Bridging the Gap: Community leaders strengthen Pittsburgh’s food system with New Sun Rising’s support

Posted on April 27, 2026 by Alyse Horn

Terri Minor-Spencer, founder and president of West End P.O.W.E.R, and Tacumba Turner, Freight Farm Program Manager, stand next to lettuce growing on a panel inside of the freight farm. (Photo by Alyse Horn, New Sun Rising).

Nestled next to the Community of Change Center on Centralia Street in the West End sits an unassuming white freight container.

Inside, the 320-square-foot metal structure houses a drip irrigation hydroponics system that grows 2,500 pounds of produce annually. The plants grow vertically on mobile panels that hang from the ceiling with nutrient-rich water that is plumbed overhead and, with a little help from gravity, drips down the panel to the plants’ roots.

Managed by West End P.O.W.E.R., the freight farm received a Food Justice Fund (FJF) Grassroots Grant to pilot Growing Justice, a system expansion to increase year-round production of fresh vegetables. They’re also hosting educational programming around healthy food, and engaging groups of youth and formerly incarcerated individuals in job training through roles in farm maintenance, harvesting and food distribution.

“There are domino effects to not having healthy foods to eat,” said Terri Minor-Spencer, founder and president of West End P.O.W.E.R. “I want this conversation to be more tied together with how the choices that we make have a lot to do with what we put in our bodies.”

The City of Pittsburgh released FJF grants in two rounds. The first, launched in 2024, was for large-scale food system investments and $1.1 million was awarded. The second, launched in 2025, was for grassroots organizations with a budget of $500,000 or less. In September, a total of 30 local food justice nonprofits were awarded $1.5 million.

New Sun Rising (NSR), a nonprofit focused on supporting vibrant communities, is managing distribution of those funds. They serve as an operating system for community-driven development by providing leaders with skills, funding, connections and data to overcome the challenges of our time.

“These 30 grantees know what their communities need and how to provide it. NSR’s role in this program aims to fill the spaces between funder requirements and grantee resources,” said Judi Costanza, director of vibrancy funds at NSR.

To support multiple food pantries in her native North Side of Pittsburgh, Jana Thompson saw the grant as an opportunity to fill gaps in food distribution infrastructure that often gets overlooked. Her project, Moving Food: The Last Mile, is providing 6,000 bags, 55 backpacks and 200 wheeled personal buggies to pantry clients who do not have access to personal transportation. Thompson said the majority of those who utilize the pantry are elderly or disabled. Providing people with the capability or choice for how they transport their food means they can get it home safely.

“I’m on the ground watching people struggle to get here and struggle to get on the bus. They’ve got everything wrapped in little plastic bags and they’re trying to be particular about how they put it in this bag, but what’s this going to look like when they get home? They deserve to have that tomato look good,” Thompson said.

To apply for the FJF Grassroots Grants, organizations needed to be 501(c)(3) nonprofits or unincorporated groups represented by a fiscal sponsor. Thompson said she had a fiscal sponsor when she applied, but the rigor of managing government funds made the arrangement impractical.

At the brink of returning the grant, NSR stepped in to serve as fiscal sponsor for the project and “caught me when I was in free fall,” Thompson said.

For the FJF, NSR is fiscally sponsoring five projects. Rooted in community work and a deep appreciation for grassroots solutions, NSR has partnered with local communities for 20 years to provide grant administration for mission-aligned projects.

“As an intermediary, NSR flexes in the space between top-down institutional funding programs and intelligent and insightful bottom-up grassroots community programs,” NSR’s Costanza said.

Maintaining accountability and transparency in the use of public funding is critically important. Community members and food advocates can follow the social and economic impact of the $1.5 million grassroots grant investments by visiting the FJF dashboard created by NSR.

The city expects to open the second round of applications for the FJF Grassroots Grant in May 2026.

To learn more about New Sun Rising, visit https://www.newsunrising.org/.

