Cable Advisory Committee - Regular Meeting

Good

afternoon, and welcome to Pittsburgh City Council's CapleCast post agenda relative to flash crowd disturbances. I wanna thank the invited panelists, members of the public who are here in person as well as tuning in from home. We are here today to discuss a critical issue that has been at the front of mind for many of our fellow residents across the city. I called for this postage in the meeting today because our cities and cities around the country are wrestling with the urgent complex and escalating challenge. The recent rise in flash crowd disturbances involving adolescents and young adults.

We have seen a growing trend of large spontaneous gatherings, primarily made up of young people materializing primarily in Downtown Pittsburgh on the South Side and in the city's East End. We acknowledge that the desire for youth to gather, socialize, and express themselves is an entirely natural and necessary part of healthy human social development. The often chaotic, disruptive, and sometimes violent dynamics of these specific incidents must be examined, understood, and addressed in a way that we keep our residents safe, create engaging third spaces for young people, and foster intergenerational belonging in our communities. I wanna speak directly to our young people, residents, community leaders, and local businesses. The frustration, anxiety, and concern many are feeling across the city is completely valid.

When large spontaneous groups block the flow of traffic or pedestrians disrupt local commerce or create environments for altercations of property damage occur, it does strike at the core of our city's well-being, including for those involved in the incidents. Everyone in Pittsburgh deserves to feel secure walking our streets and operating their businesses, ensuring that basic level of safety is and always will be a top priority of public servants. However, my background in community organizing and urban public policy and my experience serving at youth as a mentor and as a coach has shown me that draconian approaches will not provide the long term solutions we yearn for. Simply put, we cannot merely arrest our way out of a complex social dynamic. We must never lose sight that these young people involved in these incidents are our young people.

They are Pittsburgh's children. When our children mobilize in these disruptive ways, it is often a system of a larger disconnect and allow cry for help. While undoubtedly, we need to apply effective accountability measures, we almost we we also must balance that with meaningful opportunities for redemption. If we want a permanent solution, we must look at the root causes and ask ourselves some hard questions today. What are the ingredients of an engaging safe haven?

Where do they currently exist? How do we create more? How do we ensure you have accessible engaging and supervised third spaces to gather outside of school and home in every corner of our city. How are we tracking digital trends? Social media is the primary primary tool behind these spontaneous events, and how can we better anticipate these digital flash points before they manifest physically on our streets?

And what is our community led response? How are we deploying social services, street outreach workers, violence interrupters, educators, youth advocates, and other stakeholders alongside our traditional law enforcement? Our goal for this postagenda is to find solutions, driving fact finding, dialogue, and ultimately, collaboration. We are here to forge a comprehensive and equitable path forward. So today, we aim to listen to thought leaders and experts to understand the complex dynamics and root causes that have contributed to this immense challenge we collectively face, to engage community allies, to gain insight for those to work working directly with our youth regarding intervention strategies and the urgent need for more funding for youth programming, and hear from public safety experts to understand logistical challenges, current protocols, and how do we best collaborate with law enforcement as community partners.

We must balance the absolute necessity of public safety, community health, and general wellness with the deep obligation we have to guide, protect, and invest in our youth. I'm looking forward to a highly constructive dialogue today, one that will inform smart, effective solutions to keep Pittsburgh safe, vibrant, and a place our young people can thrive and feel a sense of belonging. I also wanna note that we are being joined by my esteemed council colleagues, councilwoman Barbara Warwick, and our council president Dan Lavelle. And to begin, we are going to, I'm gonna yield the I'm gonna yield the floor to our first speaker, doctor Paul Levinson, professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, who analyzes flash cloud cloud disturbances as a natural progression of technology enabled communication. He emphasizes that the Internet and social media act as rapid catalysts allowing crowds to assemble spontaneously for both positive organizing and disruptive behaviors.

Thank you for joining us, doctor Levinson.

Well, thank you for inviting me. I'm very honored that you've been invited and to be attending this important meeting. I think this is a very important subject, but I think I might have a slightly different focus than some or many of you may have. And I say this having read the provisional law that you passed a little while ago, which as far as I can tell limits on certain days, people 17 and under being able to gather in a crowd or even by themselves. If they're 17 or under, unless there's someone who is also 21 and and older.

And I was frankly shocked when I saw the wording of that law. And, you know, I'll be I'll be happy to tell you why. The First Amendment, as I'm sure you all know, among the several important things that that it guarantees anyone here in The United States. Among those very important crucial rights is the right to peaceably assemble. I'm sure you all know that.

But, possibly, what you might not be totally in tune with is that there's nothing in that first amendment that says this right can only be exercised by people 21 years of age or older. And as a matter of fact, back in the nineteen sixties, there was a very crucial Supreme Court decision known as the Tinker decision, t I n k e r, which held that a student's First Amendment rights don't end when they walk into a classroom. And in fact, they don't end anywhere. Those rights pertain to all human beings. Now, obviously, if we're talking about a three year old toddler or maybe even a seven year old kid, obviously, there have to be some restrictions on what they can do.

But to say a 17 year old or even a 16 year old can't gather in a group, again, as long as they're not doing anything criminal, obviously, if anyone does anything criminal, the police have an obligation to stop that. I thoroughly support that. But to say without any further details that just the mere gather, if you're 17 years old or younger, cannot take place unless there's someone who's 21 years or older there, I think is a blatant violation of the First Amendment, and I also think it's a a very bad idea. Now one of the things that congress member mostly mentioned, and, you know, this is an important thing to keep in mind. What's the backdrop of this?

Obviously, it's social media. Kids spend an enormous amount of time on social media. They make friends on social media. One of the benefits of social media, in fact, is that you can get to meet people online and later meet them in person. So I think it's important to keep what I'm going to now tell you in mind when you get so concerned about this impact of social media that you pass an ordinance, again, which in my view is frankly blatantly at odds with the First Amendment.

So many years ago, I was at an auction, and a box of I don't even know what was in the box went up for sale. And the auctioneer said, well, who'll give me a dollar for this? So cheapskate that I am, that appealed to me. So I raised my hand, and I got this box for a dollar. And, basically, there were a bunch of, you know, pretty much worthless things in this box.

But at the very bottom of the box, there was copy of Good Housekeeping. I'm sure you've all heard of that magazine. But this copy of good housekeeping was dated 1910. K? So over a 100 years ago.

116 ago, And so I leave the magazine. I'm not particularly interested in good housekeeping and articles, but I found a very, very fascinating and significant article. It was an article by, someone by the name of William McKeever. He was a professor in a school of agriculture someplace in the Midwest. And the title of that article in 1910 was motion pictures, colon, a school for criminals.

Actually, I left out a word. Motion pictures, colon, a primary school for criminals. And read through the article, and I had to laugh because it was this article published in 1910, and it was saying we have to do something about this new mode of communication. It's ruining our children. They spend their afternoons in dark, danky theaters.

Who knows what kind of ill effect it's going to have on them? So nowadays, we could laugh at something like that. But this worry that we adults have about new media and what impact they're having on our kids, that has continued throughout the past hundred and sixteen years. By the time we got to the nineteen fifties, most people were okay with motion pictures for kids, but they were concerned about comic books. By the nineteen seventies, comic books were let off the hook as had been motion pictures, but now a lot of experts were concerned about something that we're all aware of, television.

And each new media system in turn took its place as an object of concern and a human cry and laws have to be made about this. After about twenty years, video games replace television as the medium that we have to make sure our kids don't get too involved in and ruined by. And, obviously, what a lot of this is building up to is the Internet and social media. And so I have two final points I wanna make, and then I'll be happy to answer questions later on in this meeting. One point is who are the people around the country who are most concerned about this and are talking about passing all kinds of additional laws and policies.

One of them is a, a person that I know very well. Not personally, she was once the district attorney in Westchester County in New York State where I live. Her name is Janine Carroll, and she was on Fox News for a while. And she was appointed a US attorney for the District Of Columbia, Washington Washington DC. DC.

She has talked about making criminal charges available for any parent that allows their kids to get together in these so called team takeovers. And that concerns me because there, again, resides the route to fascist. Telling people what they can do and what they can't do when they're not committing a crime. And so to be clear about this, if there is any criminal activity, if there's any looter, if there's anyone who is physically harmed in these gatherings, then absolutely, the people who did that, whatever their age, they need to be investigated and maybe even even talk to their parents. So I'm not saying people can do whatever they want.

But what I am saying is it's a very, very dangerous thing to outlaw kids meeting. And I I know the main purpose of this meeting is to come up with alternatives. Absolutely. I think that's a great idea. You know, here in New York City, one of the great things that has been going on for decades are summer concerts.

Everyone likes that. They're free of charge. Another way of engaging young people is you open up pools. You open up places which are cooler in the in the summertime. You connect with motion picture theaters.

Some of them still exist to have special events, special movies that might be especially appealing to kids of this age. But once again, we need to be very careful not to, in the name of correcting a problem, which maybe isn't even that much of a problem, trampled the First Amendment right that every person in this country above the age of, I don't know, five, six, seven, eight, nine, but certainly seventeen, sixteen, and 15 that every human being has because of what the first amendment says. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, doctor Levinson. I'm looking forward, to the q and a session that's gonna follow the presentations from our distinguished panel. Our next panelist, flew in from Philadelphia and is from Rutgers University is doctor Valerie Adams Bass from Rutgers University, a highly regarded developmental psychologist and assistant professor who is nationally recognized for her expertise and positive youth development, adolescence, social adolescent social dynamics, and how media stereotypes and technology shape youth behavior. Thank you for joining us, doctor Adams Best.

Thank you for having me. Can can everyone hear me?

Okay. Cool.

I'm gonna share my screen. It's probably a little bit of a educator in me. I'm trying to have her sit down. But so it seems like many of us here are are are here to really address, come up with creative solutions for how to work with young people. The first few slides are really baseline information you may or may not know, and then I'll get to, like, the meat of what I think the possibilities are.

So really thinking about out of school time. So out of school time extends to weekends and evenings. It's not just just out of school. Right? Used to we used to say after school programming, but I wanna say out of school time really extends to the weekends into the evenings for young people up until the age of 18, which includes adolescents and teens.

So I wanna so start there with that basic definition because what we do know, those of us who've done positive youth development work, I certainly have been an extension agent here for Penn State University working with young people. I've done some work here with the Carden and email at libraries here, team reading lounge, which happens in your libraries, which is a great public space. So really thinking about there's a precipitous drop off in programming for teens. Whether you're in the in the middle of the city or you are out in the suburbs, there is a precipitous drop off. Even those programs that have been around historically serving young people, it's something about getting to the teen that we we probably as a society assume they don't need assistance or support, but here we are talking about that.

Right? So you can look. You can go do a a quick Google. You'll find all kinds of programs for k through six, maybe middle school. But once you get to the high school age, there are not very many out of school extended time programs for young people. So we probably should put that on the table. We should put that on table. Right? So that's a larger systemic issue. We just have not done a good job nationally as well as in the state of Pennsylvania in thinking about their teens, but they still need some place to go.

They need some assistance, and they need have a voice. Right? So that's hands down for years that has been the case, and we still haven't figured out what to do about it. I'm not sure why we haven't, but I wanna I wanna put that on the table as well. So really thinking about, when we're thinking about young people, we tend to move into the academic support. We think about, you know, k through three. We wanna make sure they're reading on schedule, so we're gonna have all kinds of reading programs. Middle school, we we know that the transition from middle school to high school is very difficult, so we wanna make sure they're ready to stay in high school and that they we don't have that attrition. But once they get to high school, again, we haven't really thought about what it is we need to do. So I wanna lean into sort of this holistic approach of social emotional learning.

I am a developmental psychologist, so I must be honest about that, as well as the educational component. So really thinking about how we serve young people holistically, and not just leaning into the academics or just leaving them to figure out what they need to do on their own. What we know, again, is that our school time programs really are thinking about academics, right, and really looking at the the college track. But we also know that, you know, that the you know, what has been said is, you know, media is also a place, and we know, unfortunately, I'm gonna say unfortunately. I'm gonna go on record in saying that that right now, if you ask a young person what it is that they want to do when they become an adult, does anyone know what career they're gonna say they want to have?

Anyone?

An influencer.

Right. They wanna be an influencer. They don't wanna be a doctor. They don't wanna be a basketball player. They don't wanna be a lawyer. They don't don't wanna be an astronaut. They wanna be an influencer. So they're going to be figuring out how to influence, and that may include public gatherings, but we'll get to that later. That's what they wanna do. That's what they wanna be. So we've gotta figure out how to bring these things together. And we don't think about that because we're still in that they wanna be a doctor or lawyer. We would have to tell the urban children that, you know, you might not make it to the NBA or the NFL, but they wanna be influencers. Right? And many of us don't even know how to use the technology that they're using to become influencers.

So let's keep that in mind as well. The other thing that I would say is when we're serving young people, particularly young people of color, there's deficit based approach. Right? There's a punitive based approach, which we just heard, this idea of, taking away autonomy, taking away the bill the ability to gather, taking away, the the free movement and free speech from them. And that tends to be our approach to working with youth in urban environments or youth who are unlike us versus thinking of them first as humans.

So what do we need to do to be culturally, culturally attuned to the young people we're serving and make sure that, you know, we're aware of what might be specific to them and how we embed that and how we integrate that into what we do to serve them and how we figure out how to serve them. Right? That asset based approach. There was a time when I was a practitioner, not just an academic. I don't think of myself as just an academic, but serving in a mentoring program, high income mentors working with urban young people. And several of the mentors would say, you know, these young people are teaching me more than I'm teaching them. Them. Yes. I do have access. Yes.

I do have the social capital. Yes. I can share with them what it took to to get the career I have, but I'm learning so much from them about resilience and about flexibility and about the reality of life. So really thinking about asset based approach. Young people, no matter how fantastic or not so fantastic they are, they come to us with assets, and that's something where we haven't figured out how to tap into.

So, hopefully, those of us here at the table can really begin to think about how do we tap into the assets of young people, particularly young people who may not look like us or they may look like us, but they have a different life experience. Their family their family context is different. The schools they attend are different. And, certainly, the time of life that they're they're experiencing this growth period during where we are globally and nationally is very distinct and different even if there are similarities to what any of us have have had to grow through. Thinking about social justice, Many young people can look, as their prefrontal cortex is still growing.

You've probably heard that. I had known some, but it's true. Really, until 25, this area where we make sense and rationale is still growing for young people. So for them, where we may have a gray area, not to not to confuse that with the gray matter in our head, but, in our brains, they can see things in black and white. It's not right or is right. They're not gonna say, well, maybe let's think about why she's done this or why he's done that, which is a little bit of what we're doing here. Like, why are they gathering? What is it they're missing? A a young person is gonna say, that is not right. They're gonna say, that's great.

Let's do something. Let's do something about it. Now what they choose to do may not be what we want them to do, quite honestly, or may not be what's safest for them or safest for the community where they live or where they're spending most of their time. But they rarely see things gray area like, well, maybe they had to do that because this was needed, or maybe she wanted to do that because she desired this. They're generally gonna see things in the black and white. It's either good or it's bad. It's right or it's wrong. That's just where they are. Right? And so we can forget about that because we can look at them physically and say, but they're tall enough. They're big enough. They they do this. They can get to school by theirself. They can do these things. They should know better, but they're still developing.

And I think we often forget that about adolescents. They're not quite adults, although we like to adultify them, particularly if they are, if they are children of color. Right? If their voice is deep, if they've grown hair on their face, if their physique is different, we see that before we see them as young people. And that might have to do with my comment about us not having programming for them. We should we should know better by now, I would say. And not just Pittsburgh. I would say that nationally on the record. So a couple things. Positive character development, this comes out of been around for a while bubbling, but really Richard Lerner, doctor Richard Lerner sort of was able to kinda put this together, this these c's of positive youth development.

So this idea of character building, confidence, confidence, connection, caring, and contribution. I won't bore you with that, but those are really the c's of any good program that's trying to serve young people. If you're trying to serve young people, you wanna make sure that you have all these c's there. I mean, oftentimes, we do forget We want adults to feel safe where the young people are gathering or not, and we forget about the caring and the connection. Both are vital for meaningful relationships and for retention.

Because if you look at the programs that serve young people, including a program like four h, as I mentioned I work for, including a program like big, big brothers or big sisters, both of them are national programs. They look a little different state to state, but they also have attrition at the high school level because you cannot treat a a a adolescent the same way you treat a seventh grader, eighth grader, and definitely not a kindergartner. They're gonna leave your program. They're not staying. When you're sit down, stand in chair, don't go anywhere.

Do your homework first in a particular way. That is not how you're gonna engage and keep and sustain a program or keep those young people coming into your door. So we really have to think about how we connect. And in this space of digital media being their primary social connection, we might need to lean into that a little bit more. And, Karen, really trying to establish a relationship with those young people, and that might mean in establishing that relationship with those young people that we have to take one on a chin, we have to take one on a chest a few times before they realize that you are there for them and you're not walking out the door. Right? You're not walking out the door. You're not just checking a box. So I I wanna lean into that. Standard best practices are here, but the ones that I wanna talk about a little bit more are the culturally responsive practices.

Because as build programs, particularly for young people of color, we wanna think about these practices, embedding these practices in, right, so that everyone benefits. When you have best practices like this included or on top of the standard best practices, you're likely to have attrition. You're likely to attract people, and you're likely to get young people to be the champions for your programming. Right? So that trust, as I said, empowering youth agencies, we're gonna get to that. Really thinking about clear expectations and allowing those young people to help you create those expectations. Young people, they have a double standard as we do. Right? We're saying these young people may or may not be able to do the things they wanna do, but they also have a double standard for us. Right?

