For Homewood residents, and all Pittsburghers who missed today's appearance of Illinois Senator Barack Obama at the Rivers Club , the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is offering a second opportunity come July 2.

The group is sponsoring a trip to Philadelphia for a candidates' forum to which Mr. Obama has been invited, along with Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Christopher Dodd and Denis Kucinich. For $50 (one-tenth the cost of today's fund-raiser), you can get on the bus, which will leave the Acorn office at 5907 Penn Ave. at 2 a.m. (yes, in the morning!) For more info, call Denise Johnson at 412 441 6551.

No word yet on whether the organization will offer a similar trip to see and hear Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani or any of the other Republican presidential candidates.

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On June 29, FaithWorks and Bethesda Presbyterian Church will sponsor an event to help faith-based and nonprofit organizations get better acquainted with one another. Very quickly. The approach being used is called "speed networking," an adaptation of the hyper-compressed dating ritual that was quite the rage a while back in post-industrial towns like Seattle (or so we hear).

Anyway, in "speed networking," participants will sit opposite one another in pairs, with ten minutes to tell each other about their organizations. That's five minutes each. At the end of the 10 minutes, one of them moves to another seat and is replaced by a new participant, who now has 10 minutes to give a pitch to, and receive one from, the person who remained in place.

Event organizer Dina Blackwell said FaithWorks and Bethesda held their first speed networking event in April, and that although it may sound totally chaotic, "once we got started, it was fun."

"We're trying to introduce people to collaboration and its benefits," she said, noting that between them, Homewood and Lincoln-Larimer have about 45 faith-based and nonprofit organizations.

If you're on staff at one of them and want to build your organization's capacity, mark June 29 on your calendar, set aside $5 for registration, and show up at Bethesda, 7220 Bennett St., at 8:45 a.m., ready to stay until noon. (There's a continental breakfast).