan, an instrument she has been playing for much of her life. Pugliano’s father is a steel pan builder and tuner, and when he emigrated with his family from Guyana to the United States in 1984 he started the Solomon Steelpan Company, the first of its kind the nation.

“I realized there was a need to preserve the history and culture of the people that have built the instrument, because that story was being lost,” Pugliano said. “Barrels to Beethoven wants to preserve the instrument any way we can: education, performance, technique, training, all of those elements.”

As the Director of Opportunity at New Sun Rising, Pugliano’s experiences give her an apt entrepreneurial perspective on how to build a business from nothing. But there is another attribute that she possesses, putting her in a different league when it comes to mentorship and business development.

“She has this empathetic quality to understand what we are going through,” said Staycee Pearl, co-executive director of PearlArts Studios. “She has a lot of different experiences and her range of knowledge about nonprofits and business is vast, and her [frame of reference] is what is most helpful to us.”

One of the personality traits that Pearl appreciates the most about Pugliano is her ability to walk into a room with the cognizance that she has and not treat others as if she is superior. Pearl described Pugliano as “respectful,” “encouraging,” and “always thinking of ways she can support us.”

Pearl was a participant in the first iteration of the NSR GROW Residency, a program for established business owners that was created and led by Pugliano. The bulk of the program consisted of weekly individualized consulting sessions with Pugliano accompanied by three group meetings over the course of six months. There were a total of six business owners who participated in the program, including Kelauni Cook, founder of Black Tech Nation.

Cook said when she first met Pugliano through the Grow program there was an immediate connection, and since then her respect for Pugliano has only grown.

“Speaking first from a woman’s perspective, I admire Leigh’s ability to command attention without having to say much. As a woman, you feel like you have to take space when you’re in a room full of men and be aggressive,” Cook said. “[Leigh] is so graceful and she doesn’t do that, she just comes in and observes and has a powerful presence.”

“From a Black woman’s perspective, just having her as a mentor, having someone not much older than me that also understands the nuance of being Black and female and how that works together in the business and startup sector in Pittsburgh—she is someone I can look up to that looks like me.”

Pugliano said her number one passion is supporting entrepreneurs, and one of the beneficial traits to her work with New Sun Rising is that she not only brings diversity, “but build[s] diversity because I am welcoming and inclusive.”

Pugliano also oversees the growth New Sun Rising’s Vibrant Communities Framework, which was created to help communities develop a strategic roadmap and get to action around the priorities they want to set for themselves.

“It could be around entrepreneurship, it could be around education, but this framework will help guide them on that path and then we can help them with strategy or help with implementing the things that they need to do,” Pugliano said.

For those who might feel not ready to take the jump into starting or progressing their business, Pugliano said that New Sun Rising is a good place to start, even if individuals just have an idea.

“People are at different places and stages with their business and within themselves,” Pugliano said. “We understand that and can help guide people through that process.”

A Community’s Recovery Brings Nonprofit to Life

Posted on February 18, 2019 by Scott Wolovich

Pictured (L-R): Leigh Solomon Pugliano, Director of Opportunity; Scott Wolovich, Executive Director; Zaheen Hussain, Director of Sustainability; Jamie Johnson, Manager of Performance Improvement, Daniel Stiker, Director of Culture + Operations

After Hurricane Ivan hit the area in 2004, communities in the Pittsburgh region experienced disastrous losses from flooding. Among those hit the hardest was Millvale.

During the storm Girty’s Run, the watershed that flows through the borough, swelled and flooded hundreds of businesses and homes. And twice within that month, brothers Scott and Brian Wolovich cleaned out the house that was once their great aunt’s. Brian had bought the home after she passed away, and Girty’s Run flows through the backyard.

“Both times it really devastated the community,” Scott said.

The Wolovich’s have deep family roots in Millvale. It’s where their father’s family settled when they emigrated from Poland, and where their father grew up. After he left the area for work and started his own family, Millvale became home base for the holidays. The fact that their parents were only children created more opportunities for the family to connect with the community.

“We had no first cousins, no aunts or uncles,” Scott said. “Growing up we were always close to our extended family, but our friends and the community became our family too.”

