Pitt Honored for Its Diverse, Wide Range of Community Partnerships

The University of Pittsburgh is being formally recognized for its commitment to community-facing work and partnerships.

On Jan. 31, the University was awarded the Carnegie Foundation’s Classification for Community Engagement, which is known as the country’s most visible and selective recognition of community engagement efforts in higher education.

“Community engagement is part of the University’s DNA,” said Kathy Humphrey, senior vice chancellor for engagement. “The collective hard work of our students, faculty and staff to invest their service, research and teaching in the community were crucial to Pitt receiving this prestigious classification.” 

Through partnerships with local organizations, robust volunteer activities and multidisciplinary research programs, the students, faculty and staff at Pitt make a significant contribution to the well-being of the community.

“As a faculty member who has been involved in community engaged work at the University for over 20 years, I have long been interested in Pitt pursuing the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement,” said Sabina Deitrick, associate dean of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. “It’s terrific for the University to receive this recognition—and to have others looking at what Pitt does in respect to engagement across all communities in our region and worldwide.”

One partnership of many

It’s the hard work of people like Jenna Baron (A&S ’13) who helped make the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement possible.

While working toward her degree from the University of Pittsburgh, Baron spent a lot of her time in the living rooms of refugee families, tutoring children from countries such as Kenya.

“I learned from this experience that coming to the U.S. from another country can just be so intimidating,” said Baron, who graduated with a degree in cultural anthropology from the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. “Between navigating language barriers, cultural barriers—it’s a lot for a young person to take in.”

During this work as a tutor for a student-run mentoring organization at Pitt, she noticed a trend: Refugee youth were missing out on proper enrichment and academic support through summer camps, making their transition to life in the U.S. even more difficult.

Now, Baron is dedicating her career to supporting immigrant children and helping them become “celebrated, engaged members” of the community. As founder and executive director of ARYSE (Alliance for Refugee Youth Support and Education), Baron serves over 150 immigrant youth per year, while providing leadership opportunities to five or more Pitt undergraduate students a year.

ARYSE offers four main programs to meet the needs of immigrant youth living in Pittsburgh year-round: a summer camp program named PRYSE Academy, an After School Club for kids in Kindergarten through 12th grade, a support group for teen women named Girls Art and Maker Group, and a Youth Steering Committee that helps make decisions about the future of ARYSE programs.

“What we strive to do is create spaces to support our youth in the transition of becoming engaged members of the Pittsburgh community,” said Baron. “We also help foster an environment for them to form friendships with other immigrant youth with shared experiences and intentionally include arts workshops so that they have creative mediums to share stories and express their interests and emotions.”

While ARYSE helps the immigrant youth with their academics and their social-emotional development, Baron said it’s all about creating a space where the youth can feel confident and free to be themselves.

One student in Girls Group called it her second family. “We want them to feel a genuine sense of belonging—and that they’re not alone,” she said.

“At Girls Group I like that we can share our different opinions with one another. I really like that I can talk with girls from different cultures and learn from them,” she said. “Everyone at Girls Group is like a family to me and our meetings mean a lot to me.”

Baron is just one extension of Pitt’s long history of partnering with the community to strengthen both the University and the greater Pittsburgh region.  

A sampling of these partnerships include: 

• AIDS Free Pittsburgh Partnership: Since its launch in 2015, the number of new HIV diagnoses in Allegheny County has declined by 30%.
• Gwen’s Girls/Black Girls Equity Alliance: A partnership that collaborates on research and advocacy to address the systemic inequalities affecting Black girls in our region.
• Pitt School of Law Legal Clinics: 500 Individuals, primarily low-income residents of Allegheny County, gained access to legal representation in 2018.
• And many other efforts: community.pitt.edu.

As a Pitt alum, Baron said she was proud to be one of the community partners named in Pitt’s Carnegie classification application.

“This recognition is really meaningful to me because ARYSE would not exist if it weren’t for the opportunities I found while I was a student at Pitt to learn from local immigrant communities and advocate on issues I cared about,” said Baron. “There is a lot of really important work that undergraduates lead during their time at Pitt that makes a lifelong impact on the world. I’m really honored to be part of that legacy.”