You're an adult. You get to do this or not. You're a young person. You get to do this or not, but you don't get to do the same thing. Right? And so they too have a double standard, and we have to think about that when we're young when we're working with young people. You as an adult, you definitely should know better. Alright? Me as a young person, maybe not so much. I can take a few risks, and you should be okay with me taking those risks because I'm not quite an adult yet. But we rarely think of that. We just see the action. We see the behavior. It makes us uncomfortable or makes the people around us uncomfortable. And so we immediately put up the the we put up the walls instead of establishing that relationship, that level of communication to figure out what's going on here or even to help them to point out that you, sir, or you young lady, lady, you too have a double standard.

What are we going to do about this double standard? How can we come together, meet somewhere in the middle? Right? And that takes a bit of negotiation, and that takes a bit more of that cultural competency and understanding how they're moving, how they're speaking, what their language language is, what is the priority in their community at this moment. Nurturing productive challenges. That is where, you know, what is the you can ask me a person, what is the problem, and how are you gonna address it? Now sometimes they dream big. As a practitioner, having worked with young people, at one point, you know, the young we're gonna you know, one they said to me, you know, teen pregnancy is a problem. You can just ask them the question. What's the problem?

What's the issue? What's the what how can we solve it? Right? Because we are all adults, unless there's a Benjamin Buttons at this table. We're all adults at this table. Where is the young person helping us to figure this out? Right? Where is the young people usually, two in a crowd like this so they feel comfortable enough to speak up. Right? That's just what the research shows. Where's that young person here helping us and listening and saying she has no no clue what she's talking about? Yeah. That's right. That's right. So we need that young person to be a part of addressing and resolving the issues.

Right? But, also, that young person is also gonna be able to say as I started to say, they wanted to eradicate all teen pregnancy. When we talked about teen pregnancy, this group I was working with, young teenagers, we wanna eradicate all teen pregnancy. One of the young women happened to be pregnant at the same time. K. How are gonna do that? They had the grandest plans, right, of how I said, you know, you said all over the globe or right here in this city, in this community, in this environment. Environment. So, really, that's where the adult is coming in. One, the young people can sometimes, as I said, they're gonna say what the issue is.

We're gonna go downtown or we're gonna go to the mall, and people are gonna be uncomfortable, but we wanna go there because there's no place to stay. Okay. What else should we do then? Right? And they're most in most cases, they're gonna have a brilliant idea, and adults who are around there developing that caring relationship and having those cultural competencies can coach them through. Is it probable that we're gonna eradicate all teen pregnancy? Is it probable that we're gonna prevent all young people from having these flash meetings? What else might we do? Right? So that's where that relationship with adults comes in, having the young people at the table to say, well, that might not be probable, but this is.

Or if we had this alternative here, then maybe this wouldn't be the challenge that we're all facing, us as young people feeling like it's us against you as adults. So those are some things to think about. Right? And those culturally based activities, like, how do young people express themselves? Right? So there's a youth culture for sure, that we need to understand and be aware of. And sometimes we have to interlope in their spaces. I say that all the all the time. We have to I'm not really one for roadblocks. Have a young person in my house. I have a a child, but she's on Roblox all the time. So I'm interloping in Roblox. I don't wanna play Roblox, but I'm in there because I wanna know what she's playing. I wanna know what the popular games are. I wanna know when they change.

I wanna know how the young people are speaking to each other because that also influences how they move outside of the digital spaces. We are in a space where how they move in the digital spaces tends to influence how they move outside of the digital spaces. Where there was a time where you would say, what people do here in a in in in, real life influences the virtual spaces, we're right now in a space where it's more about what's going on virtually is influencing what's going on in actuality. So we have to be aware of what the culture is of young people. And then if there's specific cultures that we need to be aware of, we need to do that too.

So we need to have some eyes and ears and give ourselves some space to learn about those young people. This having had all that in the background, this is, my favorite my favorite graphic, my favorite theory for working with young people. You can do this with kindergartners, but for sure you wanna do this with adolescents. And this is Roger Hart's Ladder participation. This was actually developed for humanity humanitarian based programs in countries that have had seen war or famine where young people's lives have been in shambles.

But it works right here in The United States, and we don't do it often enough. Oftentimes, we're all the way down the bottom where we're saying that we just want the young people to show up and smile for the camera. We've got some T shirts for you, or we've got some pizza movie tickets. When you're working with adolescents, knowing that they're developing, they're headed to adulthood, they still are not fully developed. They want those challenging opportunities.

We need to work in tandem with them. As I said, we're the young people at the table. Maybe they're Bahamian audience. So we wanna move from manipulating young people, using them as a token or decoration, to really collaborating with them. It's hard to get to rung eight if we've consistently worked with younger children, k through eight, or if we just haven't had adolescents in our lives anytime recently other than to see them in public spaces at the mall passing.

And so we really wanna move to a place I would say, if if you find you don't have to raise your hand. You don't have to smile. If you're at rung one, two, or three, then at least I wanna stretch you to get to Rung 6. Ideally, you're at Rung 8 where the young people are right here helping you to make decision, pushing back, pulling in. But if you're at one, two, or three and we're all busy. We're all trying to do things. And and and in the case of our council members here, esteemed council members are trying to make the see make sure the city's okay and is healthy. But we really do have to make space for young people because they you know, they are the future. They they indeed are the future. We've gotta make space.

If you think about you know, if you say go ahead and drive the car, and they've never driven before, how would they know to drive the car if we've never given them the opportunity? Right? So you gotta make space for them. And sometimes it's just small conversations and moving into a larger place. So I wanna say, you wanna make space for those young people to be at the table even if it's figuring out the out of school time time programs at work that already exist, how they need to be modified, or if they're new models that need to come onto the table.

And they need to be part of building it. And if if they're not part of building it, let's say you have an idea now, before you launch the idea, I wanna encourage you to have young people come, and that's where you get to that rung five, six, seven, or eight where young people, one, they're gonna buy in because their voice has been a part of it. Two, they're gonna tell you whether it does or doesn't work. Right? We might have the brilliantest ideas, but it's been a while since I was a teenager. And I think the rest of us here at the table as well. So I wanna encourage you to look at the Rogers Heart Ladder, and this is kind of a little bit easier on your eyes if if you have aging eyes like I do. But really thinking about getting to the place where even if it's adult led, the youth are consulting, they're giving you feedback. That's not gonna work. It's gonna work.

Try this. Try this person. Try that. I wanna meet this person. We wanna do this this way. Really thinking about that is super important. Getting to the place where young people are consistently a part of that conversation is gonna make it a little bit easier, and they're have you're gonna have more buy in. Right? But it's it's when you're partnering with them. So I wanna lean into really moving into having young people be at the table consistently, and you need to have at least two. So they're feeling comfortable and confident enough to speak in front of a room full of adults with lots of titles and lots of degrees and lots of responsibilities, and they may just be in high school. Right? If they're if if they're in high school. So we really wanna think about empowering them in an important way. Couple examples.

I know you did have a Freedom School. As I said, I've done some work here. You do have a team reading lounge. I I consistently work with libraries. I was mentioning to councilman Mosley.

I've worked with the Carnegie Mellon libraries here, in person, and then I've been working with the libraries virtually post COVID, really thinking about how do we help our teen librarians get used to working with teens. Right? Because they may know the Dewey Dessel system. They may know where to tell you how to find the books, but there are some librarians who've not had youth development or adolescent theory at all, if ever. And so giving that professional development so that young people who work with young people have never had young people in their life or it's been a while or haven't worked with a group of young people, helping them understand how to make those connections, how to do things meaningfully.

And I will say this has been one of our sites where it's been pretty comfortable and pretty well received. Making space. You know, when I met with the librarians and I say when I say adolescents or teens, what's the first thing you say? Everybody's face turns into an emoji. Right? Everyone's face is screwed up and turned up. And I said, okay. Now think about that. You're working with these young people. Look at your face. Right? So how does that how does that translate when you're working with them? If the minute I say, what do you think that when you work with teens, you turn into an upside down smile emoji? What does transfer? How does that energy work?

So really helping sometimes us as adults step back to say, okay. What do I have to do differently? What do I need to learn about teens? And I will say we have our work cut out for us because the virtual space is an extended world. Arnett has done had I think this paper was maybe out in 2006, if not 2002.

He wrote a paper about media as a super peer, and it really has become a super peer. I think that's his only paper in super peer where he said, you know, that is where young people are learning to be. Right? And that was years ago, well before, you know, maybe Myspace was out at that time, but now we do know, and there's evidence and documentation that media is a super peer, which is why I said right now, a lot of the norms for young people are happening in the virtual space. So not only do we have to make these connections and and figure out how to integrate them into direct programming, but we also have to figure out what is swirling in these virtual spaces for young people and how can we capitalize on that?

How can we help them also to think through the decision making that they are involved in and that their peers are involved in in a meaningful way? And making physical space. Right? Oftentimes, central business districts don't have space for, young people. Surely, often not the people who live in the city, but the people who work in the city.

So where are those spaces? Maybe they're private spaces, certainly public space that we can make space for teens. Again, Again, I wanna lean into the teen lounge where, there are some libraries, right, where including here in Pittsburgh, where they had made space that this is the teen space. So when you go to the library, this is where the teens go and hang out. It was not necessarily so hats off to your library system easy because there are patrons who would come in and say, what are they doing in here? It's after school. Why are they here? But we also know that between 03:30 and 06:30, this has not changed in too long that that is the highest rate of what? What is that? 03:30 to 06:30.

What is this the highest rate of? Delinquency. Right? That's the highest rate of delinquency, whether shoplifting, whether swirling, because those teenagers are either latchkey kids or their parents feel like they're mature enough, and they are busy. And so that remains the highest time because we don't have enough programming or we don't have the kind of program that's attractive to young people. So we have to keep that in mind as well. Right? So, again, just thinking about these as takeaways, really thinking about the programs that exist that do well to attract young people. What other programs can we add to that list of programming? And can we think about integrating young people?

So I'm going back to Hart's ladder to really think about, you know, what does it look like when young people are at the table, and can we allow ourself to have patience? Finally, it sounds seems like you've done this already. Local business partnerships, partnerships, they usually take a little bit more massaging, to be honest. Local business tend to take a lot more massaging to get them on board, and they, more than librarians, have not worked with young people other than a cash transaction. You come to buy something and you leave my store.

That's it. They they've not done much more. So but they are key because we're thinking about adolescents. They need to learn some skills. Not you know, they need to learn skills, those social skills, particularly this group who have been in this virtual space, extended virtual space because of COVID nineteen. So thinking about how do you, one, select those businesses and what kind of trainings and opportunities and partnerships will you offer those young those businesses so that they have, a more a higher comfort level of working with young people. School community collaborations. Schools tend to find collaborators that are gonna academics. I can tell you as a professor, I have gotten to a place where I don't answer my email on the weekend. If you can't figure out how to do your homework, I'll see you on Monday.

I'm tired. So I'm sure that the students are tired too. If you they've been in school eight to 03:30, then some of them may be in another program. So thinking about other opportunities for life skills, maybe it's learning how to run a business, maybe it's financing, maybe it's gardening. I don't know what it would be for this group, and that's where the young people could say, this is what we would do and come to. But really thinking about school community school community partnerships that are not just academic, not traditionally academically fosed focused. There are ways to integrate academics if we can just trust the process that doesn't require the standard routine, rudimentary way of approach approaching academics. And lastly, as I said, youth civic engagement and youth voice. Young people really do wanna do something. There are models all over the globe of young people who wanna do something.

Models here in this in the state of Pennsylvania as well as in the city of Pittsburgh where young people wanna do something. Let them do it. Figure out how to let them do it. You know? And that means conversations, and that might mean that some of your meetings don't take place at one, but they take place at 03:30 because the kids are out school. Right? Some practical things like that. That might mean that at a school instead of, you know, parent teacher partnerships happening at a time where most of your parents have to work and they work wage salaries, they don't work, they don't have salary positions. That might mean moving your, just parent teacher time. It might not mean all the time, but it might mean alternating.

So some of it is practical low hanging fruit where you say, we need to move our meetings every other month or every quarter so that these parents or these kids who can't come at this time can come. So some of those ways of demonstrating that you care, you value what people are experiencing is another way to develop that relationship and that trust. Super important. Youth advisory councils, that have an adult or two who's there, but it's primarily young people who are maybe meeting parallel to you, and then they can come and sit with their two representatives and say, here's what we've been talking about. What have you been talking about at your council meetings?

Here's what we're seeing. Here's what we need. What do you need? Maybe there's some partnerships there. So really thinking about, youth as also being responsible, committed to, the city of Pittsburgh just as much as adults around this table are. Third spaces, councilman Mosley has talked about that. There are virtual third third spaces as well as in person. As I said, where are those spaces that are not being occupied? How can you massage that relationship so that even if those young people are hanging around in town, are there third spaces where they can go and just be teens without being ostracized for being teens? Of course, there's gonna need be a need for adult supervision, but are there spaces that exist that are not being used?

Right? Are there spaces that exist that are not being used, and how can we collaborate and make those partnerships meaningful? Super important. Those digital spaces is hard to crack when young people get into them. We do have to eavesdrop, as I said.

But once adults get into it, they're on to the next. And by the time we figure out what their next digital space is, we're too late, really, quite honestly, which is why I say you wanna interlope in those spaces as you can, but let them have that space with our inter loping, but find where those other spaces that you can collaborate and connect, where you can have they can game and do things, and they can interlope, and you can hear what they're talking about, and you can establish that open communication to figure out where you can interject and intercede before young people are swirling on the streets and is creating anxiety or perhaps potentially leading to, you know, the kinds of things that we don't want to see young people experience or the city. So I wanna thank you for listening to me. I'm happy to engage in additional conversation and other notes that I took, as I was here. Thank you.

Appreciate you. Thank you, doctor Bassett. I do just wanna note that, we're also joined by, councilwoman Gross and Strasburger online, but we are joined in person by council president Lavelle, councilman Wilson, councilman Charlene, and councilwoman Warwick. And and and I do I do, you know, really appreciate your your presentation, doctor Bass, and I really look at this, you know, conversation as an impetus to work with the stakeholders at the table as well as the many stakeholders, in in council chambers and the gallery, to in in a very immediate future, begin some regular dialogues with those young people, you know, and create that space. So I kinda see this as that launching point, to really, you know, get our minds thinking about how how important that is.

I've had the opportunity over the past week to to be in a couple spaces here directly from young people, and I would, you know, really love it. Some point in the near future, particularly around the issue of third spaces, at a time later than 01:30 on a weekday, or it could be 01:30 on a weekday if it's, you know, about a month from now when school ends and and and have and have young folks, you know, at at the table. So that's definitely something we're gonna do. I do wanna just know for the record that, you know, we are going to as as we continue this work, is gonna be engaging with our young people, you know, in a really intentional and meaningful way. So we're gonna start with our our local experts, who, you know, have been 10 toes down in the community, have a lot of unique perspectives, for for violence interrupting to youth mentoring to to law enforcement, and we'll just start, up to my left for mister Rivers.

If you could introduce yourself, your organization, and your title.

Thank you, councilman, for having me. Number one, good afternoon, everybody. My name is Jason Rivers, and I wear multiple hats. I'm a educator with Pittsburgh Public Schools for, twenty four years now. I've worked on the middle school, high school level as well as central administration, currently overseeing the work that we do around violence prevention and intervention in the district and managing our partnerships that we have with the city of Pittsburgh as well as many community organizations.

And we have something called the PPS safety collaborative where we convene Monday morning to talk about any threats to safety within community and school and how we can work collaboratively to share critical information around that. In addition to the work that has me, you know, collaborate with many internal, external partners, you know, inside of the district, there's an initiative that I'm a senior leader with called AIM, Downtown Pittsburgh, and AIM is an acronym that stands for excuse me. Achieving goals, inspiring change, and motivating students. And we've been operating downtown for the last three years. It is advocacy work as well as character coaching work that is a mixed methodology between social work as well as intervention prevention specialist work.

So, you know, our goal and strategy within that, our work came about, you know, post pandemic in the city of Pittsburgh and this you know, the solving the so called youth problem, especially Downtown Pittsburgh. And so we operate weekends and after after school and help to create safe passage for youth in our downtown corridors, building relationships as, you know, I think it was really powerful that doctor Adam Bass shared around how important it is to be a collaborator with youth, whether it be in the district or within community. For me, this conversation is a both end. It's about high expectation for young people and genuine care, and not just the type of care that is related to my interest and my needs, but what is it centering the needs of young people. I think history has told us, you know, I think the conversation related to downtown specifically, we would hear conversation around those organizers or or community leaders, city leaders, city officials, business leaders around and this excuse me, the the unsupervised youth activity.

And one thing that I would always push in space and still continue to do is who has a promise of place in space and who doesn't. And because I think one thing that we have failed our youth in is the ability to provide a promise of space and place that that is equivalent to the beauty of we've seen in, like, the likes of a market square or many other spaces downtown that are phenomenal spaces. History has shown us whether we're talking about East Liberty or downtown. You know, we are talking about young people and families that have dealt with displacement. And so we see the change of East Liberty in time where you know, I'm a resident of the East End Of East Liberty, and, you know, East Liberty looks a lot different today than it did when I was growing up there.

And so where where do you find a place that belongs to you when that place now has different meaning? And, you know, certain cultural norms that were okay and acceptable now become a clash and are no longer acceptable or desirable. And so we do a lot of work around social decor with young people, especially downtown, because we do see, you know, that there are times where youth gatherings and certain behavior choices can be deviant and desire to to to produce violence, and that's problematic to me. It's unacceptable, and that's the work that we do with young people. But the majority of young people that come in space are looking for a space to have fun, a space to enjoy the beauty, the safety of space, and in many of their communities, unfortunately, there just aren't as many as open safe spaces that one once were.