This article first appeared on Pittsburgh’s Public Source and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

New Sun Rising celebrates 20th Anniversary in 2025

Posted on January 31, 2025 by Alyse Horn

Above: Each quarter, we’ll highlight one of our impact areas. The first is Culture, followed by Sustainability, Opportunity, and then Vibrancy, which is the umbrella for these three areas. 

It’s hard to believe New Sun Rising has been supporting community-driven development for two decades. 

When we first launched in 2005 as a 501(c)(3), it was out of the love that our founders, brothers Brian and Scott Wolovich, have for Millvale and New Orleans. Our inaugural fundraiser, the Cultural Gumbo, raised money to support flood victims after Hurricane Ivan and Hurricane Katrina devastated these two communities. 

Soon afterwards, a group of residents were fiscally sponsored by New Sun Rising to bring the Millvale Community Library to reality. Another founding project, The Horizon Experience, helped children from urban and suburban neighborhoods build positive relationships and crush stereotypes through shared summer experiences and mentoring. The outcome of these early projects created networks of hope and an undeniable shift in neighborhood perception.

This was during the first decade of our existence, when a volunteer board of directors carried the weight of our early mission to improve social, environmental, and cultural wellness of the Pittsburgh region. Our budget was $1,200 and we were limited to serving only six projects a year. The success of our fiscal sponsorship and mentoring programs during the first 10 years caused us to step back and reflect on a vision for the larger ecosystem we wanted to create. This led to the development of our Vibrant Communities Framework centered around strengthening culture, sustainability, and opportunity in disadvantaged places. After we did this, a lot of things started falling into place. 

In 2014, New Sun Rising received its first proper funding: 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. This funding seeded development programs such as Ignite Workshops and our first two Launch Incubator cohorts, and provided the resources to scale up fiscal sponsorship and implement capacity building to Grow collaborations.

Within the past decade we’ve supported local organizing and power building toward equitable development in 75 communities, and used the practical lessons learned to strengthen over 500 leaders and manage $18+ million since our founding.

The Vibrant Communities Framework emerged as a roadmap to build capacity for community-driven change at three stages of development: Ignite, Launch, and Grow. The 18 strategies are highly adaptive and implemented through local partners to inspire regenerative, wholistic development: built from the bottom up and from the inside out.

We’ve dedicated the last 20 years to the belief that transformational community change requires a commitment to supporting local people to lead and benefit from the future they envision. By unlocking authentic human potential, we’re building an engaged, diverse, and resilient ecosystem with solutions that not only improve your community – but can improve communities around the world.

To celebrate New Sun Rising’s 20th Anniversary, we’ll be taking this year to reflect on our past, how we show up presently for those we serve, and (with your input) envision our future. We’ll be hosting events and publishing more throughout the year on what we’ve learned building Vibrant Communities of wellbeing and prosperity for all. 

If you’re interested in learning more about our 20th Anniversary Campaign events and sponsorship opportunities click here. Consider making an individual donation to honor New Sun Rising two decades of impact here.

East Meets Midwest: How Pittsburgh Changemakers Found Kindred Spirits in Dayton

Posted on June 17, 2024 by Alyse Horn

By Brian Conway
This story first ran in the Pittsburgh Independent. New Sun Rising and Grassroots Grantmakers generously underwrote the cost of the trip for all participants, as well as the time to write this article. They retained no editorial control over its content.

Last month, a small convoy of status-quo-disrupting activists and entrepreneurs, led by New Sun Rising’s Scott Wolovich, departed Pittsburgh for Southwest Ohio to meet with Dayton Collaboratory, its founder, Peter Benkendorf, and his posse of righteous rabblerousers.

The goal: gather folks doing good work from places not so different, and see what sparks may fly.

Wolovich invited me one month prior over coffee at Grim Wizard, two blocks from the former “Work Hard Pittsburgh” freelancers cooperative where we first met. “Scott from NSR,” as our co-op’s fiscal sponsor, frequented the space and offered thoughtful counsel and a friendly smile to our scrappy, idealistic entrepreneurs.

