“Through its unique model of collaboration in which community members and university faculty and staff work together as peers, and the development and distribution of social and technological innovations with real-world applications, the center will help to dismantle barriers to shared prosperity and equity,” said CMU Professor Illah Nourbakhsh, who will serve as the center’s inaugural executive director. The center plans to rely on, and engage, expertise from across all of CMU’s schools and colleges, as well as interested alumni. Publicly available stories that illustrate the projects’ progress, using multimedia, CMU’s EarthTime data visualization tool and voices from the community will be regularly published on the web. Multiple working groups tackling critical issues will be launched within its first year, with interventions developed and piloted in the community within months of the groups’ founding. The initiative is ambitious in scope, speed and transparency. We wanted to see if Pittsburgh could reinvent that paradigm, and Carnegie Mellon – with its long history of tackling real-world problems – has risen to the challenge.” “But too rarely are local communities and complex social needs the real beneficiary or even the focus of the knowledge, creativity and wealth-creation flowing from these extraordinary engines of innovation. “Around the world, a relative handful of major research institutions, Carnegie Mellon among them, are literally inventing the future, with significant global benefits and impacts,” said Grant Oliphant, president of The Endowments. Convinced that the Pittsburgh region’s path to a sustainable economic future depends heavily on the people, discoveries and enterprises connected with its major research universities, The Endowments was considering major support for CMU – but only if the work would intentionally include the local community and its social, environmental and economic challenges. The Center for Shared Prosperity stems partly from discussions between Carnegie Mellon and The Heinz Endowments that began three years ago. These working groups will harness community members’ lived experiences and skills, alongside CMU experts in areas where the university leads, including data science, public policy, technology, humanities and the social sciences. In turn, solution-oriented working groups composed of community members and CMU participants across multiple disciplines will partner to study these issues, identify structural barriers to access and opportunity, and develop and implement social and technical innovations that address them. It will include representation from Western Pennsylvania community organizations and residents CMU faculty, staff and students and Heinz Endowments staff. The recently formed Center Community Committee will be charged with identifying specific equity, economic and social justice challenges facing the Pittsburgh region that will be the focus of the center’s work, including in areas such as housing, education, transportation, healthcare, technology fluency and access to capital. We are grateful to The Heinz Endowments and its board for their generous support and partnership.”Īt the heart of the initiative is a new model of collaboration that unites the expertise of both the community and the university. With both the pandemic and the rapid pace of technological change contributing to a widening opportunity gap, the solutions proposed through The Center for Shared Prosperity will help our region address societal barriers and will also serve as a model that can be replicated in communities across the country. “The Heinz Endowments and CMU have worked together for decades on projects that support Pittsburghers, and this new initiative will expand our community collaborations at a particularly critical moment. “As a university- and community-wide effort, The Center for Shared Prosperity will apply a comprehensive methodology to CMU’s engagement across Western Pennsylvania and will leverage our unique expertise to help residents benefit from the innovation economy,” said Farnam Jahanian, CMU president.
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