As hundreds cram into Oakland's Carnegie Music Hall tonight for the Allegheny Conference on Community and Economic Development's annual meeting, it will be hard not to notice how age has touched the 60-year-old public policy organization.

This 1953 photo of a Regional Planning Association luncheon reflected the makeup of local policy makers. From left, Lawrence Woods Jr.; Arthur B. Van Buskirk, chairman of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development; Mayor David L. Lawrence; W. P. Snyder III, Allegheny Conference executive; Park H. Martin, director of the Allegheny Conference; County Commissioner John M. Walker; Frederick Bigger, chairman of the City Planning Commission and Leonark J. Curran, district engineer for State Highways Department. Click photo for larger image. Related coverage Q&A with Allegheny Conference CEO F. Michael Langley

Not only have the players changed since the group's inception in 1944, but so has the game. The conference no longer is a clique of good old boys -- an all-white gathering of corporate honchos crafting city policy amid the cigar-smoke filled rooms of the Duquesne Club.

The scene tonight will have its share of the rich and powerful, but more prevalent will be scores of private sector leaders from around the region who years ago would not have had a foot in the door. And while white men will still dominate, there also will be women and people of color. Four women, five African-Americans and one India-native now hold seats on the 48-member board.

"This is a group of people who want to make sure Pittsburgh is competitive and thriving," said Karen Wolk Feinstein, president of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation and the Allegheny Conference's first female board member. It wants to create "an environment where people want to live and work and firms want to do business."

Of course, the conference of old sought to do the same things -- and in many ways, was successful doing so. Keepers of the region's jobs and purse strings, it once was composed of about a dozen men who met frequently to tackle the city's big issues, acting as the invisible hand behind the region's development by using the muscle of their finances, jobs and influence to guide and shape public policy.

John Beale, Post-Gazette William Trueheart

It helped clear the Point of rail yards and abandoned warehouses, replacing them with gleaming new offices and parkland in what became known globally as the Pittsburgh Renaissance. It championed smoke controls that cleared the city's skies, promoted mass transit and helped launch a second wave of new offices to offset Big Steel's decline.

"Those were the men who could make decisions and raise money and get things done," Bob Pease, the conference's executive director in the '80s and early '90s, said of the elite but effective leadership at the time.

"It was exclusive, but it never pretended to be anything else," added Tim Parks, former president of the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance, a regional economic development clearinghouse formed in the mid-'90s at the conference's behest.

John Beale, Post-Gazette Sunil Wadhwani

But as the region has changed, moving from a manufacturing-dominated economy to one made up primarily of services, education and research, so has the conference, broadening its scope beyond just race and gender. It has had to redefine itself, its vision and relevance amid a socially and economically transformed landscape.

It has not been easy.

It has meant reshaping an old, traditionally closed institution into one that is open to a variety of views and diverging interests and does not rely on a handful of corporate behemoths that once held sway over Pittsburgh to get the job done. Gone are Gulf Oil, Westinghouse Electric, Jones & Laughlin, while survivors such as U.S. Steel and Alcoa play a much smaller local role.

Michele Fabrizi

Small and mid-size employers that reach far beyond the city limits have replaced the old icons, forcing the conference to remake its leadership. The heads of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, for example, hold board seats, as do several tech entrepreneurs and Jeffrey Romoff, chief executive officer of the region's largest employer, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Still, the conference's evolution remains a work in progress.

While former executive director Rick Stafford helped broaden its reach to include members of the foundation community, universities and the fledgling tech community, smaller and mid-size businesses and organizations that populate the region and employ its citizens continue to be underrepresented.

Many of these constituents were upset, for example, when the conference led a failed effort in 1997 calling on voters to adopt a half-cent sales tax to raise money for new stadiums and development elsewhere in the region. While much of the money to be raised was targeted for projects outside of Allegheny County, anti-tax groups led a charge that equated the effort with big Downtown corporate interests thrusting new ballparks for millionaires down the public's throats.

The conference has worked hard to mend fences, and last year it went a step further, launching an initiative aimed at luring new members while generating more revenue.

Karen Wolk Feinstein

It formed the Regional Investors Council, which has attracted scores of smaller companies and organizations beyond the Allegheny County border while raising more funds for a conference whose mission and staff has been growing. The new members -- called Regional Investors and required to pay a minimum of $3,000 a year -- now number more than 200.

For their money, they get to attend quarterly meetings sponsored by the conference as well as special issue-focused briefings designed to capture the thoughts and opinions of a broad swath of the 10-county region's leaders.

In June, for example, investors heard the conference's explanation for why it fell short of its goal of creating 50,000 jobs and generating $1 billion of investment in the region by 2005, and their ideas were solicited -- a shift in the past when conference leaders typically talked and the audience simply listened.

The roster of Regional Investors includes a bevy of private companies, nonprofits and educational institutions, and Allegheny Conference Chief Executive Officer F. Michael Langley said he would like to grow their ranks to 350 next year -- a reflection, the conference notes, that half the region's manufacturing jobs fall outside Allegheny County borders.

"If we're truly going to represent our 10 counties, we need to hear the voices of those 10 counties," Langley said. "Our agenda as we go forward is shaped by the input of our regional investors."

The need to draw from a bigger pool of leaders in many ways reflects the stickier, more complex problems confronting the region these days.

In the '40s, '50s and '60s, it was hard to find anyone who thought the idea of clearing smoky skies, controlling flooding and improving public transportation were bad ideas. And while labor and management often butted heads, the distrust of corporate America didn't run so deep, particularly in a region that has seen so many of its major employers leave or slash jobs.

It also helped during the conference's early days that half of the region's population lived within the city borders. Indeed, decades ago, working with the public sector meant meetings with Mayors David Lawrence or Richard Caliguiri or a phone call to Richard King Mellon or former Gov. Richard Thornburgh.

Today, it takes a larger political coalition to address the region's mounting economic problems, including a bankrupt US Airways, a city on the brink of financial collapse and a pending transit crisis.

Their task is much more difficult today," said Moe Coleman, a University of Pittsburgh professor and longtime conference observer. "The problems are greater and their control is less."

Former Allegheny County chief executive Jim Roddey agreed. "In the old days, the conference just told everybody what to do. We wouldn't accept that kind of leadership today."