I asked if he was interested in coverage of the journey. He said he wanted me present for the experience, to maybe take some notes, and after everything unfolded we could see if there was a story to be told.

I caught a ride westward with Laura Totin Codori, founder and CEO of compost startup Worm Return. Seated shotgun was her second-in-command, Jess Kusten, a ‘21 Carnegie Mellon grad and fellow true-believer in the importance of organic waste diversion. The pair kept a green bucket in the trunk for any apple cores and banana peels we might generate along the way–worm food for later, and the type of devotion to sustainability one would expect from people organizing Pittsburgh’s first green-collar cooperative.

Frankie Harris and SaKyah Harris, of the Ujamaa Collective fair trade boutique, rode along with Scott, while Ron Gaydos, another Work Hard fixture and the cooperative development director with the multistate Keystone Development Center, rounded out the worm mobile.

Peter was calling this a “learning journey” for “positive deviants.” What I didn’t fully appreciate yet was that Peter and Scott began to use Positive Deviants as a label in 2022, as a framework to connect unconventional change agents and explore principles of community transformation.

In the meantime, I didn’t know what to expect.

“Are you ready to join the cult, Brian?” asked the worm lady, between drags of her American Spirit. We were running late, trying to tie up obligations so we could arrive unencumbered, ready to listen and learn. Whatever we were getting into, we trusted Scott’s intentions. If he thought there were good people we could learn from, we were in. And as we would hear so often in the coming days, things only move as fast as the speed of trust.

We arrived in a city just as big as Pittsburgh but with half the population, and none of the hills. Peter and co. welcomed us to the Collaboratory with open arms and local beer, and in that downtown Dayton storefront, between bites of pizza, our communities collided.

The back half of the Collaboratory was filled with West African oil paintings reminiscent of Seurat, and whiteboards scrawled with words packed as densely as Ben Ibebe’s brushstrokes. Amid the flurry of text, a quote from R. Buckminster Fuller, which Pete says encapsulates their ethos: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

That sentiment was represented by Frankie and Kyah of the Ujamaa Collective marketplace and cooperative nonprofit for Africana women and artists. Kyah is their inventory specialist; Miss Frankie, her grandmother, explained that Ujamaa, the fourth principle of Kwanzaa, means “collective economics,” embodied by their motto: “we lift while we climb.”

J. Thomas Agnew, co-founder of Black arts collective BOOM Concepts, rounded out Pittsburgh’s contingent. He calls BOOM a “swiss army knife” for its versatility; coincidentally, it’s the same term Scott often uses to describe New Sun Rising. BOOM connects artists with resources and opportunities, he explained, while reflecting on ten years of advocacy, cultural disruption and placemaking, from the arts district storefront they aspire to purchase.

From Dayton: Glenna Jennings, the shutterbug, U. Dayton professor, and food justice advocate with Desert Kitchen Collective. We heard how Karen Korn made the leap from academia and anthropology into an online cannabis education. And Peter told us about the Collaboratory’s Community of Well-Being Initiative, which tracks and measures what it means to be a thriving community.

By the end of our roundtable, a template had emerged: Inequity exists and so I advance change in the manner I’m best suited for, in spite of the challenges, because people deserve better.

Or as Laura put it: “I got tired of complaining.”

United over common cause, the conversation shifted to The Barrel House, at the suggestion of Richelle Brown, the sex educator with a shock of purple hair, who heads up LGBTQ+ Health Initiatives for Public Health of Dayton. She taught us about the Rubi Girls, the comedic drag troupe who raised $2 million for HIV/AIDS and LGBTQIA-related causes in Dayton, and the city’s legacy of redlining.

Friday morning began at the Edgemont Solar Gardens in historically disinvested West Dayton. “Black elders leading growth and community opportunities,“ Thomas posted on social media. Organized by the Greater Edgemont Community Council, the garden has been active since 1978. Today, with most volunteers past retirement age, the challenge becomes finding a new generation to carry on their greenhouse work.

