In The News

Maxwell King, president and CEO of the Pittsburgh Foundation, led the Heinz Endowments from 1999 to 2008, a period that included the purchase of Hazelwood Green. He said the revitalization effort in East Liberty serves as an important example as the specter of development hovers over Hazelwood. “Gentrification was beyond what the architects of the ELDI [East Liberty Development Inc.] had expected. The strategies weren’t a match for the market forces,” Mr. King said.

The Pittsburgh Foundation shows how conducting communications research with the people you serve can make philanthropy more inclusive.

The story of this boy’s homicide, the result of 3 bullets to his back as he ran from an East Pittsburgh police officer, has pricked a bubble of simmering pain and its contents are scathing the region. 

Freedom of speech is too often misunderstood or undervalued, and so is freedom of the press, said The Pittsburgh Foundation’s President and CEO Maxwell King, as he opened the First Amendment for the Twenty-First Century conference yesterday. “Freedom of speech,” he said, “isn’t something that takes place in some ether over the nation. It takes place in communities. City by city, town by town.”

Bill Strickland has served as an ambassador for the city, for the underprivileged, for higher education, for the arts and for workforce development. His resume is impressive. More important to him, though, are the thousands of Pittsburghers who bettered their resumes through his programs. Bill Strickland is a Pittsburgh Foundation Board member.

Project Hunger is a station-wide initiative to bring awareness to food insecurity issues in the greater Pittsburgh area. The hour-long program focuses on what food insecurity really looks like and the army of volunteers and advocates who strive to connect wholesome food with those who need it.

The foundation on Thursday said its 18-member board of directors is launching the search process and expects to announce Mr. King’s successor early next year.

The community foundation’s board chair, Edith Shapira, on Thursday said that Boston-based Isaacson, Miller has been retained to manage the search, which is expected to be an eight- to nine-month process. Shapira and Walter Smith, who heads the board’s governance committee, are co-chairing the search committee.

On May 1, a million-dollar effort to raise money for Pittsburgh-area food banks and food pantries will get underway. The Critical Needs Alert, which was put together by The Pittsburgh Foundation, will run from 8 a.m. until midnight, with donors able to make their donations at pittsburghgives.org and pittsburghfoundation.org.

Neighbor-Aid came together in early 2009, shortly after a federal report spelled out just how devastating the nationwide recession was and after it became evident that the community’s need for services would overwhelm the budgets of local nonprofits. “I think we didn’t believe this could happen to us as a nation,” said Jeanne Pearlman, senior vice president for Program and Policy at the Pittsburgh Foundation, who was the foundation’s education grants officer in 2008.