And then the other thing is, young people are very brilliant. You know, social media has made them that much more intelligent and ability to coordinate and connect in ways that as adults, we're trying to catch up to where they are. And so when we offer them things that are subpar to what they can see in other parts of their city or in other cities, they take it upon themselves, to find spaces to to join. And so, you know, the work, in talking to young people, whether it be on the district district side or in the AIM space downtown, what continues to be reiterated from the voices of young people because I do agree that it's problematic that they're not at the table with us now. And I think, you know, what does it mean for us to normalize their voices in space?

As a part of AIM Downtown, we've hired many of the young people that were deemed problematic to help us with safety, to help us with conflict resolution, violence prevention, coaching, supporting their peers, they've been really, really powerful in space when we've had, you know, hundreds and sometimes, you know, thousands of youth downtown. If we're talking about special events and the they're able to communicate in an effective fashion that me as a 49 year old man, you know, I have a leverage point, but, you know, it's one thing it's a different thing for a young person to talk to another young person. And so what they talk about often with us is, you know, respect goes both ways. It's a mutual thing. They they believe that that there's some things that they can do to improve the narrative of who they are in space.

Well, also, what does it mean when they clash with adults where they can feel the presence that their presence is not desired? And young people are very intelligent, and they pick up on the nonverbal and verbal cues. I think it's also important for us to remember when we talk about the number of young people in Allegheny County between the ages of 12 and 18, and then we talk about where we've had some concern with youth behavior. That number is a lot smaller than what our overall population is, and we have to be very careful about the dangers of a single narrative. And then what that narrative is when it's overlapped on certain populations.

And so we learned from Ferguson what can happen. And if you look at the study of Richard Rothstein and the making of Ferguson, he describes what happens when you take a suburb of Saint Louis that is a predominantly black area and that is going through change in gentrification and then the clash that can happen between law enforcement and community. And so I think we see this in other spaces coupled on and and compounded with as was discussed, the pressures of social media. When I talk to young people all the time, I tell them, you know, yes, I was one 16, 17, 18, but I have no clue what that means to be 16, 17, 18 in 2026. Mhmm.

And the pressures that they're under and around identity and belonging, whereas before if you were dealing with isolation from your peer group, you may be talking about, you know, 10 to 15 peers. Now you can go viral for all the wrong things. And so I when we talk to young people, I hear them tell me things like, these aren't the decisions that I ultimately would wanna make, but I cannot my respect and my dignity and space means a lot. So sometimes folks are doing things and engaging in behavior that they feel like they don't have another choice for. So I think it's important for us to consider that.

The algorithm of social media is is really anchored in the exploitation of young people. When we talk about sexual exploitation, when we talk about violence and how that carries space, young people share all the time that they believe that in order to be that influencer that they have to create a scene that is drama or is excitement because that's how you get your likes up, that's how you get your clicks up, and that's how you get more followers. And so we see in spaces across the country where now Meta is being held accountable for, you know, some of the tools that are being used and the impact of depression. You know, something that was supposed to bring us together as a society has us more isolated and far more depression in space. Young people deal with depression often.

And so one of the things that I found so phenomenal when I when I'm in and I look forward to being in the space, especially downtown with our youth. That point around learning, they teach me far more than I have to offer. And when we watch them, they are the leaders and protectors of their own spaces. They problem solve every single day. They protect. They parent one another. They provide the work of a social worker to one another. Sometimes they show up as a police officer to one another. I'm not saying that all of their behaviors are the behaviors that we would desire in space because that's absolutely not true. We've unfortunately even lost the lives of a young person recently downtown.

And so any violence and every point of violence is unacceptable to me in space. I think social decor is important. I think that as we're talking about our young people, what was lost during the period of the pandemic? Just because we said the pandemic was over and we open society back up, we have some families and some students that were able to navigate and persist and move on, transition fine, but others that have been stuck in the weeds more. And I think that we don't give enough time and conversation to what that looks like and what those impacts have had.

There's many clusters of young people that are dealing with homelessness, food insecurity, and I'm again, I'm not it's never acceptable to break the law. That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is how well are we doing of a job to understand the individual stories? Our young people are not monolithic. It's not one size fits all, but how are we spending time and space to understand the variance of stories?

And so one of the things that we do within our work is relationship building and storytelling and to build the psychological relationship that's needed to build the trust. We phased countless young people out of the downtown corridor that were stuck in space. Many of our not just teenagers, but young 20, 21, 22 year olds that have graduated or have not graduated that are just stuck in space. We've transitioned many to career opportunities to programs that can be of support to them. We have this mixed mess methodology of how we collect information, and one of the ways that we connect is something that we call the h's, which is high fives, handshakes, hellos, and it's a way for us to build rapport and space.

So we do, you know, this positive patrolling, making sure that we have presence proximity to our youth. And since 2024, we've had 30,000 of those h's in space. We have a small team, but it's a really powerful team that's doing the work, coaching opportunities with young people. We've had over 900 opportunities to have small coaching spaces sessions in space with young people. And then we do check ins, like if it is something where we've been able to mediate an issue or follow-up on, you know, a referral.

We do check ins with young people. We've had almost 1,400 of those as well as 670 specific interventions, and many of those are in collaboration with Pittsburgh Police, public safety around incidents that have risen to the point of violence. We've been able to help support many issues that otherwise would have turned violent, getting weapons off of the street, preventing fights in in many cases. And so just saying that our young people are under a lot of stress. They're not monolithic, and here's the voice of a young person that I was with earlier today.

They wanted to make sure that this was shared out around their voices, that they believe, you know, that idea of nothing nothing about them without them should occur and that most are doing good things every single day that never make the 06:00 news, that aren't, you know, talked around around this table, but these things are happening every single day with the majority of young people in our city, and we have to protect that narrative as we're also dealing with the issues of the most vulnerable among amongst us because the most wounded and vulnerable tell the most truth, and so we need to understand the perspective of those that are dealing with complex trauma and its impact on them as well as our society at large. The the point about mutual respect going both ways, the idea just because, you know, I'm a young because that's the other thing. I think we have to isolate the conversation of race when we're having this discussion because we're talking about a certain racial group when it comes to young people predominantly. And so I think we can't gloss over it and pretend that that's not what we're saying, what we're saying it, because back to that point about promise of space and back also to that point around who is desirable and whether it's implicit or explicit, just how that shows up.

And so I think creating the I'm not saying Market Square in the way it exists now is the space for our young people, but what does it look like for our city, for community organizations, and residents to collaborate on the creation of space that can be for young people because they're not looking for structured program. They they'll tell you all the time, I don't wanna go back to school after I've come out of school. They want soft space where they can gather, where they can do some social media stuff, where they can engage with one another, and we're the free spaces for that to happen for them. The other thing is that they wanted it to be known that they do a lot of community service that doesn't oftentimes go on go notice even in the downtown corridor, helping people out, taking care of elderly, elderly, checking in with those that amongst us that are are dealing with homelessness. So there's just many things that they're engaged with that don't come out if we just keep the conversation as a part of that that single narrative.

And so I'm honored to be around the table, open to collaborate and support in the conversation, whether it be on the district side or, like I said, in the community side with AIM. What I will say is we have a process of shrinking the scenario because in many many cases, our young people were able to operate in the shadows. And so if I did a behavior and there wasn't somebody that can connect back to my coach, to my parents, to my teacher, the the behavior persisted. And so with our character coaches in space who have rapport with parents, with with coaches, with educators, one thing that I'm able to leverage on the district side is that when I see a young person, you know, if they're doing good, I celebrate it. I let the principals know.

I let the teachers know. I let parents know. If there are problems and concerns and things that are alarming, we absolutely follow-up that way as well. And so when you shrink the scenario and that person becomes more than just a random person, becomes a name, and even making relationship between our business corridor downtown and our young people for future opportunities of engagement. This is what the work is about. It's a it's a powerful work. I'm honored to be a part of the group that is building relationship with our young people. They just have powerful stories. They're very resilient and and brilliant individuals. So just honored to be here today in in any way that I could collaborate. Thank you, mister Rivers. And just doing a quick time

check is 02:40. Folks could keep their opening remarks about five minutes. I wanna make sure that the members have time for for q and a as well. But I do I don't, you know, hopefully take away, you know, from, the impact of of what you have to say. So our our our our next panelist is mister, Al Saeed. If you could introduce yourself, your title, and your organization.

Yeah. My name is, Farooq Al Saeed. I am the director of operations at One Hood Media. I would like to say that I'm, you know, uniquely qualified to be part of this conversation, this panel, largely for the fact that a lot of the young people that we're talking about, from, you know, basically 18 and down that have been isolated as problems and and, you know, some stress of the definition, that was who I was as a young person. I spent a large portion of my teenage years incarcerated, for some for some really, like, serious charges.

Fortunately, my cases were acquitted, and I was able to, you know, kinda get on with my life. But I I spent a good bit of my senior year of high school, in in jail where I lost the ability to play professional baseball, and I turned, 18 in solitary confinement. From then, I went on to be a k to a educator and really working directly with the, you know, the most impacted people that we're really talking about right now. And at One Hood, we've been around for almost twenty years now. In October.

Inshallah, we'll be celebrating our twentieth anniversary, and I have been with the organization for almost nine years now just, you know, a little after I got to Pittsburgh. And one thing we do is we work with young people directly in the city, right, from all across the socioeconomic spectrum. And a lot of them, you know, you you lot have engaged with at this table. And we have a program called We Keep Us Safe, whereas it initially started as media literacy academy, a few years ago, and then it kinda morphed into this political science, problems of democracy, youth development, leadership academy where young people are really tackling the, the the things that we're talking about right now every day. And in fact, right after this, I'm going to I'm sorry.

I'm going after the pro I'm going to to to work on our program, which we host every Wednesday. We just had a youth panel this past Saturday that we've been putting into play for a good couple months prior to all of the, you know, kind of the fervor around the curfew and everything like that. And what we do with young people is specifically allow them to take the charge. Right? You know, one of our things at One Hood is we always say we lead from the back, And we we include the the the people who are impacted the most, and we allow them the platform to speak. And what I like to think is, like, you know, I don't I don't ever give any young person empowerment. They already have power. Right? I just teach them how to kinda color in lines once they come up with, like, a canvas or something like that. Right?

So what we've been doing, with with the young people is really just kinda coalescing them and having authentic conversations with them and allowing them to reshape public safety in a way that suits them for what their vision of an inclusive future looks like, for however many years it goes. The spectrum that we deal with, is is is essentially how, like, the federal government defines you from '26 to, like, '14. That's kind of what we work with. And we have a very this specific cohort of we keep it safe that we have is, like, our most multicultural, with, like, seven different languages being spoken. We have postgraduate students in there, and we also got young girls that, you know, was like me.

They're just coming off the roads, and they're looking for that third space in some place that could really just be, like, safe and inclusive where they don't have to worry about the pretense of, like, an adult talking at them however many hours out the day, they can kinda just come to us and just decompress. One thing that our youths have been, like, super, super involved in is just, like, all of the public policy things that have been happening. They've come here with city council, with me. They've they've been engaged with every single governmental official in the state all the way from, governor Shapiro, all the way to, city council members like yourself. Some of them you you met personally.

And they've had such amazing things to say, whether it's challenging challenging local officials or just posing questions and saying, come out and help us and join the community. What we do is kind of like a culminating event called Fridays on Death where where, brother Rivers was just talking about it. We allow them to get out into the space and program areas where young people were removed from very much like Market Square. Right? They come out, every every summer we've been in the the East Libbey area, and we're expanding now into Hazelwood and the Hill District, and basically programming these spaces where curfews have been enforced. Right? And we're allowing the young people to come out there and work directly with the community. We provide arts and education resources. We provide food trucks. We provide live music.

We just provide safety for young people autonomously from, like, the constraints of curfews and pretense and and and just places where they don't feel welcome anymore. And I think I can I can reiterate all the things brother Rivers has just said because he said so many great things that I I kinda wanted to say, but

If we live together?

Appreciate you. Yeah. But the the the thing that I will that I would just kinda leave off with is that the young people that we have are beyond I don't think brilliant is is a sufficient adjective to describe them. But the thing is they come to me with questions about the number one question they have is why is nobody defending us? Why are we being criminalized, and why has this collective call for violence come to young people from adults? And a lot of these people, a lot of these adults work with children. They're educators. They're parents, and that's the most disappointing part. Our panel was specifically curated by young people. I only moderated it.

They brought up every line of questioning. They gave me their q and a, and I was like, oh, okay. I gotta stick to the script. You know what I mean? Like, 17 year old, like, yeah. You're talking about this today. I'm like, cool. Yeah, baby. I got it. Like, this is what you want. I got it. But the number one thing is why are these adults so quick to call for collective punishment from us and to us, when they haven't given us an opportunity to speak for ourselves? And I think that is the biggest thing that has these young people upset right now is that anytime it it's just like, you know, we're adults. Right? Let's keep it tall. If you tell us we're not gonna do something, we're gonna wanna do it. Right? And that's just that's just a fact. Right? And young people, almost by virtue of their age and nature is the challenge.

And every successful movement that we've had in politics, progressively, culturally, has come from young people. The Black Panthers, they were young people. People often forget chairman Fred Hampton was 21 when he was murdered. That's a that's a that's a young person. The Freedom Riders. All of these people that we fancy as our most provocative and and and and thought provoters, civil rights activists were all young people. Right? So where would they have been in these situations today when we're in chambers talking about these things without them? They would've kicked the door down. Right?

Many opportunities. My father was in the civil rights movement in the seventies, and this is one of the things that he constantly told me was nothing about us will follow us. That's why our youth panel was called nothing about youth without youth. So I'm just gonna end it there. We've been doing work for twenty years in in in in Pittsburgh. In Inshallah, we'll be doing it for another twenty. And, yeah, thank you.

Thank you, sir. And and and the next panel, this is an old friend. Miss James, if you can in introduce yourself, your title, as well as your organization.

So I'm here wearing multiple hats as well. I sit on the board of a the Alliance for Police Accountability and Rise Up three sixty five. So Brandy Fisher was invited to be here, but she had a conflict. So I'm here as a board member, but I'm also the president and CEO of Youth Places, which we have thirty years of providing the third spaces for teens in Pittsburgh. We have been in up to 25 neighborhoods in the city of Pittsburgh over the course of our, and our main core work is the third space.

So it's brick and mortar. It's providing that safe space. We were also one of the first to come downtown in back in 2018 and say, where are all these young people going? And from that point, we opened a facility down on Penn Avenue in 2019. There's a lot that my colleagues in this work have already said.

So I kinda wanna put something on record around this large group of teens because that's where this conversations has started. And I've written some notes because I was called in at the last minute. So I'm sorry if I'm not looking you each in the eye. But large groups of teens are not automatically a threat and I think we have to be careful not to confuse youth presence with youth violence. And, those are two totally separate challenges.

One is behavioral modification work and one is young people deserve to hang out with their friends and be themselves and normalizing that. The solution there are many third spaces, let's just be clear, around this entire city, But I can tell you that the journey to getting to those third spaces is increasingly and incredibly hard. We have situations where we're offered, all of us have been offered small spaces, and we're expected to build unicorns in dark spaces. Mhmm. And so I think that we there is no collective agreement between the city, the nonprofit leaders, the resource providers, whether that's foundations or donors about what it's going to take.

And so one of my calls to action is around who else is not at this table aside from youth that there's no collective agreement on what it will take. When you do pose three space a third spaces to philanthropy or to any type of grant cycle, the question becomes going back to what doctor Valerie was talking about this academic enrichment piece. Right? And we have been screaming from the rooftops for years that that is a yes and Mhmm. Approach.

And it's not just about the kid get going from a c average to a b average. It's about the kid who needs a lot more nuanced work than people are willing to support. So when she spoke about the social and emotional development components, I'll give a brief story and then I'll move on. But when I first took over in youth places ten years ago, there was a lot of chatter about effectiveness, you know, reputation, things of that sort. One of the things that I fought back on was this idea of SEL, social and emotional learning and development because we are one of the few groups that only deal with the teen population.

And so when I started pushing back on that, no one was per receptive. They're like, no. We need the grades to change. We need this to change. And so I then conducted an ACES study back in the early nineties.

Kaiser Permanente put forth something called ACES, is adverse childhood experiences. The average childhood experience that an adult can function as a have a basic quality of life, they can have three adverse childhood experiences and that could be no food in the home or something like that. It does not take into context very urban based context. So we did an ACES study on our youth at our sites, and our kids had an average score of nine by 12 years old. And I think that's really critical to to understand that you're not dealing with young people whom have necessarily the agency to be able to improve their lives on their own.

They need access to quality individuals and quality third spaces. We also have to contextualize this idea around the these these youth need to be broken up into clusters. There's some youth who are highly retraumatized on a consistent basis and their only way to respond is through bad behavior as we wanna call it and I put that in quotations. There are youth who are literally just hanging out. They're lit they have all the resources they need at home.

Their parents said it's fine. We trust you. Go hang out with your friends. And then there's in between young people who are caught in between, you know, their parents may work a lot, whatever the situation is, but we can't conflate the issue. We can't conflate the the groups, and we can't conflate the teens.

I think it is super important to acknowledge acknowledge that, that, and I and I can't remember who brought it up, but this 18 the 16 population, this kind of failure to launch crew that has come out of the last twenty years, that's that's the there's a high need for supports and investments and spaces for that 16 24 failure to launch group. The positive youth development sector as you wanna call it is we are all aging out of this work and and and that's something that is hard to acknowledge. We're aging out of this work. We are becoming more and more disconnected as our parents were disconnected from what we thought we knew at sixteen seventeen. We're becoming increasingly disconnected from what's happening on the ground, and we need to establish a younger workforce, to be honest who can carry this work forward and all of us who are at this table know that that workforce comes from this demographic of young people.