From there, we traveled to Gem Street Market, where Lela Klein, co-founder of Co-op Dayton, showed us firsthand the potential and peril of community ownership. Opened in 2021, the co-op market has well over 5,000 paying members, and includes a deli, specialty and organic products coffee shop, even a teaching kitchen and community space in what was once a food desert. Our resident co-op guru, Ron, took special interest, having worked with groups in Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood and Homewood neighborhoods to pursue similar community-owned markets in food deserts.

Next we heard from Sharon Hawkins, a former nursing professor and community activist who who leads the Health Equity Activation Think Tank. Previously, she worked with Black doulas via the TRIBE Collective, a cooperative that seeks to improve birth and early childhood outcomes in the Dayton region, where just five years ago Black newborns and infants died at a rate twice that of white babies.

“Mama Sharon” says she takes inspiration from a Cornel West saying about listening first to the people most impacted by a problem when trying to better it. She called her fellow advocates a group of “misfits” whose bond only grew at “speed of trust.” A lifetime of Black women’s narratives and sagas being distorted led her to become skeptical of media coverage, and she said that it is incumbent upon white journalists to use their privilege to counteract ongoing biases and harmful narratives.

After lunch from the deli, we meditated at the House of Healing Arts and took group photos. Then, at Westside Makerspace, a “member-led, almost-cooperative,” we made mugs, and met the Irish journalist Stephen Starr, who spun up Dayton’s Journalism Lab with help from the Collaboratory, where he and other volunteers help community members hone and pitch their stories for local and national news outlets.

That evening, on the way to dinner at the cooperatively-owned Fifth Street Brewpub, we crossed paths with a man named Jim, out tending to his garden. As soon as the Collaboratory came up, Jim said “oh, you know Pete,” and presented us with flowers, roots and all, that he yanked right out of the ground.

For some, the night ended with a bourbon at The Century; others, a beer at Toxic Brew. We learned about DIY skateparks being done with Rhymesayers entertainment, funded by sales of the Aesop Rock single “Pumpkin Seeds.”  And we heard about the city’s critical role in the development of funk. Over those last few hours we met our new friends’ partners and children, and bid our first goodbyes.

No matter which side quests we took Friday night, all of us made it to breakfast early Saturday at 2nd Street Market. Kelly Brown, the Dayton-via-Chicago accountant who first joined us Thursday evening, said it was the best place in the city to people-watch. And as we checked out local farm stands and food stalls, while people from all walks of life went about their business, we reflected on our time together and some of the recurring themes we’d take away with us: empathy, solidarity, and humility, as we seek to uplift the well-being of our communities.

We hugged goodbye and vowed to return for another Collaboratory production, Dayton’s Porchfest, later this August, and there are already plans for a Dayton visit to Pittsburgh this fall.

Before we’d even left Ohio, Peter sent along a gracious email to thank us for our visit. He singled out Miss Frankie and some words she shared when we first met–“You are never too old to learn and never too young to teach.”

Hilltop Rising expands opportunities for South Hilltop residents with permanent home on Warrington Ave.

Posted on October 13, 2023 by Alyse Horn

Above: (Left to right) Zak Thomas, partner at STIKO BRUNO, LLC, Jmar Bey, co-founder of South Hilltop Men’s Group and Hilltop Rising, and Scott Wolovich, executive director at New Sun Rising, after closing on 744 E. Warrington Ave.

Pittsburgh hosts a handful of startup weekends every year, but the September 2015 Startup Weekend Civic in Allentown set in motion a series of events that, eight years later, would come back full circle. 

That startup weekend, hosted by Work Hard Pittsburgh cooperative, was focused on entrepreneurs who wanted to build data-driven businesses aiming to improve city government or impact the local community. Jmar Bey, cofounder of South Hilltop Men’s Group, was a member of Work Hard and heard about the event through another member. He said initially, he went for the free beer.

