Revitalizing Pittsburgh’s community parks with public policy
The last time we talked with James Snow, MSUS ’14, he was a project manager at a community development company then called GTECH (now Grounded Strategies). Since then, he has been named one of Pittsburgh’s “30 Under 30” by the Pittsburgh Business Times in 2018 and one of Pittsburgh's "50 Finest" by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation of Western Pennsylvania in 2017.
Today, Snow is Development Director at Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy (PPC), where he oversees individual, foundation, government, and corporate giving and works on public policy initiatives to revitalize Pittsburgh’s community parks. Here’s what he has to say about this career transition:
“When I was working in a more direct service position with GTECH, it was great to be very hands-on, working with community members around environmental issues that impacted them directly; but, to be able to effect systemic change, I wanted to get into a leadership role with a larger organization that worked on similar issues.”
And mission accomplished: “The PPC is one of the best and biggest environmental nonprofits in town,” he continues. “I really found an opportunity to make more of a difference and grow professionally and personally. It’s been phenomenal. Parks serve people in so many different ways. Being able to improve the quality of life of Pittsburghers is really meaningful to me.”
Snow credits the Falk School of Sustainability & Environment with encouraging the search for meaning, saying that the Falk School gives “the ability to really explore what sustainability means to you personally and professionally, and helps you craft your experience around something that is professionally meaningful to you.”
“Having that real-world experience at GTECH, getting to see firsthand very early on how the political system works and how to be a civic leader was really important, and having the academic experience at Chatham to complement that, to understand how sustainability plugs into policy procedures was also important,” he adds.
For the past two years, PPC has been working on an initiative called Parks for All, which focuses on neighborhood and community parks that “serve some of our most vulnerable populations and require significant resources to maintain and upkeep,” says Snow, who calls it “a very large public policy initiative that’s an example of how my degree at Chatham has been applied on a very large, systemic change scale.”
“To have the latitude to explore how different topics in sustainability fit within the broader setting is very special, and I think unique to Chatham.”
Snow’s favorite part about the job, he says, is that no two days are the same. “It’s high tempo, fast-paced. One of the things I love doing most is working with our donors and allowing them to see the impact they have on the parks. Just last Friday we were in one of our community parks projects, McKinley in Beltzhoover, which is one of our more underserved communities. We took a group of volunteers from FedEx Ground out into the park. They had made a donation to the project and wanted to have a volunteer day to plant native trees. That was a small component of the project, which showed them the impact of their donation. A couple of residents came down and talked to them and told them how grateful they were that the project was happening. Later, I came back for a meeting for the Parks for All with a variety of different stakeholders, and in the afternoon I worked on a grant report. After that, I went and met with a private donor to talk about one of the projects we have lined up for 2020. Some days I’m out talking to donors, different philanthropic partners and really advocating for the parks in Pittsburgh; other days I consider myself air-traffic control here at the office.”
Snow considers this on-the-ground experience to be a formative aspect of his work today, and also of his education at the Falk School.
“To have faculty who encourage you to draw on your real-world experience, and bring it into the classroom – that’s how we find consensus,” he says, “that’s how we build community, and that’s what sustainability’s really about.”
Chatham's Master of Sustainability (MSUS) program prepares enterprising students with the tools necessary to be the agents of change that corporations, governments, and other organizations need to lead their sustainability initiatives. The program and its focus on real-world impact is inspired by environmental icon and Chatham alumna Rachel Carson '29, whose own work over 50 years ago continues to impact the world.