That's where this workforce was built. This positive youth development workforce was built off of the kids who everybody rejected in the past, in the nineties, in the eighties, in the seventies. And so if there's opportunities to look at workforce opportunities, there's opportunities to understand our youth better, to contextualize the situations, and opportunities to strengthen the third spaces. These third spaces, we can't have 200 square foot rooms, and you expect us to have a 100 kids walk through the doors. Right. So that's my Thank you.

Thank you. Mister Ford, if could introduce yourself and your title and your organization.

Yes. Leon Ford here, and I am the director of external affairs and cofounder of the HEAR Foundation. And I'll I'll keep my comments brief. You know, what we're about is is really inspiration, education, and connection. And and I'm really inspired by all the comments that I heard here today.

One of the things that well, two things that come to my mind immediately is, you know, him, brother Jason speak because he has referred he and has referred several young people to the boxing gym. Right? So I'm a boxing coach at team four one two boxing. And on several occasions, they have reached out to me like, yo. Did you see this kid?

And and they were a little concerned, and, you know, that kid was in the boxing program traveling the country. I mean, we've taken kids all over the country. We was take taking kids to Puerto Rico to train and things like that. And on even given day, we got about 30 kids at the boxing gym just, you know, taking advantage of that space. I just wanted to call that out because there are a lot of different spaces where young people exist that they're really benefiting from.

We have six athletes ranked in the top 10 nationally right now, which we're really proud of. The second comment that I'll make is thank you. The second comment that I make is at the Hair Foundation, we we're launching this summer, the community innovation fund, which is really inspired by the be me model. Be me is a national organization. And over ten years ago, many brother Cornell and Jason Rivers are both be me brothers.

And when we were nominated to go and and and be a part of be me, we received a 10,000 grant. And I got nominated in 2015. And so with the Community Innovation Fund, I began to think about, like, how do I reverse engineer who I am today? Right? And and and kind of go back to who I was when I became a member of Be Me.

And I say that because at the Hair Foundation and our program committee, we're wrestling with the the the qualifications or or requirements to be nominated. And I think about my story, and I was shot when I was 19 years old, and that's where a lot of my community work started. And so with the guidance of some of the people at the table and also some of the folks behind me, I would love you your help to kinda help me, you know, structure what the community innovation fund will look like because we're gonna be nominated. So we're gonna have cohorts. The first cohort, the inaugural cohort, is gonna be one leader from each of the six zones who will receive a $10,000 grant along with mentorship.

Right? So we'll have a nonprofit organization within their zone who will become their kinda, like, big brother, big sister, but also their fiscal sponsor. And then we'll teach them grant writing. We'll teach them mediation. We'll teach them meditation for the self care point.

And so I say that to say, this is another way for us to empower some of those young people who have graduated, who really care about community and and wanna be empowered and to connect them with some of the the leaders who who who have been around to mentor them. So if y'all could give me some feedback on that really soon, actually, because we wanna disperse we wanna nominate them and and identify them by the end of June and maybe give them, you know, the money and start the training in July. So thank you. Thank you, Leon. Always good to see you. Likewise. Reverend Jones,

introduce yourself, your title, and organization.

Cornell Jones, group violence and avenger coordinator for the city of Pittsburgh. My job is working with everything from dealing with the outreach workers, law enforcement community. If it's okay with you mister Mosley, councilman, I wanted to take my couple minutes to give it to Aya since he's boots on the ground Absolutely. On the situation. Thank you,

sir. Yes,

sir. You can where doctor Adams Vasquez. Yep.

Appreciate that,

my man.

Yes, sir. Stop, guys.

Excuse me. Mister Young. Introduce yourself, your title, and your organization, please. Thanks for joining us.

How y'all doing today? My name is Io Deji Young. I'm the violence prevention coordinator for Zone 5 for REACH. I've been doing violence prevention work for over twenty years throughout the East Side in the city of Pittsburgh. Cornell, thank you again for seeing your time to me.

This first off, I would like to say that this is a good idea that you had by pulling these groups together, but I will say that there's been this is the third panel that has happened over the past few weeks, and no members from REACH were invited to be on those panels, and I didn't see any youth invited to be on those panels. And we have a pretty large presence in Downtown Pittsburgh throughout the East Side and through several different locations throughout the city of Pittsburgh because we were awarded the grant to do violence prevention work in Pittsburgh. So we're kinda boots on the ground in hours that a lot of other people aren't. Let's just say that much. So starting with Market Square.

From our perspective and the work that we do on a daily basis, it is a disconnect between like everyone like a lot few people said here, our kids aren't a monolith, and we get that. So the part of the kids that we work with are not the population who would really come and sit on the panel and wanna have these conversations about where they wanna go to and where they wanna be at because whoever's the coolest kid in their circle said, we're meeting in Market Square, and we're gonna go do this instead. So kids choose to go and be in those places. Our stance is this, nobody is saying and it's getting characterized in in wrong language, and I think it's getting kinda done purposely at this point. I haven't spoken to anybody that said that they want a curfew for our kids in the city of Pittsburgh.

I work with Cornell on a regular basis. Great, strong black man in our community. I've met our public safety director, Sheldon. He has a great reputation throughout the city of Pittsburgh. I've worked with commander Novosell and different commanders to Pittsburgh.

I haven't heard anybody say that we wanna get a curfew. And these are some of the reasons why there's really nowhere to take all of these kids. We don't have the vehicles or the manpower to do it, and it's all gonna fall on probably the outreach workers and the police, which given more headaches than overtime. I think so nobody I've been around at any of these meetings are speaking any of that curfew language. It's coming from people who might not be in those rooms to hear the actual conversations, so they're getting the trickle down effects.

The things that are happening in in Market Square, that's just a rule in Market Square. It's not a rule meant to hurt kids, stop kids. In all honesty, Jason will tell you this. We don't bother kids in Market Square. They're perfectly fine. You know when we bother kids? When they start doing dumb stuff. That's when we approach them and say stuff to them. Other than that, they're fine chilling in Market Square. The police don't say anything to the kids until they start doing dumb stuff.

A few weeks ago, I was walking through Market Square, and kids were throwing bottles on the original fish market. I said, stop doing that. Another young man barked at me, talked to me super crazy. I said, yo, why why are you talking to me like that? Immediately, keep talking, old head. I got something for you. He went and got something. I had it under his waist and followed me aggressively through Market Square. I went to the Fairmont, sat down in the Fairmont, and called the police to come. Officer came.

This young man sat in front of the Fairmont with his hands under his shirt, with his friends around him, as if they wanted waiting for me to come outside. Now I ain't stupid with all my big bad outreach list. I stayed inside. Go ahead and try to risk seeing what he had under his shirt. That moment right there clicked for me and said, a rule gotta get put in place, something.

Like, just something. Not nothing to and and it turns out that that same young man that did that to me, we end up running into on Friday out in Homewood in an abandoned house doing some other mayhem. It said and and Jason knew his whole family and showed me who he was and everything right on the spot. Something needs to be in place. The SIS program that we all knew, that some of you guys knew for when we were younger, that's no longer the same. It's optional for kids to come now. It's not mandatory like it used to be. The day school at the academy pick up, that's not anymore. Schumer Center only has 12 beds. To go to the county jail, a kid must commit an extreme offense in order to go to the county jail.

A couple days ago, a kid stole a car in the morning, and he was outside by 02:00 in the afternoon, back in Market Square, looking at me like I was crazy. There's just no rules. Like, there's and our kids know that there's no rules, and there's nothing wrong with just a rule or two. There's just nothing wrong with that. I'm not like, nobody's advocating. Like, my reputation in the community is solid. Everybody knows I am not advocating for the criminal industrial complex to lock up black boys. Did you know that? You know Kehari, is it? You know Cornell, is it?

You know nobody at this table is. I know brother Sheldon isn't. A few rules. The people that I talk to have a massive social media following. The people that I talk to on social media, they just want rules. They don't want nobody is rooting our kids to be locked up, harassed, or anything by the police. They don't even wanna do the paperwork for kids. They just want a rule or two. And I think that with all of our collective minds, we could come up with rules that there's there's spaces for kids to go to, and one of the main things that get kids in the room is dollars, stipends. $25 to come to groups.

Zone four one two does that. They give kids money to come to groups, and kids go to those groups. That'll get kids in the room faster than just I can't compete with a 18 year old. Cynthia can either. If the cool kid says, hey. I have a butt, and I'm going to Marcus Square, that's gonna beat Cynthia saying my program is doing this cool project. Unfortunately, that's the truth. If if we have to find a way to meet them where they're at and be kinda accepting of some of the things that we might see when we let them in our spaces, if we want them in those spaces. Can't be stiff with them. Can't talk to them like we're not of the same and of the same level.

If you're in your forties, you kinda know something about the hip hop generation and the hip hop world. You know something about it. That's the relationship point that anybody can connect with kids on. It's not rocket science. But again, just speaking for the people on my timeline and who I'm around, who I deal with, It's just a few rules to put in place to get our kids in order. It's nothing extreme. It's nothing crazy. And then supporting these programs that we have to have the capability of doing it. I worked at youth places. Cynthia is not what she's doing and the sites that she has all over the city, other organizations really don't have that.

Kids will come in the door by the droves if there was something behind that monetarily to put kids to make them wanna come in the doors and say, I don't wanna go downtown. I wanna go to this because this program is paying me. And in the early two thousands, there was money around to do that. We had cleanup crews. It was like it was like somebody in the early two thousands realized that that violence isn't a thing that just goes away, and and keep bad bad behavior isn't a thing that goes away, so maybe we should fund something consistently to keep it going over the years.

And they they was it wasn't just the city's job program. Youth places had their own summer work program. That took hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it serviced kids from all over the county, and it made a lot of those kids integrate and know each other. That's another thing that's missing. Those one uniting events that we could bring together and have kids mingling and mixing with each other.

So I'm glad thank you, Cornell, for letting me say this because I just wanted to bring some realness to the conversation. I'm not saying that nobody else isn't, but just between the things that we get fed online and the things that might come in your algorithm and the whispers you might hear from certain corners is really not that deep. Everybody is saying the same thing. Like, just a little order is all the people really want.

Alright? Yep. Yeah, mister Young. Please don't stay at the table.

I gotta stay here?

Yeah. Stay at the table.

Yeah. And I

and I I and I appreciate, you know, the feedback because you don't

got no answer no questions.

That's lot. You know, you know, we we work together so closely. We're putting together, the d nine street team, so my apologies for the oversight.

No

doubt, doubt. Boss. You know, of not having you initially at the table. I thank you for making yourself available, and please, you know, stay at the table for the remainder of the conversation. You know, your insight is is invaluable, and the insight that you brought to work that my office and you and Jay Rock and Boaz and Leon are working on with commander Hoysen and the East Liberty Chamber of Commerce. I think it's gonna be transformational this summer. So thank you for joining us, and and bang cleanup is my my good friend, commander Lance Hoysen.

Council Mosey, if I could, real quick. Yeah. Because, unfortunately, I have a 03:00. Myself and that councilman Strausberger both have a 03:00 that we have to step away the table from. But first and foremost, I just wanna thank you all. Thank you all for the work that you do, both those at the table and those in the audience. Thank the work you do all do is critical. Took a took a number of notes, had a number of questions, and if it's still going, I'll come back in. Okay. But I just want to acknowledge and thank you all for being here today.

And and we and we can and I can have my office gather up questions and, you know, continue to because I think this is really just the impetus. This is not gonna be a one off. Like, this is has to be the beginning of not just conversations, but actual work that we're gonna do in collaboration across a lot of different organizations. Did was there anything you wanted to say, councilwoman?

You know, I realized realized that that I'm I'm entering the conversation late, and I'm I'm having to leave early. I will be, you know, tuning in online, after the fact so I can catch everything because I've just, this has brought together a lot of, a lot of the pieces that I I thought I heard, but it confirms a lot of what I heard and and affirms a lot of of of my assumptions, and that's that's a good thing, I think. And, I do, you know, I do wanna make myself available and be part, in any way that I I can from this position in these not just one off, but holistic and long term solutions. So thank you for convening this councilman, and thank you for everyone for being here today and for the work that you do every day, both at the table and and in the audience.

Thank you, council president, and thank you, councilwoman. And now Batten Cleanup is, my good friend who I work with very closely. I think we probably talk at least once a day, the the new newly minted commander from Zone 5, commander Lance Vollison.

Yes, sir. Thank you, councilman, for, for hosting me. Thanks to all members of, council for having us here. I I just wanna appreciate I just wanna express genuine appreciation for everyone on this panel, for your opinions, everyone in the room who who works on these efforts, to help us with this issue. You know? And I'll explain why it's important to have everybody involved, in my opinion. My name is Lance Hoysen. I'm the commander of Zone 5 Station. Prior to that, I was the, the the night watch commander with citywide oversight for a few years. I'm finishing my eighteenth year on the job.

My my educational background is is in a little bit of sociology and statistics, so I understand and I appreciate some of the things doctor doctor Levinson was saying that, you know, statistically, the vast majority, 90% or more of a group that's gathering is there for for legitimate reasons, whether it's juveniles hanging out, whether it's adults gathering for First Amendment expression. You may have five to 10% of a crowd that engages in criminal activity, and it gives the entire crowd a bad name. And I think that's what we need to separate here. I don't think there's a one size fits all solution to this. We obviously don't wanna treat all juveniles like they're criminals because 50 are gathered in Market Square and two of them get in a fight.

That being said, I think I'm gonna kinda piggyback on on Steel Lovallo's thunder here. I think we need to add a seventh c to to doctor Bass' presentation about the ways we need to engage with these juveniles. And I think for those most serious offenders, for those kids that are out there stealing cars, I mean, we got kids we're catching every other day in stolen cars, and I think that seventh c needs to be consequences. I think for those most serious offenders who are giving the crowd a bad name, then there needs to be an understanding that that the police are gonna do their job because we're failing that that young man or that young woman if we just allow them to continue down that path of criminality that they're on. I think we're failing their families, and I think we're failing the our the our residents and our visitors whose cars are being stolen, who are victims of a robbery.

So I think we need a a you know, we need to approach this from from from multiple angles. I don't think there's a one size fits all solution to this. We need to direct the vast majority of these juveniles to the appropriate resources, to the to the third space, to the resources they need. And for those couple that that just aren't getting the message, we can force them to those to those resources resources through through some consequences. And I think, while I can't speak as the Zone five commander on behalf of the entire Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, I can say that we, in Zone 5, are ready and and prepared to to to do our part to that end.

So thank you again to

to everyone. And and and just as a follow-up, I I really wanna thank you, you know, for the way you show up to the conversations that we've been having, you know, over the past few months, you know, and being in conversations where folks have a lot of fear and anxiety and frustration was what's going on and, like, you know, how can we triple and quadruple and contouple the beds, you know, up up up a human, and you're always the first one around the table. Like, look. That that's not gonna be the solution. And and and and and, you know, and throwing a whole lot of money at police over top is not the solution.

You know, solution is what we've been working on, and I'll talk about a little bit later the d nine street team and the work that I owe and Boaz and Jay Rock are doing, you know, with our office to identify folks in the community and young people as well, people that are actually part of that demographic to be part of playing a central role in in making their community safer. And I think that goes along with what doctor Adams Bass was saying, And I think that's what what I thought was, like, so transformative and unique about when when I O J Rock and Boaz brought the idea to me, you know, that we're gonna roll out next month in the community, you know, was that the the young people that are part of that age group are gonna play a central role in making their community safer and being engaged. So it's not gonna be that top down, but it's really just a bottom up. And we're just playing a facilitation role and not, you know, guiding that. But you in in in, you know, playing the role that you play, sending that message, it gets across to the community, you know, a lot stronger.

You say, actually actually, your money's better spent working with the d nine street team than just trying to throw extra extra dollars at police over time, particularly when we're talking about this specific issue, you know, involving that, you know, 16, to to 25 demographic. So now, that we that we completed the presentation, I wanna thank everybody for their patience. I know that was long, but I I think we've been talking about this a lot for the last month, so I think it deserved the amount of time, that that we gave. I don't think sixty minutes would have been enough, you know, to to really and I and actually, you know, this ninety minutes that we've taken is isn't enough either, but I think that I think we kinda got a width and a breadth of of of the conversation from a whole of a variety of angles. And I think if I could still remember the order of appearance, I think, our first guest was councilwoman Warwick, and and hopefully, I I can remember how how everybody showed up.

And if anybody is in a hurry, know, you know, the afternoon is running long that, you know, let me know if you need to jump in and ask questions. But councilwoman Warwick, I yield the floor to you.

Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you everyone for for being here and for, you know, for taking the time. So, you know, I have some thoughts.

I have questions as well. I do I do quickly so doctor Levinson, you had said right in your opening remarks, and I think this is maybe part of what I kind of, you know, gut reaction, concerns me the most with this, specifically around this market square policy, is, you said that we passed a law. We did not pass a law. So that did not come to city council. And we actually had, when I first came to council, I think it was a former councilman Smith actually tried to to pass a curfew ordinance, and it failed.

Mhmm. So I do wanna stress, you know, that I you know, I think this First Amendment issue is important. And, and this notion that while they may have been working together with, public safety, the idea that a nonprofit organization, which pit Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership is, can come in and have a permit in a public space, right, that, restricts movement of residents just because they feel like it. I mean, I understand you can have a permit for a private event. That's fine. Right? You can permit a private event, whatever. You can permit a birthday party at a at a shelter, and but this is not what that is. Right? This is a public space.

So, and, also, of course, you know, with the rules and I do understand. I, like I I understand the problem. Right? I don't wanna pretend, like, everything's, you know, Hunky Dory and Market Square, and there's no issues. There, of course, are. But, you know, with the policy like this, it's the enforceability. Like, how does that even work? And who's it for? Right? Is it for my you know? And I and so, doctor Adams Bass, when you talked it struck me when you talked about sort of, like, the black and white the way that young people think in black and white. I can say when I told my I have teens. I have two teenage twins. And when I told them about this because one is downtown. So I was like, hey.