“Josh [Lucas, founder of Work Hard Pittsburgh] ended up getting me on the stage to pitch an idea. I didn’t feel like I had anything to say, but he told me, ‘you’re always saying stuff, get up there,’” Bey said. “So I got up there and I freestyled an idea I’d been thinking about, and it was great enough to get me selected as a finalist for the competition.”

Bey’s idea laid the foundation for the South Hilltop Men’s Group (SHMG), an organization that provides programming that encourages responsible entrepreneurism, workforce development, and case management support with a focus on building community. A year later, with support of the Launch Hilltop incubator, Bey established Hilltop Rising to provide employment opportunities for those who complete training and programs through SHMG. 

On October 4, 2023, SHMG and Hilltop Rising received $302,000 from the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) to purchase 744 E. Warrington Ave., the former location of Work Hard Pittsburgh, which started to wind down operations in 2021. The funding came through the URA’s Avenues of Hope Commercial Real Estate (ACRE) Program and the Pittsburgh Business Fund. New Sun Rising had been the previous owner of the building since 2017 with a goal of transitioning the property to long-term community ownership and use.

“The relationship with Work Hard and its leader was really catalytic, because if that [startup weekend] hadn’t happened the way that it did, we wouldn’t have developed relationships with some of our biggest supporters,” Bey said. 

The space will be used for workforce development training and certification programs like OSHA, deconstruction, demolition, safety, and job readiness. There is also a recording studio in the basement where Christian Nowlin, co-founder of SHMG and Hilltop Rising, will be running Hilltop Media with a focus on working with youth in the neighborhood to create podcasts, videos, and more. 

“We were essentially left with a business that just needed a bit of tweaking. Work Hard’s experience, knowledge, and data on what did and didn’t work in terms of the Hilltop gave us solid rock to build upon,” Bey said. 

Creating opportunities for employment in the Hilltop neighborhoods, Bey tends to operate on the prevailing wage standard and provides training, certification, and field experience in deconstruction, renovation, and similar pathways. According to the Vibrancy Index, the areas served by SHMG and Hilltop Rising have an average Work & Economic Growth Index of 61% compared to 71% for Allegheny County (Sustainable Development Goal #8).

“Equitable growth means that the people who are from the community get every opportunity to lead and benefit from the future that they envision,” says Scott Wolovich, executive director of New Sun Rising. “Since 2015, we have partnered with South Hilltop Men’s Group and Hilltop Rising through capacity building, bridge loans, and access to grants. Property ownership is the primary way that wealth transfers and communities are shaped in America. We couldn’t be happier for them to acquire this building and continue the entrepreneurial and community-building spirit of Work Hard Pittsburgh.”

Neighborhood Allies, a long time partner of NSR, provided support to SHMG and Hilltop Rising through their Community Leadership Forum, a Small & Simple grant, and making pivotal connections to resources. 

Zak Thomas, a partner at STIKO BRUNO, LLC, met Bey through Neighborhood Allies and was the attorney representing SHMG and Hilltop Rising for the acquisition of 744 E. Warrington Ave. He said it was “inspiring” to talk with Bey about the future of the building. 

“Jmar doesn’t really talk in terms of, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do in this space.’ He talks about, ‘Here’s how this impacts this part of the neighborhood and creates jobs for residents.’ It’s much more about the impact than simply what’s within the walls of the building,” Thomas said. 

Bey grew up in Beltzhoover, and prior to closing on 744 E. Warrington Ave., he and Nowlin were running SHMG and Hilltop Rising out of a rented office space at 831 E. Warrington Ave. for five years. Bey said he never thought they’d have the opportunity to own a building along the business district, given how property values have risen over the last decade.

“When I was a kid, there were very clear racial lines. We couldn’t go into Allentown, that was the white neighborhood,” Bey said. “Years later, a lot has happened culturally, societally, and for me personally. When I reflect on how I got here, I can’t help but to think that it’s providence.”

