Home >  Business

Allegheny Conference affirms its new focus

Friday, November 15, 2002

By Dan Fitzpatrick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

When Kirkpatrick & Lockhart lawyer Chuck Queenan became chairman of the venerable Allegheny Conference on Community Development in 1999, he had dinner at Shadyside's Soba Lounge to prove that the half-century-old economic development group was willing to build new relationships with a young, hip crowd.

Last night, the 72-year-old Queenan again reached out to the same audience during the conference's annual meeting in Oakland, applying the themes of youth to three conference priorities for the coming year. The conference, which gained national attention by helping clean Pittsburgh's skies and redevelop the Golden Triangle after World War II, is now turning its attention and influence to Oakland, which conference officials want to reshape as a vibrant, easy-to-access neighborhood huddled around a redesigned Schenley Plaza.

The conference, in the coming year, also wants to help all 10-year-olds become proficient in reading, writing and mathematics, and it plans to roll out a long-awaited strategy to attract and retain young workers.

"We need some excitement," Queenan said in an interview before the event. The meeting last night was Queenan's last as chairman. Marty McGuinn, the 60-year-old chairman and chief executive officer of Mellon Financial Corp., takes over Queenan's spot in January. McGuinn did not attend last night, but in video remarks he promised that the conference will try to generate 50,000 new jobs and secure $1 billion in new investment over the next three years.

The voices of youth and diversity were in plain view at last night's Carnegie Music Hall gathering, starting with pre-event music by the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra and carrying through speeches by University of Pittsburgh bioengineering student Emily Miner, Gay and Lesbian Neighborhood Development Association's Ray Obenza and Arthur Sheffield, president of the African-American professional group Onyx Alliance.

"Young people tend to prefer diversity, both in workplace and the communities where they choose to live," Sheffield said.

Chatham College President Esther Barazzone, who unveiled the conference's youth strategy, told the audience at the Carnegie Music Hall that the region needs to take a serious, comprehensive approach to the long-running problem of keeping young people in the area. If the young continue to leave the area as they did during the last decade and if the region does not make itself more attractive to immigrants and minorities, she said, southwestern Pennsylvania could face a shortage of 125,000 workers by the year 2010. To address that, Barazzone recommended the creation of a "CEO roundtable on diversity," a group that would set goals and track progress toward the goal of workplace diversity in the region.

To set the right example, the Allegheny Conference is trying to become more diverse.

Its 46-person board, once all white and all male, now has four black men (George Miles, Bill Trueheart, Milt Washington and Bill Strickland) and two women (Barazzone and Karen Wolk Feinstein) as members. Three of the newer Allegheny Conference board members -- Glen Meakem, Sunil Wadhwani and Sean McDonald -- are high-tech entrepreneurs who attracted new attention to Pittsburgh's economy in the late 1990s.

A clear sign of the conference's youth movement is its recent focus on Oakland, which serves as a gateway for many of the region's college students and technology workers.

The 21-member Oakland Task Force and the conference's seven-person Oakland Investment Committee yesterday released a strategy designed to make Oakland a "Great Place," befitting its status as the medical, cultural, educational and technology hub of the region. The committee's strategy includes as a "first step" the previously announced effort to change Schenley Plaza from a parking area into a landscaped extension of Schenley Park.

"The heart of Oakland should not be an asphalt parking lot," said Markos Tambakeras, chief executive officer of Kennametal and an Allegheny Conference board member.

The conference also envisions transforming Forbes Avenue into a retail- and pedestrian-friendly "main street" and redesigning entrances to the neighborhood.

"In many ways," Tambakeras said, "the future of our region depends on the future of Oakland."

The future of the region's schoolchildren was another subject of last night's Allegheny Conference meeting, where officials cited a new report from the Education Policy and Issues Center showing that only 62 percent of fifth-graders in the 11-county area were proficient or advanced in reading and 56 percent were proficient or advanced in math.

The report, available at www.epi-center.org, compares data from each building in the region.

Staff writer Eleanor Chute contributed to this report. Dan Fitzpatrick can be reached at dfitzpatrick@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1752.