Listen. There's this thing in Market Square. You know, you you can't go into Market Square without a chaperone. She was like, that's BS. I was like, immediate, right, with without any prompting. So, you know, I think sort of how, you know, how the teens would react. And and my thought maybe this is a question for for doctor Bass just about kind of this notion of, like, the the Pygmalion effect, I guess, sort of the opposite of of, like, you know, like, the self fulfilling prophecy. Like, if we're saying I mean, the media, regardless of what we our intentions at the city of Pittsburgh, and I get that. Right? At the city of Pittsburgh, we are not you know, director Williams is not trying to criminalize kids.

Nobody at this table is trying to do that. I I, you know, I don't think our police department is, but the reality is that what is happening out in the the ecosystem, the comments online, the you know what I mean? The news reports Mhmm. Is demonizing our kids in a very real way. And so I wanna ask about that, like, this notion of, like, a self fulfill like, well, if they're gonna say that we're you know? I I wanna ask you about that. Sure. Thank you. So

I wanna I wanna say a couple things. Yep. The black and white, you hit it on the nose. You live it when you have children in your own household. And then I want to say, you know, as I was sitting here listening to the panelists who are doing amazing, awesome work, hats off to all of you, I I want to say what would happen if you had a group of young people trained to elevate all the good, to to challenge the algorithm.

Because, you know, there was a time where there were you know, you could see positive stories on the news. You might get one a week, maybe. And that's not where young people are going to get their information. That's where adults are going to get their information. So The spaces like, this is where I was saying those small businesses or maybe it's, you know, within the council.

There is a space for young people to write the narrative, to elevate the narrative of all that's good. Right? So they are learning those technical skills, not just learning to say meet here with the cool young person, but they are learning to elevate that good that is happening in the city of Pittsburgh. And that is changing and challenging the narrative, whereas right now, they're primary consumers of media. Right?

Someone might want to debate with me about that, but they're primarily consuming the media and using it as a way to engage in a particular way. However, if we think about bringing those young people to the table in a way that they are able to rewrite that digital narrative, that can happen in short term, in my opinion, because they are felt at the use of technology. And so just like they can say, meet with the cool kid, you know, they can say, here's what we're doing, and they can rewrite that narrative narrative right away. And I think that, one, helps them feel seen that negates some of that self fulfilling prophecy. Right?

When we can acknowledge all the good that they are doing, when we can acknowledge the ways that some of them are serving as mentors to one another and governing one another sooner than later, like, I think that that does deter some of that self fulfilling prophecy because they are being recognized and honored for all that is good. They're being recognized and honored for their willingness to collaborate, their willingness to do those things. And right now, we're only hearing that when we are on the ground. Right? When we are face to face with that young person because it's highly unlikely that's gonna show up in the algorithm or it's gonna show up in the news.

What happens when those young people are writing those press releases like this quote, mister Rivers were sending it, pushing it to the local radio station as well as pushing it in the digital media spaces, the technology that they're using. So I do believe that we have to publicly acknowledge all that is good with young people. You know, if you remember you know, I'm dating myself when you know, at school, they would come on the loudspeaker and say, today, we wanna honor, you know, councilman Warwick for on time attendance every day. Where where are we doing that for adolescents in this community? I mean, I this is not just Pittsburgh, but we're talking about Pittsburgh now.

Where are we doing that for all the young people versus that one young person who's been elevated and highlighted nationally or locally for all they do. So that is one way to begin to establish that relationship, to acknowledge that young people are contributing members of this society and that they matter in a positive way. Right? Because right now, you know, as I heard, the percentages of the young people who are agitators in those spaces are smaller even than the young people who are in those spaces. So I feel like that's a low hanging fruit, you know, in a way that acknowledges who they are, what their contributions are, and the good that they are doing. I think we we could probably do that in relatively short time. Thank you for your question.

Cynthia, did you wanna no. Oh. No.

I just wanna say, I mean, just to clarify for the record that from what we've heard about the I think we're all aware that it was a special events permit, but the special event is three hundred days. And that's the that's, you know, the special event, we understand that, but it is three hundred days and I think that's the piece that's kind of tricky for us.

So I think it's also important, doctor Adams, and I agree 100% with you. I think in addition, like, you know, Jason knows, mister Rivers knows that one of the things that we like to do is when a young person, even though when they were in the streets and they were getting caught up and, you know, people known for that right there, there, but when they're making this transition, you know, this young person that we just met with, I think it was yesterday, they're graduating in a couple days. You know what I mean? Like, you know, that we're going back to that house that we had that intervention with them and gonna celebrate that that graduation with that. So as much as we're, you know, celebrating that person who's already doing great, I wanna make sure that we're continuing to we're starting to celebrate the ones who are making these changes because people are looking for attention.

You know I mean? A lot of this stuff, honestly, is about a lot of attention. That's why I was talking about a lot of the social media and things like that. These are geniuses. These are geniuses. These are young people that I wish I knew how to organize the way that they organize right now. And and, honestly, we don't wanna take that genius away from them, and we don't wanna take that passion away from them. So like being able to get them in spaces, those third spaces, those spaces to be able to help them, to be able to help find the purpose in this type of stuff that's not going to get them jammed up in the system is key for that type of stuff. These the other thing is there has to be a method that I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off on it, but it has to be a method that because when we're dealing with the households, it's not even just that kid.

It's that kid going to a household situation where there where there's so many levels of trauma, of lack of resources, and things like that. That's and so it's so important that we work together as the city, county, you know, youth places, every single pro program that that's why I was talking about the village piece because all of these different families are needing some situations. There's some everyone that when the families are like, listen. My my my child is going downtown, you know, and getting caught up on stuff. I got I got six other kids at the house. I can't focus on some. Like, how could mom or dad they're good people. How do we give them the support to be able to help them deal with what they're dealing with? Because what's gonna happen is they're gonna continue to go downtown. They're gonna continue to stay out late and get caught up and stuff.

But how do we as the the village and this is part of the conversation. To me, that's very important. Keep them from getting caught up, you know, from visiting a lot of houses and doing interventions. There were houses that were happy that that child wasn't around because they were locked up. I'm like, we can't let that be the situation.

These the we gotta be able to find out how can we help, how can we tap into the thousands of nonprofits that we have in Allegheny County, how do we work together, how do we tap in from the city and county resources and deal with the foundation key to be able to find out what we need to do to be able to tap in to those households to be able to help them and say, listen, man. This is like this is a no judgment zone right here. Listen. We wanna help you to be able to deal with the situation even if that person incarcerated. How do we tap into a resource to be able to support that person who's already incarcerated to be so when they come outside from those in in those walls or whatever, we're able to give them the support so they could be successful.

Haiti, and I also we want we want people to win. You know what I mean? We want people to win. We don't want it it hurt it hurts to see what we see when we're when we're downtown, when we're in Market Square and in the community and things such as that. But there's also a level that to me, while we're working to be able to plug in these these these programs and all that type of stuff that we're working to be able to fix and help with the with the people in the community, while we're working on that, there has to be some type of structure to be able to save somebody's life.

So I understand that that some people are upset at that structure, but it's almost like we're working backward. I said that a couple days ago. It's almost like we're working backwards so that we're able to build this stuff right here so that we're at a point where we don't need that type of structure anymore. We don't need this guideline. I know the roller skin, all that stuff will be gone.

But right now, to be able to save somebody's life, you know, it was already mentioned earlier that there was somebody that was killed, you know what I mean, in that situation. You know, the the then these these are the things that we're hearing about. And and you we're not hearing about the the the amount of interventions that the the outreach teams had to do on a regular basis. The the amount of homeless young people that are downtown that the outreach members and people like that are taking home and a bus pass for the day because they're they're stranded downtown because they're going they're going couch to couch. So it's a big situation right now.

It's it's even bigger than the just the downtown thing. You know what I mean? This is just one of the one of the one of the out out the outcomes of what's happening with the situation. So I said it before this this when I said that all hands on deck mindset, that's not a cliche. That's the piece of us on having to understand that we're seeing the the the the effects of so much for the COVID and and then but then we're seeing a lot of broken situations in households, but it takes the takes all of us being able to strategically come together with an I'm saying this again with a no judgment mindset to be able to say, listen. You specialize in this. Oh, you got a boxing program? Coach, are you specialize in this? Oh, this is the cool the the thing to understand. Miss James right here, she has programs all over the county.

We got people coming from all over the county. Somebody told me recently that they got kids that are coming in from Ohio, coming downtown. So you can't deal with these situations with just a local type situation. You gotta come with a a mindset of, like, not just like like, countywide. Countywide. And then other thing is I'm blessed to be able to you know, a lot of us are blessed to be able to tap into other other cities that are dealing with the same exact situation. The challenge with that is this is new to everybody. This is new to everybody. Everyone's throwing ideas back and forth that, oh, that didn't work for you, that type of stuff. And in Pittsburgh, compared to a lot of other places, they all have, like, heavy curfews and and and extremely aggressive.

Our stuff is not nearly as aggressive, you know, with that type of stuff. In fact, there's a citywide. Ours is dealing with this with the area where that we know that everyone's coming to to be able to try and bring some orders so the people that could actually have some type of support because we realize it's supporting structure because we realize if that supporting structure is that not there, people are gonna get hurt. People are gonna get hurt. And the thing is the people that are saying that that's a mess and things like that, I want them to realize and watch the videos that have gone around all over social media and the families that are saying, if that was my family, I'll go down.

I would do this and this, this and this. And it's building a lot. It's like a like a like a pop can. It's keep on shaking, and it's getting closer and closer to a lot of families that don't play. So when I say don't play, I'm talking about that are about those streets, and they're saying things about our kid. We wanna make sure that there's a safety situation for everybody. So that some of these adults who are like that that adult that was in that bus and things like that, like that if that was my family, I'd go see them. We're trying to stop a lot of stuff and put a structure to a in a situation where people aren't having those structures. So in a lot of ways, we're saving lives with this. So people don't believe me, and they think it's crazy.

But but the the structures that we need when I'm when I'm talking to these families aren't there to the point where they want the criminal justice system to give them that structure. And we're trying to stop this type of situation from happening by putting these type of structures there and saying, in fact, if the if the people who are part of the village, if you could find somebody that could go and go with you to that situation to be able to go into that place, we want that. We also want mentoring partnerships to step up. We also want the fraternities and sororities and the faith based community to be able to step up, be able to say, I'll be that that person. This is opportunity for all of us to be able to step up to really be who we're supposed to be so that through this situation. So and I believe that we will we'll make it through. That's that's the faith that I have.

So I do wanna I and and I I appreciate it, but I I do wanna just sort of caution for us at the city. You know? And I I I understand the the concept, right, of, like, the community needs to step up. The parents need to step up. The all like, this but that's we we're we're the city. Right? And we and we can't control what parents do, and we can't control if, you know, some group or another group decides to come down. So and or help or volunteer. So that's actually one thing that I I wanted to kind of shift toward. And and I I will say too just just quickly, you know, with Market Square.

You know, we had this huge opening of Market Square for the NFL, and it was Brandy at, at the, 365 panel. You know, it's this beautiful thing at this brand new square, and it's and I think she said, you know, it's pretty, and we wanna come down and enjoy and and we're saying, like, no. Not for you. Right? And, and and we're doing that. And I think there was one one young man on the panel who just said he said that he you know, just recently, a friend of his had been shot, and it was like nobody even flinched. It was just like we just kept on going with the discussion. Right? So it's like you have the experience in, you know, in perhaps his home community. I don't know what neighborhood he was from.

You know what I mean? Where a friend of his was shot, and it's like and we just move on, yet we're just, you know, freaking out about Market Square and the businesses and, like, the potted plants or whatever. You know? And so I think that I I don't know. I I I can't speak for teens.

Of course, you you all are working with teens, but I can imagine that that that that that is noticed. At any rate, what I did wanna ask though is, a little bit, and perhaps, commander, this is for you. We heard it at the $3.65 a little bit around the numbers, and it was there was a very stark difference between this time last year and this time this year to the point of saying, like, maybe it was, like, five incidences last year and something like 20 some. I I don't remember what then, but it was a very stark difference. I'm not sure if you have

Specific to Market Square? Or I I I would not have them.

Downtown. But was it downtown?

I believe it was downtown. Citations between January and the end of April of this year. It was 25 for the same period last year.

Okay. So so twenty twenty five to 95. And I was and this is I I feel like because this this was not said at the last panel, and I feel like that's some and I get this is a new and, again, I really wanna stress. I am I'm there there's no nobody here is trying to harm our kid. There's no I just but I think sometimes, you know, this is a new administration.

You know, this folks are new in their roles. Many you know, haven't even been for a year. I really think that as a city and all of us, what is different about what we are doing? I I recognize there's this thing with the with the the teen takeovers, but these have been happening since 2019. I mean, if you look at sort of the history of teens, like, you know, these things of kids gathering is not new. Right? So what and I mean, really, I'm not saying we can answer it here, but, like, really a deep dive with the folks who were on the ground last year. You know? What were we doing last year that we are doing differently this year?

And I don't know if

I don't I'm not asking for an answer, but if anyone has comment.

I I don't I don't think that this is, like, succinct ly just one thing that could be answered. I think that, like, the divestment of, yeah, community organizations who have been doing this work, the stringency and the I'm gonna say this again. I I know this went viral, but the political vagueness of having to put these RFP through and all of the language attached to the stop the violence grant and all these other things that makes the organizations like myself, like, other organizations, it it really makes our job hard, man. Like, it really does that we're expected to do more with less in times. And a lot of the situations where we're not aware of what certain officials in in in city government feel about the the community as it were.

I know anecdotally, I have a reputation in this city, so I know when people certain people see me coming, they think that this radical, light skinned Malcolm X guy is coming, and I'll be there. That's fine. Because I have a vested interest in my community, I wish that there was other city officials that share the passion that I do and the other people in this panel do about our young people. Specifically, to address your question, there's a collective understanding that once the administration's changed, that community organizations doing this work were devalued, that they were no longer seen as important, which would be indicative of this drastic statistical increase overnight, essentially, from one administration to another. I think that if any if if this was a presidency, if this was any other thing, you would look at the higher up.

Like, well, who did you bring in? Who didn't you bring in to yield these results? And I think that that has to be a conversation that we need to have holistically as a community if we wanna see things change. Famously, public safety is not about statistics. It's about feelings. Right? So what is the feeling when you have a curfew? What is the feeling when you have an exclusionary group that's been targeted by any type of legislation or nonprofits or rhetoric that indicates that you are no longer welcome in a public space. What's the feeling about that? If we're not talking about the statistics, we're talking about the feeling that young black children aren't welcome in certain areas of downtown.

And then how can that be permeated, or how can that exist and echo in the other parts of community gatherings throughout the city? Can we expect to see something like that in Homewood? Can we expect to see something like that in Squirrel Hill, Hazelwood, the Hill District? Can this be replicated in another way if these permits, like, exist the way that you said this? We could have a special event permit for three hundred days.

What's to stop another organization from coalescing or co opting that and employing that into another part of the city? So I think that, you know, succinctly, it's about why have certain community organizations been excluded, either devalued, divested from, or just completely isolated and siloed, whether it's part of the nonprofit industrial complex, whatever you wanna call it, there's certain people that are specifically excluded from the table in discussions at certain times. And one time, okay. Two times, we got everybody's email. Pittsburgh is small.

All black people is one piece person removed in Pittsburgh anyway. The third time, it's a choice. Right? So I think that that's really what it is is we're we're looking at purposeful exclusion of organizations that are doing really good work.

Like to

Counsel councilor, I think

yeah. I

just wanna add

to that.

Yeah. Sure. Of course.

Yeah. Because I think,

I mean, it's important to pick through why organizations might feel diminished, especially because, like, the example that was being given about the RFPs and the paperwork, that was a decision made in the last administration. Mhmm. So moving forward

Mhmm.

Why organizations feel diminished, I think we just need to talk about, like, you know, more examples in terms of, like, why that is the case, why organizations would feel that way. But just wanted to, like, kind of just add that part.

No. I appreciate it. Yeah.

It's awesome.

I know we've yeah.

If I could, about the stop the violence. Sure. Sure. So, we applied in the very first cycle, and then we didn't come back after that for a variety of reasons reasons around how politicized it was. But I think the underlying point here is that our new mayor definitely was a council member during that time as well, and it has it has felt as if there is a divestment from community based organizations supporting this work.

So whether that's through the stop the violence money or whether it's through narrative, right, or it could be assumptive narrative. There's something there is a big difference. And again, we don't have a vested interest in the money. I'm speaking from just because we are a larger organization. We can do a lot of the paperwork, and we have a lot of the systems in place to achieve the goal of acquiring the investment.

But a lot a lot of people who are boots on the ground, like my team is boots on the ground. I'm not boots on the ground. Like, to be honest, my team is boots on the ground, the ones who are working at the sites. But the boots on the ground organizations coming out of these communities that don't have this uniform structure, they just have they're kinda like mom and pop shops who that that investment was super critical to them continuing the work. Mhmm.

And when it appears as if it's been a divestment, and again, I say this is a summative narrative. We need to know the facts. But that I just wanna kinda lay that out, like, that's the feeling, especially for smaller organizations who don't have, like, the big five zero one c three piece.

I build

on that?

Can I Go Go ahead?

So the the so two things. One, aim for the impact, not a part of the the the stop the violent trust either. But as, you know, funding came short, like, was many we had to cut half of the staff. There were some volunteer work still happening during the week as well as paid work on the weekend. I think the other thing that is important to consider as we continue to have this conversation is that it's also unrealistic to put the sole pressure of organizations that do said work to solve all of these societal problems.