“It feels amazing, it feels meant, and it feels like it’s time.”

South Hilltop Men’s Group is a fiscally sponsored project of New Sun Rising. NSR was also the fiscal sponsor of charitable activities contracted through Academy PGH and Work Hard Pittsburgh, which included the purchase of 744 E. Warrington Ave. The intent of the acquisition was to provide financial security to Work Hard Pittsburgh. As such, the financial realities of the Work Hard Pittsburgh ecosystem during the pandemic made it necessary to sell the building, a decision that was ultimately made by NSR as the owner. Read more about NSR’s Real Estate Co-development Model here.

Program launches for environmental justice communities to organize, access generational funding opportunities

Posted on October 11, 2023 by Alyse Horn

Above: The SURJE Summit (Southern Unity for Racial Justice and Equity) in Memphis, Tennessee. Photo by Scott Wolovich.

Two trillion dollars is an impossible amount of money to wrap your head around. But that’s exactly what the Federal government has approved for community investment in recent years. What makes this different is that 40% of eligible funds will directly benefit disinvested and overburdened communities through the Justice40 designation – and $2,000,000,000,000 is a once in a generation opportunity.

At the other end of the spectrum are local organizations and resident leaders who have dedicated their lives to helping people thrive. They tend to be small, underfunded, and often volunteer-driven. The distance between these federal opportunities and the people best positioned to direct and benefit from them couldn’t be greater.

Last week, a group from Southwestern PA began their journey to help close this gap. Residents from environmental justice designated communities, community engagement professionals, a documentarian, and nonprofit leaders attended the first ever SURJE Summit (Southern Unity for Racial Justice and Equity) in Memphis, Tennessee. The trip, self-funded by New Sun Rising and RiverWise, offered a transformational opportunity to learn, connect, and begin designing resources that serve the multi-county Pittsburgh region.

Together, we learned about the lasting impacts of our nation’s history of stolen land and stolen labor. We met hundreds of inspiring leaders who are organizing power within their communities. And we heard the call for advocacy and capacity building to ensure that Justice40 funds and the implementation of programs are community-led. 

Our long-time collaborators at EcoDistricts also announced that they have officially rebranded and relaunched as Just Communities after joining the Partnership for Southern Equity.  On the final day, our learning journey concluded at the National Civil Rights museum located at the Lorraine Motel, the site of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968, the day after his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech.

In the coming months, New Sun Rising will support the launch of a program whose goal is to support environmental justice communities to navigate Justice40 funding opportunities while building collaborative capacity for projects that improve their health and climate resilience. It will be designed in close collaboration with the Environmental Justice Genius Advisory Group, a team of community leaders which includes Mary Carey, Alyssa Lyons, Melanie Meade, Shawnta Reed, and Seth Whitted. Our partners at RiverWise, District PGH, the Center for Shared Prosperity Environmental Working Group, and an expanded national network from SURJE will continue to help shape and connect resources as it unfolds.

Together we are eager to unlock resources for projects that can advance environmental justice in our own communities and beyond. Learn more by exploring the new environmental justice layer on the Vibrancy Portal.

Interested to partner, fund, or support this program? Email info@newsunrising.org.

Nonprofits & Artists collaborate to launch Creative Advocacy Playbook

Posted on April 1, 2023 by Scott Wolovich

Scattered across Southwestern PA, nonprofits, educational institutions, religious organizations, foundations, activists and more are working toward asserting greater agency over the future of their communities. Since the fall of the steel industry, community leaders have regularly lamented regional division as well as a misaligned direction for the future, making many residents of the region uncertain of how to formulate effective, sustainable change. That’s where creative advocacy comes into play.

On March 30, New Sun Rising and RiverWise announced the release of the Creative Advocacy Playbook, a dynamic in-depth resource that provides adaptive, evolving and practically applicable tools for practitioners of community-focused work. Creative advocates are committed to understanding, engaging and transforming mindsets in ways that produce greater agency and transforming mindsets in ways that produce greater agency and more vibrancy in their community.