In the early nineties, Scott and his brother began traveling to New Orleans almost every year for Jazz Fest. Over that decade, the brothers’ relationship with the Louisiana city only deepened their appreciation for culture and vibrant communities. So when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans the year after Ivan struck Pittsburgh, Scott and Brian launched New Sun Rising as an immediate response to raise money for flood victims in both cities.

For its first event as a 501(c)(3), New Sun Rising hosted the Cultural Gumbo at Shadow Lounge to benefit the Tipitina’s Foundation in New Orleans and North Hills Community Outreach in Pittsburgh, which supported a lot of the flood relief in Millvale.

Shortly after, New Sun Rising became the fiscal sponsor for a community project that defined the nonprofit: the Millvale Community Library.

“In a really interesting way, the library was catalytic even for other projects we are currently working on almost 15 years later,” Scott said. “The fact that it was literally built by the community, and through that collective experience grew the interest in sustainable development. Millvale’s Ecodistrict planning process was born out of the library, we are on our way to becoming one of the first EcoDistricts Certified communities in the world, and has led to the creation of the multi-municipal TriBoro Ecodistrict.”

Another foundational project for the nonprofit was The Horizon Experience. Under the guidance of mentors, kids from 8 to 10 years old that lived in the city and suburbs would come together and attend events over the summer. The heart of the project was to strengthen interpersonal relationships and unlock individual human potential, and that core mission can still be seen in the 150 projects that New Sun Rising supports each year.

But for almost 10 years, when volunteers fueled the organization and the budget was $1,200, they were limited to serve only six projects a year through fiscal sponsorship.

“We created a structure to help grassroots leaders take action by reducing barriers, such as allowing people to receive grant funds and use NSR for the legal and financial side of things, but it got to the point where we were turning away three out of four projects who applied because we just didn’t have enough bandwidth,” Scott said.

Admittedly, during the nonprofits early years there was not an overall strategy besides mentoring and giving projects access to their 501(c)(3) umbrella. That caused the staff and board of directors step back and reflect on a vision for the larger ecosystem that they wanted to create. This led to the development of New Sun Rising’s Vibrant Communities Framework centered around strengthening culture, sustainability, and opportunity.

Cultural and shared values allow communities to develop to their “full authentic potential while respecting their history,” Scott said. And sustainability, both in development and environmentally, had always been a priority for the nonprofit as well as increasing access to equitable and regenerative economic opportunity.

“So these three things emerged as the foundation of our Vibrant Communities Framework, and when that happened a lot of things started falling into place,” Scott said.

In 2014, New Sun Rising received a $15,000 Small & Simple grant from Neighborhood Allies that stimulated larger investments, including $550,000 from The Henry L. Hillman Foundation and $35,000 from The Pittsburgh Foundation the following year.

“The idea of what New Sun Rising came from, the way the organization was launched… its purpose was to fill a gap they saw in the system and inherently they are a value for the community,” said Talia Piazza DePasquale, senior program manager for communications and marketing at Neighborhood Allies.

In 2017, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, Neighborhood Allies, and the Borough of Millvale invested in New Sun Rising’s purchase of the old Moose Lodge on East Sherman Street in Millvale. The building is now headquarters for NSR and an emerging Food + Energy Hub, located just a few blocks away from their first project: the Milvale Community Library.

Although the nonprofit was born in Millvale, over the years of its existence New Sun Rising’s reach has crossed rivers helping to build vibrancy in over 43 Allegheny County neighborhoods, including the South Hilltop, Wilkinsburg, Northside, and McKees Rocks, to name a few. They have also been tapped to support sustainable development efforts in Beaver County.

To increase the effectiveness of capacity building and funding programs, New Sun Rising organizes services based upon the participant’s development stage to help them ignite, launch, and grow their work. Implementation strategies focus on creating nonprofit and business plans, stimulating financial and human resources, increasing access through connectivity, and strengthening a sense of identity.

Josh Lucas, founder of Work Hard Pittsburgh in Allentown, has worked with New Sun Rising since 2014 and said he believes they are able to “successfully walk the line” of what it means to have support from traditional foundations but still operate outside the box.

“[Scott] is pragmatic; he is an outcome driven executive director,” Lucas said. “He doesn’t get seduced by the politics or network he needs to maintain and successfully fund raise. He speaks the truth plainly and people see value in that.”