Right? Because there are many work that many in this space as well as, you know, that we know throughout the city that is doing this work. And so so two things. One, I'll go back to the point about the pandemic. The reset, you know, it taught us as a society a lot of things, including, you know, this idea that certain things absolutely had to happen a certain way. Like, in order to perform work, you had to go into a a brick and mortar structure space. Well, the pandemic taught us that that's not necessarily true, and those are adults. And we knew coming out of the pandemic that adults struggled. We saw the the spike in road rage as the pandemic opened back up. And so social decor was lost for all of us.

And those that need the modeling the most, like, were those impacts on our children and how they navigate space? So one thing whatever side we situate on in regards to the rules in Market Square and however long they persist, the one thing that I will say in a short term that we can see is this collective reset that I think was important for us around emotional regulation. Because when we talk about large gathering, it's not just a Pittsburgh problem. We know that this is nationally happening. And so when things are happening at a epidemic level like that, it's not just isolated Pittsburgh.

Just like, you know, gun violence in certain communities and not just the Pittsburgh related things. So we have to look at the the structural elements that create the right conditions for certain behaviors to persist, and so we always have to look at root causes. The other thing is that with this very issue, we've encountered many a times where the point was talked about, like, county kids that come downtown. Another concern that I have and many on this panel that spend time and space can can concur with is that the or the the age is getting younger and younger. Mhmm.

And I'm not talking about mass, but it's concerning concerning when we have, you know, late elementary school and middle school kids in space when you're you have school the next day. That's problematic. And so I think our strategy has to be one that, again, isn't just a blanketed strategy for all youth, but what are the ones that are having specific issues and what needs certain supports. And if you work with those that are on the ground, they could tell you the stories of these families and of these students and of these young people. And like you said, some are just coming for recreation, recreation, and others come because my safety is is predicated on it.

Like, I come down here because that older guy over there can help me find a place to stay because being at home is not safe for me. And so we have a cluster of why people come downtown, and it's our responsibility to understand the whys of that and then connect the resources, right match the need to the resource, and versus just blanket sweep through, we're gonna do this for all youth. And so I think and if you talk to those that are doing the work, they can share the stories. And I think those connections are really, really important in the conversation as we move forward. And youth, they absolutely wanna be around the table.

They wanna help support as it relates to that. So I just want to name those two things. Please, though many have stabilized life post pandemic for it it taught us that there's a new way to do things, and many are resistant to going back to the old way. And so as adults struggle, young people struggle and, you know, commit manipulate scenarios. So I just think that we have to consider those things because I also see it on the education side. I see it in k 12, you know, how do we get back to whatever the new normal is. But folks are resistant now that they know that that's not an absolute way that we have to do things.

Yeah. So If I could just jump in real quick. I I have I have to head out. I have to 04:00, but the HARE Foundation is committed to partnering, collaborating, Whatever y'all need is a on the solution side of thing, just let me know, and we can figure out a process. I was actually, I just texted a few people, and there's some folks who are open to doing a a pop up. Like, you know how they got content houses to do a content booth in Market Square, if that will be helpful. I don't know. But the folks who are on the ground just let me know what y'all need, and we can figure it out how we can support from the Hair Foundation.

So If I

Thanks, councilman. Sam, sorry. Wait.

Did we make this up? This ain't my job,

Art. I

just wanna

say something.

I

appreciate y'all. K.

With that, I think that perhaps so this is and, you know, what Sam said as well, this is clearly a a recurring theme, I think, with multi I know that I've heard from safe passages they're running out of money. Right? So, I I think just that question went beyond I was sort of looking more for a numbers. Like, what's you know what I mean? But, so, you know, perhaps as the as a follow-up, you know, with the administration just to sit down with individual leaders of the organizations to talk about the, you know, the issues with with funding and, you know, the changing the changes in capacity and and just so that the the new administration can understand that better.

Right? Okay. So I just wanna shift just to finish up, and I was I did have a question, but I'm gonna I'm I'm gonna leave it. But I I just will say whatever you can do to mobilize the, the political power of of these youth because as as people who do politics, to to get that many people together to do one thing at the same time in such speed is pretty astonishing. So, you know, there's a lot of power in that, just generally speaking. But, I do just wanna share quickly, one sort of success story. This is in my district. I've talked about it before. Much smaller scale, obviously, than Market Square. I'm sure you're familiar.

So, you know, at there's a bus stop in in Squirrel Hill where, they were issue you know, just lots and lots of kids at the bus stop. Right? They had no choice to go to this bus stop after school. There were incidences, and this is an ongoing. Right? So REACH is there every day. The Bureau of Police is there every day. We have had OCHS go in and, work with the employees employees at at a a Starbucks to kind of you know, give them some training on dealing with the youth. And, our community groups have been there, you know, doing, like, cookouts, you know, once a month or so. We've even had retirees from the community who just kinda go there every day and are just there, And the situation has gotten significantly better, significantly better, but it is ongoing.

And I know that you all know this. Right? It is ongoing work. It is every day, and it takes time. And, of course, you know, it takes money. And, so, you know, I just, as far as the the third spaces conversation, I I do think

Sorry.

I gotta leave Of course.

Of course. Waiting. Yeah. Like, now. Appreciate you all.

You know, as a city, we we we do provide these third spaces. We have rec centers at our city. Right? We have recs. In my district, McGee Rec Center is the gold standard. Right? Like, young kids, o older kids, teen right? Basketball. You name it. It is the gathering place for young people in the community, and we run it very, very well. Our city parks department does a fantastic job. But in, you know, Hazelwood, not five minutes away, there is no such In fact, we just renovated. Right? There's there we just renovated a building, actually. There are plenty of spaces.

There are plenty of physical spaces. Right? But we do not program in them as the city, and that is you know? And and and we rely on community groups to run around and gather money or figure, you know, figure it out themselves. And then sometimes when they don't because, you know, groups are up and it's not the government the the funding is generally consistent. Right? But well, I mean I mean, within the government. Right?

Oh, yes. It's a ministry.

But, you know, and if a group stumbles or something's not going what you know what I mean? And they can't keep up, and so now you're you're you're relying on on and something that that can become unreliable, and that's not fair, of course, to our kids. So I think we can do this. I think, it's our job to do this. I think everyone here recognizes that. And, anyway, so just thank you. Thank you for all for the work you do and for

for being here. Councilwoman. I think I have the queue right. It's councilperson Charlene. Council oh, councilperson Wilson. Councilperson Charlene, I know we still have a councilwoman Gross online as well. So, councilman Wilson, the

floor is yours.

Actually, if mister chair, I will jump out and all the other councilmen to speak if, I could just, make a comment and say goodbye.

Sure. Sure.

Thank and

thank you. I appreciate I

appreciate the time. So I, again, wanna thank all the speakers, of course. And I am I've learned a lot and taken lots of notes. I probably will have some follow-up questions after today's meeting, after I process some more. I do want to I I think we'll be along the lines that several of the speakers have brought up and including commander Hoisin and some of the other panelists that this is not a homogenous group.

Right? And so we've heard both the kinds of issues and solutions that we need to really not make one blanket policy, and I've got that kind of underlined many times in my notes. There is not one blanket solution because we don't not every team has the same problems or or is looking for the same things. I think some of the panelists have mentioned that there many, many of our constituents who are just looking for recreation, whereas some of them truly have repeated trauma or under resourced or have home home issues, housing issues. And so I I look forward to having more of those in-depth conversations about where we should be allocating appropriate resources.

And as I always do, and I know our rich people will appreciate that I I will be consistent in my reminders to all of our discussions that one of the things I didn't hear today, but we have had another discussion since that I would love it also to be a gendered analysis and talk about the differences in the gendered solutions, resources, spaces, programs so that we don't assume that all of our teams have the same needs for the kinds of recreation or physical spaces and resources that they're looking for. And that's my two cents. So I appreciate it, and I I will sign off.

Thank you. Thank you, councilwoman. Thank you for your patience, councilwoman Wilson, and then councilman Charlott will close this out.

Thank you. I appreciate you putting this together. And then before I forget, I was just gonna maybe piggyback off of something that councilwoman Gross was talking about. Maybe it's not specifically what she was trying to describe, but essentially whenever I would be in the Start the Violence meetings, we would continually talk about funding youth pro youth football programs, which we do. And out of that conversation, the future of that was talking about how to involve young girls, teenage, you know, of all ages and to with the the with the funds as well.

So I thought that that was interesting conversation we had not gone down. It seemed like the first the first way to tackle any sort of issues was through youth football programs. I know that I think we've tied together some of the outreach work through those programs, or at least at least from my understanding, like football coaches and other individuals that were in that space were trained on similar ways with similar training that our outreach workers had. So I'm definitely interested in that conversation because I do think that there is a gap there. Obviously, there's a gap.

Not you know, I'm not seeing not seeing girls play football that often. So but to get back to this this conversation around this table, I appreciate all you coming today. I I did have a conversation recently with the PDP that I thought was in insightful for me to understand about funding around this this this conversation, which I think in the future be useful to include in the conversation, is and maybe someone here is funded by the county, but the county, because I know that they are probably probably receive all the funding for just like just like homelessness, they're the they're the entity that does receive all that funding. Yes. And because we're the city of Pittsburgh, we always are the face of every community meeting, every every issue that comes about.

We're like, you know, I don't know how long ago it was. It was like six years ago. We're like, you know, know, councilman council president, and then at the time, your predecessor was talking about this fund, and we went forward and and put together the Stop the Vans Fund. And out of that came continued funding for outreach, continued funding for the different programs that we continue to talk about here at the table. But we cannot continue to have this conversation without really having understanding of what the county how the county is is spending dollars to really understand flash crowd disturbances or, you know, what's behind that happening.

So I'm pretty sure you all forgot that I said I had a conversation with the PDP because I'm just rambling on. But the reason why I think there's a connection there, because they said that they're gonna get some funding from the county to hire a consultant. Everyone here knows that already. Yeah. Probably.

They have to hire a consultant to understand more about, you know, what their direction should be in that in that market square space, which, anyway led me down the path trying to remind myself how much funding the county gets to really solve these issues. So looking forward to any sort of collaboration, any sort of future conversations we could have directly with the county to understand this. But I thought it was very, very, you know, impactful to to hear what's what what's happening from your from your end and, you know, especially just to, you know, understand where our outreach team is is coming from because I know that, you know, Cornell has left, but in the past, I've worked directly with Cornell and the outreach team on several several, you know, outreach workers from North Side. Mhmm. Oh my god.

So, you know, I are you're you're mostly downtown and and and

Zone 5.

I don't know

it's but one of the supervisors, we downtown is kinda like all of us kinda touch downtown.

Okay.

Because we all send workers from our sides to work downtown.

Okay.

We just extended our hours from two to ten now. It'd be good to connect zone is down there. So yeah.

Great. It'd be great to connect with you on, you know, the work that you're doing. But, you know, previously, just like talking with the outreach workers that are more specifically, before my district grew, I was always talking specifically to outreach workers on the North Side. And I always, you know, wanted to make sure that I'm never dismissive of what the other opinions were of the average workers, you know, about my neighborhoods and how they could you know, violence could be solved. So I told Cornell a long time ago, I said, well, I have this I have this power that was given to me that people pick up when I call.

So if you can't get somewhere, you know, please let me know so I can call that person. It sounds ridiculous to say like, we're some you know? But it is a unique power you have when you get elected. Somehow everyone picks up.

So No doubt.

You you need get

in touch with someone? You need need to to get get in in

touch touch with with someone? Someone?

So to push that conversation

do you need

to push that what I'm saying is to push that conversation or in this instance that I'm talking about, you know, it was a juvenile situation and and, you know, it doesn't matter to go into the detail, but I'm always interested to have these conversations to try and push the conversation to someone who may not really understand the severity of the situation. So it's pretty vague what I'm talking about, but I gotcha. I I think that it's important that council members continually have good connection with the with the outreach workers. So I always appreciate appreciate you coming to the table. And with that, I'm just looking forward to continue to connect with people at this table, and thank you, councilman, for putting us together.

Thank you. And to to say a bad joke that's usually between us, but I think one of the reasons why they pick up the phone is because your nickname is Bobby with the tool. And he didn't even know what that means for, like, a few months. Inside joke. Little inside joke between me and the councilman. So, to close this out is, councilman Strongman.

Yes. Thank you, mister Sharon. I will be relatively short because we're losing experts here, and, I know it's been a a long afternoon, but I do appreciate the discussion here. I have a couple things that are not necessarily, like, related to each other, but I do wanna acknowledge that we do have a curfew on our books. Our curfew we have curfew has been on the books since 1995.

It's chapter six zero four when I was seven years old. We obviously don't enforce it, and I think, you know, I I think one of the big things in the discussion I represent Southside, so we've got a lot of discussions about what to do with with youth in late at night. It's it's the practicality of it. You know? It's where do you where do you take, you know, where do you take the kids? What if the parents don't show up? It's it's you're taking an officer away because they have to, you know, babysit. And it's just I I get asked almost almost, like, every week. Every time something happens in Southside, they're like, why don't you do a curfew? Why don't you do a curfew? It's like, it you know, can't. That's that's the answer. You can't. Like Right. Yeah.

I mean and and go ahead. If if you got some data

No, dude. You're saying my sentiment is what I was saying earlier. Like, it's we can't do this. Like, it I don't

I I I truly don't know how other cities pull it off, but it's like, you know, it it just it it is not possible. So it's you know, it it is not something that we have it's not something, like, leadership. And I feel it's like I have to whenever I've got folks in in Southside who wanna, like, help work on problems, I have to, like, almost give the same, like, lecture at the start. Like, we're not doing a curfew, so let's move on to the next thing. Let's move on to whatever the the next option is because that we that is that is not feasible, here.

You know, we can argue whether it's a good idea or a bad idea, and I'm I'm not even that's a totally different idea. We just can't do it. Like, it can't be done. But it but, again, it is on the books and has been on the books since I was seven years old. The other thing I I if I can shift gears completely, like I said, some of these things are not really related to each other. I wanna highlight something that I I think is I wish the school district was doing a better job highlighting this. I represent Arlington k through eight. It's It's a, you know, a k through eight school, and it's named Arlington. It's actually in Mount Oliver. But the school district at this point last year or that school had a 110 fights at this point in the year last year.

This year, they've had seven. And I don't know. I don't know what to do with that fact just other than it's awesome, and I think we should celebrate it more. We talk a lot about issues within the school district, and I don't think that we celebrate their success enough. I wanna make sure that to speak that out into the into the ether there.

But the the the question I wanna wanna kinda end with, and I'm I'm curious. I really wanna get your perspective on this. I go to a conference conference almost every year with, professor David Kennedy, who is, you know, kind of a renowned criminal justice, expert. And one of the, like, the big David Kennedy thesis is that most of the problem, most of the crime is committed by a very, very small pop segment of the population. Like, you can have a huge crowd, but it's, like, one or two people in that crowd that that cause the problem.

And his his kind of concept and he's got lots of great anecdotes of times that he's done this in other places. But how do you how do you figure out what to do with that that little population there so that the whole population isn't roped in with it? How do you how do you handle that? I I'm not an expert in this world at all. I just I know that a lot of other people look at that, and they think that that is there's there's some truth to that.

My concern is always that we talk a lot about programming and, like, what we can do for the kids. And and, you know, I represent Southside. We don't really have a large, you know, kid population or youth population that that comes down in the evening or that that is from the Southside. The youth population that comes down is usually from elsewhere, and they're coming down to the South Side. So some of the questions we've talked about is, like, what are the things that we could do that, you know, that like, let's not, you know, let's not criminalize the kids.

How let's create a better opportunity for them if they're coming down to the South Side. But I have no idea what that could possibly look like because if we, you know, if we do, like, basketball let's say, like, we did late night basketball. You know? The people that would go to late night basketball, they're not the they're not the that little population. They're the large crowd. Like, the we do youth sports. You know? I'm very close with with Von Madden. You know? Kids in the Southside Bears, they're not the kids that are that are causing the problems.

Those are the you know, they already know coach Von at that point. So how do they you know, how do we find the the kids that, like, would not be interested in the you know, any Lola knows anything I suggest would be, like, super corny at this point. But, like, how do we get the activity that gets that kid interested in coming in? You know? I I don't begin to know what that is, but what what do you guys how would you approach this problem, or what would you think that would would be?

Yeah. So, I mean, I'll start and then open up to the group because I know folks have insight. Number one, principal Caldwell is doing amazing work at Arlington. Cheers. And a big reason why so when we think about the safety triangle starting, you know, not just physical safety, but psychological safety as well as emotional regulation. Like, chose to intentionally focus on what are the causes of violence or fights or disputes. And another powerful thing about that work is that it's translating to results academically. So Yes. When safety happens, you know, safety and wellness is the conversation that we need to have. And if I if

I may, one thing I forgot to mention, she told me so a 107 fights, if a fight has two people in it, for each person that's in a fight, that's eight hours of staff time Yes. That are spent on, know, you after calling parents, whatever needs to be done. Now with all that, you know, the all the additional staff hours that that have been created by not having those fights, now you're able to pour more into the kids. And I was like

Right. So it's powerful.

We we we need, like, the

Well, I think it's a model, and Yeah. Many of the organizations operate off of the similar preference premise, you know, of collaboration with the youth, the, you know, the the person that's having the issue, what are the reasons for the issue, who they do huddles every morning Mhmm. Where they walk and talk and build with teachers, with other caregivers in the space, parents as well, and and the young people. So I I think we should do a much better job as a city. Like, growing up as a lifelong Pittsburgh, I don't know a time when the school district and the city of Pittsburgh, the relationship was stronger.

And I just think that we need to continue to build on ways that we can be champions for the stories that need to be told as well as honest around where gaps and leaks are in our process. And so councilman Gross brought up a point around, you know, Kimberly Crenshaw's work with intersectionality. So she talked about, you know, race based history or gender, another issue around sexual orientation. Right? Because our youth are not it's not a blanket thing.