The Playbook was introduced during the Ignite Creative Advocacy workshop, where leaders received information about the concepts and strategies of creative advocacy, individual mentoring from artists and advisors on campaign plan development, and participated in a pitch competition where they shared their campaign plans with a panel of judges. Three creative advocacy campaigns were then selected to each receive a $5,000 grant and three months of technical assistance to support the implementation of their plan.

The Creative Advocacy initiative is a partnership between New Sun Rising and RiverWise to help build community capacity and power across Allegheny and Beaver counties. The development of the Playbook was supported by a diverse team of Creative Advisors, along with the research and design support of Trailblaze Creative and Collaborative Craft.

“Although community leaders are increasingly aware that their communities are missing out on opportunities, they often do not know how to make a public case for something different,” said Daniel Rossi-Keen, executive director of RiverWise. “The Creative Advocacy Playbook helps leaders develop effective strategies for communicating what they want to see come alive in their communities.”

This form of advocacy is a public and intentional form of engagement that employs artistic practice to disrupt prevailing narratives and strengthen community movement toward an identified goal. Creatives — artists, writers, artisans, performers, documentarians, and more use their skills to expose, explore, and elevate a specific issue, all while inviting others to think critically, ask questions, and find their own way to be active participants in that movement.

“Creatives help you dig a little bit deeper into seeing things in their natural state, answering questions with people that are going through the issues, seeing their surroundings and their environment, being able to see their actual emotion as opposed to it being scripted, or acted out or reimagined in some way,” said Jay Manning, otherwise known as JM the Poet, who serves as a creative advocacy advisor.

When undertaken intentionally and deployed wisely, creative advocacy can help communities become better informed, inspired, connected, mobilized, and resourced to realize their shared vision for the future. RiverWise used creative advocacy during a 30-day social media campaign in September 2022 to raise awareness of a bridge and trail project, which includes transforming Black’s Run Bridge, an historic bridge that crosses Route 51 between Monaca and West Aliquippa.

Most recently, RiverWise and New Sun Rising together produced “Boom & Bust,” a documentary following a handful of community leaders from Beaver and Allegheny counties who, just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, took a trip to Louisiana’s chemical corridor to learn from locals about the impact of petrochemicals. The film poses questions about the future health and vibrancy of Beaver County in the wake of Shell opening its ethane cracker plant in Potter Township. Beyond Rust, an artists’ response to industrial development in Beaver County, will take place on April 21st from 7-9PM and kick off an ongoing campaign.

Creative advocacy is meant to engage a wider group of people in dialogue and provide opportunities for them to contribute to the future that they envision. Using creative and innovative techniques can equip residents to be active participants in moving their region forward. New Sun Rising helped communities advocate for a just use of vacant property through the Ground Truthing project led by Grounded Strategies. The alternative future expressed in the campaign video was envisioned by Homewood residents, and produced by artists Marlon Gist and Christopher Padgett, owner of Human City Creative.

“If we are to overcome the economic, social, and environmental issues of our time, we must find new ways to inspire more people to take action,” said Scott Wolovich, executive director of New Sun Rising. “Our hope is that people will use the resources in this playbook to bring community leaders and creatives together and mobilize people towards shared goals.”

The Creative Advocacy Playbook combines theory and practice to help community organizations de-risk their commitment to and investment in advocacy efforts. It explains the who, what, when, where, why, and how of building a campaign. The playbook includes 17 worksheets that can be adapted, used individually, or together as part of a sophisticated campaign to guide readers through the creative advocacy process.

Read + Download the Playbook

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New Sun Rising supports the people building vibrant communities through culture, sustainability, and opportunity. They provide capacity building, accessible funding, data, and creative advocacy to help nonprofits, social enterprises, and collaboratives lead and benefit from the future they envision.

RiverWise is a nonprofit organization working to organize community power and voice so that residents of Beaver County can create the kinds of communities in which they wish to live,

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