So based upon what is my trigger, what is my identity, where am I firm in my identity, where am I struggling within my identity, and then how does inequity happen when there's march multiple marginalization points based upon gender, ethnicity, race, so on and so forth. And so you asked the point on what we could do with the youth, and I think, like you said, you have ones that are interested in football. And so to those, we continue to gear them that way. We have many young ladies, young people that want to figure out how they can start a business, earn money. You know?

So cosmetology, like, how are we exposing opportunities for to connection because plenty and many of the young ladies in our spaces are already doing hair, nails, doing things on their own. How do we create connections to where they can get into a business of, like, taking care of themselves now, and then how can they connect that to other career opportunities. So I think what we, as a collective, bringing youth representation and planning along, so let them tell us what they love about what we're talking about, where we're all the way off with, what other opportunities for exposure they would be looking for. And then sometimes, I was just having a a conversation with the principal for Bashir and around career exploration for one of her students, and she was talking about the game commission and this interest in fishing that this young man has. Like and she was just saying how that she was saying that prior to that moment, you know, as it be these are things that he wouldn't necessarily been thinking about on his own, but these connections that they were able to make in school around exposure.

So I think sometimes you can tell us what they need, and sometimes they don't even know yet, and they need to try things out. And so I think we're there's multiple answers to the same question, and we should have a plethora of opportunities that can be engaged in from athletics to academics. Because another thing is like, it's it's further upstream, but there's a correlation between literacy and violence prevention. And so how do we, you know, celebrate scholar identity amongst young people and the pressure to to hide effort? Like, we did some research in the district where we looked at the between third and fifth grade boys, black and brown boys specifically, but they were hiding effort in the classroom not because they didn't know the answers, but but it wasn't cool to display it in space.

And so I think that we have to have a plethora of answers that support all the identity. Safe passage does great around building identities within young people. And so I just think where are the identities that young people and communities are already aware of, and then where are ones that they're not even thinking about that we can create connection. And there are so many resources around the table and within the city that I just think, how do we how do we build bridges, you know, better bridges in the city of bridges for connection and opportunity. So where things work, and where we haven't explored yet, like, let's consider those things too. For

I'll get you in just a second here. But, you know, I I think my question though is that do we is your, I guess, thesis here that if we create as as many different opportunities that eventually we will find, you know because my my my problem is, like, how do we how do we get that 2% of the population? Mhmm. And you're saying, like, we just need to create a 100 different

For the 2% of the population, we need to spend extensive time and you don't even have to do it because we've already done it. There's many around the table that have sometimes we might need to, but I think for the the smaller part, we need to have very specific and intentional strategies that tie to what that two percent is dealing with because we know hurting people hurt people. Right? And so where are the trauma points, you know, what therapeutic elements need to happen, what OVR opportunities for connection to work related stuff. So I I think with that 2%, the conversation can be the same, but it can also be different.

But where are people's interest if we do interest assessment and and things that they're good at, and then how can they make career connections to those things and not even career connections because some of that stuff is too far down the line. How can I make connections to things that I can do now? And oftentimes, when you talk about that 2%, there's a larger level of vulnerability with that population. So how do we meet those needs in moment? I know is it to improve that the city bill has started for over on the the South Side?

And one of things I like about that work is it it's a holistic work that works with the whole family, not just the the young person that's working with the parents, that's working with other people in the household. Because Cornell brought that up earlier too. It's like, you could do a great work, but a child has to return home somewhere. And we have to you know, how are we helping to stabilize and understand the needs of that household. So I would just we just I think we need to to do a better job of understanding what that 2% population is dealing with and let our strategies match those things, including accountability, you know, consequence, which was brought up.

The last thing I'll say is that one of the things that I've noticed in space and so there's another challenge that we have not only in our k 12 education environment within society as a whole. So, you know, when we know IEPs or individual learning plans, like, there's certain advocacy and protection for young people rightfully so in education educational spaces. But one of the unintended consequences that we're starting to see now are, like, young people saying, well, you know, I can you can only hold me so accountable. Or, you know, if I I can do this thing and I might not get a punishment or a reprimand because you have only so many days allotted that you can discipline. And so on one hand, we need advocacy and they need protection, but in another unintentional consequences in society, you operate in a world that doesn't is not concerned about IEP.

And I'm not suggesting that all of our issues are with that population, but when we have young people that are dealing with issues around emotional instability and some of those academic pieces, that it's a crash course collision. And when you look at downtown, if you were to at one time, I'm not saying this right now, but there were many kids that I knew that were dealing with those complexities, and I think we have to bring those experts in as we talk about mapping and supporting those populations. Populations.

Yeah. So I'm gonna speak anecdotally about this and tie this into a local situation. I grew up I spent my four hundred years in New York, right, in Queens. And one of the things that was dope for us growing up was, like, old all the people we looked up to on the TV with record deals, even before I got my record deal, was in the neighborhood. Right? Like, Mobdeep wasn't far from me. Nas wasn't far from me. A lot of those guys actually went to high school with some guys in junior. They they weren't far from me. So having access to those people, and I'm not suggesting that, you know, Pittsburgh sits here and cuts a check to, you know, every single celebrity that comes out of this area.

But I'll tie this into this, and I just looked over my shoulder a little bit ago and see he's behind me. I didn't know he's gonna say I didn't know he's here. So Bo Boaz is one of my favorite entertainers ever in my life. And Bo being one of the most gifted Pittsburgh products in terms of hip hop ever, being in the space that he's in now is exactly what you need. When I first moved to Pittsburgh, the first rapper I learned about outside of Jasiri was Bo.

And I'm not just saying this is my brother and I'm a fan, but the the things that he has said in in his music and the and the environment that he comes from, to him to be in the environment is now giving back and and working with the young people that were just like us growing up. So I think we're same age, bro. I think we're the same age. That is where that 2% population, wherever that small infinitesimal population looks to, is the brothers they came off from. Again, anecdotally, I was 17.

I was arrested for attempted murder, spent a good bit of my time in jail, and then I was able to as soon as I got out of jail, I went on tour with the unit. Right? I went on tour with the guys I looked up to because they was in my community. I was accessible to them and they were accessible to me. Having a treasure like Beau behind us in in the REACH program, people know him. People know he's a OG now. He made it out. Like, you know, people can sit here and they can say, how did you do this? How did you get to have Wing Night at your restaurant and all them other things? Yeah.

I still gotta pull up. But like, how can you still have proximity to our community, but we see you with celebrities on TV and all these other things? That's an invaluable resource. And I think like, you know, we've engaged Lamar Hamlin, we've engaged a lot of these other, like, you know, high level a list people who are in the city that come back all the time. You know, how many people were just here for the draft that actually front Pittsburgh that weren't tapped to do outreach work? I feel like that's that's a massive drop. That's a fumble right there. Like, did you have all these professional athletes, all these entertainers, all these people here, these deal the laundry list of CMU graduates, the Point Park graduates. You know, everybody loves to go on piss, TV and say, I'm from Pittsburgh. Right?

Who has a direct line to these people to say, hey. Come through and talk to or just just appear with some of these young people. And that that that, I mean, it worked for me, you know, and and I'm I'm exactly who we talk about here. You know what mean? I'm exactly who we talk about. My first time I got arrested was 11. So when you was talking about these young guys downstairs downtown, that was me. You know what

I mean? So I

think really and truly, it's just

like this 2% population, we all tend to look at them as like these sociopaths. It's not that, really it's it's really not that. It's just that they don't really feel like they're connected to anybody that's older than them that gives a damn. You know what I mean? Like, that that really cares about their investment. This isn't a critique of anybody. I'm just saying, like, you know, like, my my biggest problem every time that I had an issue as a as a young person wasn't with people my age. It really wasn't. It was with people substantially older than me. And then, conversely, the people that made me wanna do better were people older than me.

They taught me because you think about it, that 2% of that small group,

right,

they're the most influential ones of their friends. You know what I mean? Like, for better and for worse, I learned that violence made me popular. So I got really good at it. I got good at survival violence. I got good at inactive violence. It it landed me in a couple of whack situations, but then, you know, it it it also put me where I am today, learning how to deal with it and respond to it. So I I you know, succinctly, you know, I'm tying this back that if we had investment programs or just investment strategies, I'm not talking that everybody has to be tapped, go holler at Wiz, or go holler at Fed, right, or holler at Jeff Goldblum, right? We know that's a stretch. You got Bo right there.

Bo does great work. You you have so many of these other brothers and and and and people just in the community that are legends in their neighborhood, in the in the areas that are untapped for one reason or another. I think those if you have conversations with those people that belong to your district or wherever they are, levy those because those are the ones that pay off the dividends. You

know what

I mean? At least in in my experience, again, is all anecdotal. You know what I mean? Take it what you want from it, but it worked for me, you know, when I will go when I will go uptown and bus arrives would be out $20.50 dollars for school clothes. Right?

We'd go outside and we would see Cam hitting a wheelie down 125th Street and he'd be like, Yo, show he stay in school. You know what mean? Just something like that, just that impactful. You know what I'm saying? Seeing Queen's Day when we would have what would be a Basie Punk or anything like that, 50, LL Cool J, a lot of these guys would come out and they'd be like, Yo, yeah, I know I'm rap about X, Y, and Z, and I'm saying only different things, but yo, listen to your teachers.

Just something like, even though

you sound cliche, that's gonna be way more impactful than And again, I was an educator, I went from the music industry to education. Your average student doing don't care about what they teach and say. But if someone like off the roads or someone that's like super impactful, they give you the same message, unfortunately it hit different. That's just the reality of it. So I mean, again, anecdotally, that's how we approach it. I can't say everybody has the same privilege or resources that we do, but there's a there's a lot of Pittsburgh legends outside of the hip hop scene in Pittsburgh that would love to be able to do this work just given the opportunity.

Really can I say something real quick? Just really quickly thinking about what you're asking specifically about diversion strategies. Right? So one thing I'll say that is missing is maybe some of the diversion experts as you think about how to grow this conversation. But when you look at diversion data, like the results of diversion, most people most young people don't feel that the consequence is worse than their circumstance.

And so when you have when you really drill into that and you think about this 2%, that is their mindset. Mindset. The the consequence is it may not be the best, but I'm sheltered. I have some food. Uh-huh.

I have some friends. So the consequence of, you know, a crime, so to speak, is not worse than their circumstance, which is constantly fighting to survive, constantly fighting to to be connected to something. So I think it's about thinking about the mindset and from the mindset, we can then think about some deeper solutions. All of us are doing all of this work. A lot of us I know personally, I've said like, I cannot I don't know what I would do with a young person who who has been consistently retraumatized.

Right? Because I'm not a therapist. You know, I'm not a behavioral specialist. I don't know. But I do know that them knowing, like, for our for us, them knowing that there's a safe space to go to if they need if they need is is critical, but it's not the only answer. And I think looking at diversion and what that root cause is, you know, whether it's homelessness, whether it's something, but that would be my response. Thanks.

If I could just jump in really quickly to the 2%, I think there's some diversity. So percentage is gonna be what we just heard, the personal and adult experience. I'm sure there's data that shows that. But then there are the young people who are emotionally and physically unsafe. They may not be looking for the popularity because they are clowning around, taking risk, but they are emotionally and physically unsafe.

And sometimes it's in the schools. They're emotionally and physically unsafe, and they spend most of their time in school. And then they may also be emotionally and physically unsafe at home. Many times, those young people in that percentage, some places is 5%, they're looking for an adult who is going to listen, look, and see them. Not just as a problem, not just as a nuisance, but that takes a level of patience, maturity, and stay around.

I'm in schools right now, and I just got cussed out last week, but I came back on Monday. Right? I was just there yesterday. Right? So this idea that, you know, they're waiting to see, and sometimes it's they need something right away. They need the relief. They need the food. They need the shelter. They need the whatever. And that's the space where they are. So I think we don't wanna lose sight of I hear diversion. Absolutely. We don't wanna hear sight of people on being trained to work with those young people because working with children with multilevel trauma is traumatic. It's traumatic. You gotta be able to deal with that.

But I think we also have to level up and understand and appreciate that there may not be food at home. There may not be lights at home. The parent may be working. You know, as I said earlier, there's some parents they can't take off. You know, they can't take off and come and listen to this because they're gonna get doc pay, or they may not keep that little job or job that they have. It could be a big job. But my point is that, yes, there are some young people, but we've gotta find out who that two percent is. Right? So when we did they did some they were having a lot of suicide when I was at University Virginia in Loudoun County. They were having lots of suicides among adolescents. That's a high per capita. That's Northern Virginia. They were having all kinds of suicides. So they did do a needs assessment. Well, they attempted to and figure out, like, what do the kids want?

What do the kids need? And what are the programs? So I think the additional thing to consider is, is there a database or system which, you know, a lot of, counties and government don't necessarily have that helps you to see all of these organizations and where you could make those connections. Right? That that means paying for someone to do that work, that data and analysis to say, okay. Yes. We do have these school based. We do have these community based. We do have mom and pop. We do have longer or larger organizations so that as you're identifying that 2% or that 10 or 15%, you can see who's gonna partner with the commander, who's gonna partner with the outreach team.

Because oftentimes, there there's siloed databases that are not that are there and possibly can meet the need, but they're not talking to each other unless they're at the table together. Right? So you have these folks who are at the table together. So I think it's one finding out those young people need, and it may not be the traditional survey that's nice and clean. It might be right there in the street and getting cussed out before you get to the root of it. And that's real. I'm that's very real. So you just had to be prepared and have those people who are willing to say, we gotta find out what that 2% needs, and we also need to make sure we're we're we're attending to the social emotional health of those young people as well as the adults who are serving them because they're gonna need support too. I just wanted to add that. Thank you.

Thank you. I just I won't be I'll be brief. I just think that for that 2%, we don't we don't think about how capitalism has affected the 2%. I won't talk about that a lot. And and it is a capitalistic mind state that these young people have that that tells them that they need to be rich at 22. Mhmm. They need to but the struggling college student mentality of I don't have any money. I gotta send home for noodles. Now take that away from college and put that on the streets to after you graduate from high school at 18. And no one you didn't take school enough serious yourself, and there's really no pressure on you to do anything after that.

Right. You're stuck in this little limbo phase of what do I do next. And what every young person I talk to, the first thing they say is, I want some money. How can I get some money? What can I do to get some money?

And going down that path of what can I do to get some money leads to all of the bad decisions and leads them to places that they didn't intend on going? So from and and tying it together with, like, a Boaz and guys of that nature, that 2% like, Boaz was intentional for being a part of our team. Like, we always say with reach, we don't have job applications. We are selecting people who come from the same life that we have that change their mindset and have and started doing the things in the community already before we bring you in and ask you to be a part of what we have going on with Reach. If it wasn't for programs like a REACH esque program in those days, then I wouldn't be doing this violence prevention work because it took somebody to pull me in and get me together and say, I'm a teach you this work.

I'm a get you these trainings. I'm gonna get you together and get you on a track to earn a living off of giving back to your community. And that is a aspect that, like so, you know, crime in America and in this world is want it to go away, wishful thinking, but we know that it's not gonna go away. And you're gonna need people to send to this point about young getting younger in the workforce. You're gonna need people to fill these slots and come in.

Boaz is younger than me from a young another generation. So him coming in his spot is already putting younger people in place that come from that 2% to get these jobs. I intentionally hire people like I have guys that I've been coaching football that I know what their young lives were was, and before they were able to get off track and totally make those bad decisions, pull them in to doing violence prevention work and getting them trainings and building them up so they can eventually replace me as I elevate on to the next place. And the key thing to pulling them in was the capitalistic mindset. Hey. I got some money. And I'll pull y'all in. Y'all want some money? Yeah. I got some money.

Well, I'll I'll I'll go to any training you want me to go to if you're giving me $200 a day. You know what mean? Like, they so they were they yeah. They they they so they wanted to come, and they wanna be a part of it. So that 2%, their mindset is already on trying to survive and what they need and how they can get them get the resources to survive. So pulling them in and getting them under the fold and helping them change their mindset to getting it is the way. That's that's our approach to reaching. We're actively doing it now. Several of our workers were in that 2% that we've changed and got them doing God's work now and helping change other people. So it's just getting that system and getting it rolling.

We're getting those people indoors and not shutting them out completely because they made a mistake or two. People always forget the mistake we I was we made my friends laugh about this. They say, well, you guys were bad back in the day, and you changed your life. People don't forget that we want the prison to change our life. Listen.

Listen. We we you

can in

the streets, you

either got robbed or something Mhmm. Or you went to jail or you got shot. It's like something traumatic happened for you to change your life. I didn't just graduate high school and say, oh, no. I'm a good person. Now I'm a citizen. I was doing stuff then and continued doing it until my younger twenties until something traumatic happened. I went away, changed my whole life, came back, and now you're a different person. We're trying to stop kids from going through that process. Yeah. Right now, you don't need to have a traumatic experience in order for you to move on to the next level of life. No. You're in the 2% pool you in now, get you together, and so you don't have to go through that traumatic experience to get here. So that's how I think

we can

approach it.

Can I just build up there real quick before we cut off? No. No. No. Bro, he was cooking. Like, no. No. We don't have a lot of money, but our program that you've come to, Council President, we're funded by the state. Right? And we pay all the use a $100 a day for pulling up. Now when I get younger is this off the roads. I'm like, yo, I I liking it like this. You ever have you even make something for yourself in the kitchen if it don't taste like your mom make it, and it'd be the same ingredients because your mom put love in there. Right? I know a $100 a day ain't that much. But when I break it down to these juices, I'm like, yo, look, you hustling. You know how to break this down. You know what your split is. You know what your load is gonna cost. You know how much this is gonna cost.

This $100 a day is actually making you more money because it's more consistent than what you're getting on the roads. So if you you wanna come rock with me, I can guarantee you a $100, I can guarantee you food, I can guarantee you a safe space, and I can guarantee you a conversation, and perhaps like a field trip some other place where you ain't never been before. And it's just like this is the type of conversation we have under that capitalistic mindset because, you know, capitalism. Right? We here. So the way I look at it is like if we're gonna be getting money off these youths with these with these grants, they should be being paid for it. Mhmm. You know mean? I They should be the they should be the recipients and the beneficiaries of all these programs. So that's just kinda how I leverage it to, like, to my youngest. It's like, yo, listen. I know it ain't much, but it's all that I got. I actually wish I could give you more when when I can. You know what I mean? I'm like, yo, here's double what we gave you last week.

You know I mean? So it's just like just just small things like that, this is like when you leave with love, it's it's again, as cliche as it sounds, it does go a long way specifically with that population that you're talking about what they feel like. Don't nobody care about them. You know

what I mean?

Good. Alright. Thank you. Thank you, mister Chen.

Thank thank you, council person. You know, we're a little bit past hour three, so I don't have any questions. I I really enjoy the the conversation, the the insight. Look forward to continuing this and and not making this a one off and also, you know, ensuring that that, as part of the work that we do, that we create some spaces for our young people to be at these tables, to be at these conversations, and hear directly from them, and and have them design how that conversation goes. Part of the work that we're gonna do in the weeks and months to come, you know, to continue to figure out, you know, how do we solve this issue, you know, and get out of ahead of it, you know, and and really, you know, serve our young people, you know, the best way we can.

Because I think that's, like, the important thing, like, when we were on our last call, you know, about the street team and and and planning our our June 27 kickoff event at Liberty Green Park talking about how do we show, you know, ultimately, when we get past, you know, the the accountability stuff, which we know is important and the rules and stuff we know is important, but also at least showing how we can, you know, you know, in in a in a a real meaningful way, wrap our arms around these young people and show that somebody cares about them. So I I wanna thank, everyone for being here today. I know there's a lot more conversation that we could have today. I know there's gonna be a lot more conversation, you know, into the future. I just look forward to working with you.

I think this could be, you know, the beginning of something really transformational for the city, taking something that caused a lot of anxiety and fear and pain and a lot of emotion over the last month or so is something that we may be, you know, sometime in the near future, you know, we could see is actually was, like like you said, you know, that, that that traumatic experience that actually led to growth, you know, development, and hopefully, a celebratory moment one day. So, having exhausted the business of this postagenda, this meeting is now adjourned.

Including it's I wrote a list because there's a lot of them, but including the terminal building on the South Side to which we refurbished, the existing buildings into new commercial space and created a plaza, an outdoor public plaza with it. We have worked on the Garden Theater. We've worked on currently the Wellington and the Pennsylvania are two historic, residential multifamily buildings that are, just being finished. We worked on I've worked on Rockwell Park in Point Breeze for over five years, both on master planning, architecture, interiors, and how to insert new new purpose into historic buildings. Some of the other ones we're working on are have been Masonic Hall, Knights of Malta, the Brass Building, which houses our own office.

In fact, there used to be an old brass manufacturing business in the Strip District, and we repurposed it for residential commercial. And I think it's a very personal project, but, you know, a good example of how our office and my personal approach to historic conservation when it comes to architecture is, which is infuse the purposeful life of historic buildings for the future without compromising, of course, the architectural integrity and of the building and the community and the city as a whole. Currently, we're working on doing the same thing to The Gulf Tower close by here in downtown, which

will

be a mixed use project. So really are in my work within Novena, I go through a lot of these processes from the design perspective and I am hoping to bring that experience to the commission and really help, yeah, provide some insight to how we can best use and guide any applicants or any projects towards the best possible use of historic buildings. It's not just a museum. They shouldn't necessarily just be the way they were, but it's a a matter of being respectful to the original architectural intent and, also providing opportunities for new use. So I'm very excited for this hopeful opportunity, and I thank you very much for your attention.

And likewise, if there's any questions, I'm happy to answer them.

Thank you, mister chair. My name is

Marty Iser. I'm a forty three year resident of Squirrel Hill, not a native of Pittsburgh, but I'm going to die here with my boots on as I say to my friends. So I hope it's not anytime soon, but I certainly love this city. I'm currently the secretary of the board of trustees for the Community College of Allegheny County. We've been involved in in bringing to life a number of historic buildings for the college and to repurpose for college use.

And we have tried in every instance to maintain the integrity of the building, the woodwork, not trying to destroy anything that would be of historic significance. And I think to date, we've done a really good job. The latest one being Shelton Hall that we just opened recently. I also am a long time supporter of city trees. I was chair of the Shade Tree Commission for fifteen years.

I was a founding member of Tree Pittsburgh, a founding board member. I'm involved in a number of city projects with my role as president and past president of the Squirrel Hill Urban Coalition where I've been actively trying to bring some order to Forbes and Murray in terms of having enough benches for bus stops and trees for shade and things that will help the neighborhood maintain its unique urban status. I've also recently been and still am vice president and fundraising chair for the Neil Log House. If you don't know where that is, it's in Shunley Park. It's a circa 1795 house that was falling down.

It was rescued by us incorporating in 2021 as the friends of the Neil Log House. We began fundraising in 2022 after knowing all of what we needed to do to actually restore the house to historic preservation standards. And over the course of a year and a half, we raised over $300,000. We did manage to restore it. We have a contractor from Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania who is an expert with log houses, and he was brought in to actually do the work.

We also have restored and and gone to great lengths to furnish the Neil Log House with some items that had been left over from the junior league purchase in the nineteen seventies, but, many had to be destroyed because during the process of the house being closed for thirty years, lots of critters came in. You might have seen fox in there in the newspaper and squirrels, and we had a groundhog that took us three years to get him a home 17 miles from here. And we have been struggling to maintain the landscaping, and we have plans to build a Virginia fence. And then our plans are to turn it over to a permanent lessee, a nonprofit that can run it for future generations and we look forward to doing that. I'm very honored to be considered for this appointment and I hope that I will be able to answer any of your questions, and I thank you.

Very much. We'll now turn it over to members with questions. For the record, at the record reflect, we've also been joined by our additional colleague, councilman Schroffsberger.

Thank you, mister president, mister chair. Thank you all for being here and for you know, clearly, you're incredibly qualified for this role. I I appreciate your willingness to serve. And I really just have one question because I know this is something that the commission grapples with, and that is how do you think about historic relevance and historic the need for historic preservation when it's a decision that, you know, is maybe how do you grapple with the decision to preserve based on the significance of the architecture itself versus the events that occurred inside the building? We've seen those we've seen varying types of nominations come through that, you know, where the where where we know that there might be a less significant case for the architecture itself, but there have been significant historical events taking place inside.

And, obviously, cases that are, you know, where the where the structure itself is historically relevant might not be popular architecture for all types because preference you know, it's it's all subjective. It's all based on preference, but it's ignore historically significant. How do you think about historical relevance and structure relevance? And I encourage you this is for everybody to answer or anyone who wants to answer. Just to say, like, I encourage disagreement. If you do disagree with one another, that's okay with me. So whoever starts doesn't have to be the vanguard of the answer. Anyone is able to start.

I'll start. I believe in balanced perspective. I also believe in trusting the perspective and the opinion of the staff that would advise the commission based on the guidelines that are in place. And so speaking specifically to balance perspective, if we're permitted by the guidelines to take into consideration what happened inside of the building, then I would absolutely do that. If the guidelines require us not to take that into consideration, then I would follow the guidelines and the recommendation of staff.

I agree with Chase, what he

just said, and I would take that one step further. I did spend a lot of my career in the field of regulatory administration, and I think writing the requirements and the regulations and the code in language that can be understood and can be applied equitably and can be applied reasonably by the people who are on the commission is key to us moving forward with answering your question. But I also believe sometimes there are ways to honor what happened inside a building in ways that don't require the building itself to be considered as the final answer. I think the balance is what Chase started with, and I agree that that's the way to approach it.

As someone who's in the business of preserving histories and culture, I think that a place can absolutely be very important to the happenings that are there. I think really listening to the community too and what they would want and how their relationship with that building, what it's like, of course, like, what's safe and keeping up with the codes, etcetera. But I really see being part of this commission is this partnership too with the community and what listening to them and kind of coming forward to being informed by them and vice versa and how we can work together in a partnership. But I do feel like it it has to be case by case too, but a place can absolutely inform a history.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's that's why as an architectural practitioner, I think this is such an interesting group and commission to be part of because to me, historic preservation is such a wide range of things, and it is exactly what you described. It can be a place. It can be a building. It can be an event that happened that we collectively decide has enough significance that it should be honored in the future use of the building.

And when we think about historic buildings, maybe most people think of, you know, log cabins or older buildings, but really we're also going into an era of saying, what is architectural significance or building significance that's worth preserving? It could be the Brutzhof Endymeron parking garage, even though it's not really I mean, it's a range, and I think they're so I would love to contribute in a way to advise on what is the best use of it, how do we preserve architectural excellence and and cultural excellence as well. But so I don't know if it's really an answer per se, but I think I I very much agree with you that it is a sliding scale, and it's a very big responsibility to make those decisions both on behalf of the people that come to us and come to you and wanna do something something else with the building and to guard the the ones that made it in the first place. And I think that the best the best path forward is to always ensure ensure that whatever is is changed is an added value. It's never a deduction, and doing that with high quality design, construction, whatever it might be, programming is is important in my opinion.

Thank you for the

Thank you for your thoughtful answers, and I'll let my colleagues ask whatever questions they have. Thank you, mister chair.

You. Councilman Schrodinger?

Yes. Thank you. Thank you for your willingness to serve here. I will be relatively brief here, but I do wanna talk about, one of the the you you I think a couple of people have mentioned the balance of, historic preservation and something that we have, experienced here at at council in in our our city is the weaponizing of the Historic Review Commission. Oh my.

Yeah. Everyone's getting it.

Well, that was an experience I

never had.

Just for the viewing public.

We all

just received a tornado warning on our phone. So that's why.

Is that what it was? Yes.

Oh my goodness.

A tornado.

That's That was how tough this question was. How about losing your train of thought there? Yeah. So I I wanted to ask about the, you know, Historic Review Commission being used, you know, as a a last effort to kill a project that a community doesn't support. Oh, sure.

Sorry. Okay. Using the historic review commission as a last last ditch effort to kill a project that that, you know, that someone has opposition to, and we've seen the the city really be held back by some of you know, finding a reason that something is historic, finding finding whatever that might be, and then putting it through that process as a way to kill housing in our city, to to move back economic development. And I wanted you to hear from you about how you would balance actual historic preservation and your your authority to to you you know, it's a really important authority to stop the the city from moving forward in certain places.

I'll I'll start again as a as someone who practices architecture in the city of Pittsburgh and regularly come to the historic, decommissioned with projects. You know, it's it's for us, it's always a balance between the developers wants and and and the what the project programming is, which versus the historic character of the building. And there's always stakeholders in play. There is the community rules and regulations, of course. I think I am hoping to balance it in a fairly, but I would say development forward way, never at the compromise of quality again.

My previous answer is the to me, it's the most important thing to honor an an historic building by adding something purposeful, both in terms of programming and architecture. And to me, that is, again, high quality materials always to well considered planning and design. But, again, it's a case by case basis, and there can be, of course, significant cases where you're like, this has to stay because it it is this significant, and we can't change it in the way that we want to change it. But I'd like to think that there is a lot of very talented architects in Pittsburgh that are are come with very considered approaches and and gentle approach to projects. So I'm very much hoping to see some of that and and help discuss it with the commission.

I think what you said is important, but I also would emphasize that your your topic of what's gonna happen after the historic building is saved. Is there going to be programming? Is there going to be a group that's going to keep it operating? Is there going to be something that can be offered to the community that is going to be helpful in a way provides economic development or tourism or whatever it is that we're trying to achieve. I I think saving it for the sake of saving it without having a plan going forward is a little troublesome to me.

I mean, a great example could be we have so many wonderful churches in Pittsburgh that, you know, has such a rich cultural history, and unfortunately, many of them are currently abandoned and indicate being dilapidated. And it's a very typical dilemma that we encounter if someone wants to buy the church and make it residential, for example. We think that we can do that in a purposeful and and honorable way to the building, but sometimes encounter just too many challenges to get through the processes to make that happen. And then five years later, the the church is still sitting in decay unused and is becoming a blightful city. Yeah.

Or ten or fifteen. Whatever it might be. I mean, yeah, that's just one example of it would be great if there was better avenues to help move those things forward because, as you say, the community many times will use that as kind of the the beating stick to you know, there might be one or two neighbors on the block that don't want anything to happen. And then the rest of the neighborhood do not wanna see it, light it, and graffiti all over it. And Right. So I think that's a just a very real problem that, hopefully, this commission can help address in a more efficient and reasonable way.

I think you're exactly right. In five or ten years, the boarding up and the graffiti and what happens with the parties of people trying to get into the building and maybe not use it for the purposes for which it was intended. There are buildings around that I think we all know and we have seen for years that are still there and just falling further down. And I think there should be a way for us to balance what you said and be respectful, but allow it to be maybe made into condominiums or some kind of housing. I I I absolutely understand what you're saying. Go.

Oh, I was just gonna say I am I really am invested in the city of Pittsburgh. I'm raising my family here. I want to see it move forward in a thoughtful, productive way and how we can be purposeful with the changes that are made. I don't I don't wanna see it boarded up. I don't wanna see that happen. I want it to grow. So again, like working with whoever is coming forward on the project that they are interested in and doing the research too behind that existing building and then thoughtfully taking it to the net. I think it was what in your opening statement where you were saying about looking to the future but moving for or looking at the past but moving forward. That's yes.

I would say, councilman, preservation and progress can coexist. They should, especially in a city like Pittsburgh, and there's more than enough evidence to suggest that it can be done successfully. If I can speak to what I believe to be the core of your question and that is the weaponization of this commission for specific interests that may not be aligned with the purpose of this commission. I believe that vision conveys purpose and we are ultimately will be responsible for ensuring that the vision that is presented to us, whether it be for preservation or for progress for lack of a better term, we need to be sure that it is well intentioned for the community that in and that it enriches the greater vision of the city. And I think while we are certainly political appointees, I'm not a politician.

My purpose on this commission will be to exact the standards that we are held to by way of this confirmation. And so I personally will not allow myself to be weaponized against this body or any other for any political purposes outside of progress or preservation.

So, you know, one of one of the things that's interesting in in Pennsylvania is that you don't have to own a building for it to be deemed historic. That is not the case everywhere. I have a a very good friend who's a preservation planner in in Dallas, and you have to own the building if you wanna make it historic. But I can just point at a building and say, let's let's evaluate that as historic, something I have no interest in, and we've seen that happen. You know, we've we've seen that happen for for a variety of different reasons.

And that is something that we now at council, we make sure that on our agenda, we see does the owner of the building support this nomination or not. I will never support a nomination that the owner does not support. If if if you don't if you don't own the building and you don't think you have the capital in order to keep it up to historic guidelines, someone else shouldn't be pointing at your building and saying that, you know, this is how you have to have it, and this is how this is the kind of expense what you're doing is you're saying you have to keep those kind of expenses on this building. And it's something that that, you know, greatly frustrates me with the way that we do historic review. The other thing one of the organizations that comes before you a lot, they they came in my district, and they they wanted they they wanted to nominate something as historic.

And luckily, the community group was like, don't do that. We that doesn't fit with the neighborhood plan. And then they were like, what else can you make historic? And that's not how we should be doing a historic review. Historic review should not be, I'm looking for something to keep myself interested.

It should be that building actually, you know, is the Cathedral Of Learning. It's the the the tallest educational building, I think, in North America. That that's something we wanna keep historic. It shouldn't be, I'm looking for a project because I wanna, you know, keep funding for my organization, I have to have so many nominations per year. I I'm curious if you guys can can talk about, like, how you'll how you'll manage, you know, actually doing preservation with, you know, just folks that that don't own the building and don't understand the economics of what a historic building means?

I'll restate that I believe vision conveys intent. And so how a presentation is made and what that presentation entails will be significant in how I will work in collaboration with my colleagues and the staff to formally make a decision. I also am unprepared to answer the question specifically about an individual and or organizations identifying buildings that they would intend to preserve because I'm not sure how slippery of a slope that is in terms of whether it would prevent the city from identifying a building that it wants to preserve as a story. And so I would lean on the council of the staff again to help inform that decision.

I think providing encouragement to

to

owners for both development and upkeep of of their historic structures is important. You know, there's a lot of development in Pittsburgh that rely heavily on historic tax credit funding, for example, in our cap money, etcetera, that that, would not be possible as new construction, for example. So having this sort of vast historic building mass in Pittsburgh is, in my opinion, can be a great advantage, and I think it just is is the commission's job to see through that weaponization because I'm I completely understand what you mean. I've I've seen it firsthand multiple times, and it is a shame. But, again, it's also a it's an important balance that should be held by the the city of Pittsburgh and not necessarily only by the building owner or only by the community.

It should be held by, by a third party committee, which is what this is. So I think that's why it's why it's so important.

And so, you know, I represent East Carson Street, which I would imagine is the longest historic district in the city. I I don't know that to be true, but I would imagine it is. One of the the situations that happened on the district or in the district in the nineties, the the historic designation of East Carson Street and the tax credits that were available from it actually were very important in order to revitalize the district when the the district was really dilapidated in the eighties and we were able to move it forward, was the historic designation going after the tax credits, being able to preserve preserve the the buildings along there. But it's a double edged sword because a couple years ago, we had an old gas station that was turned into a barbecue restaurant. And somewhat and it's not not contributing.

You know? This is not George Washington never went to this gas station. This is just an old gas station. Not contributing to the district, so it's it's not a contributing property. Someone wanted to turn it into a different restaurant that was gonna have a volcano at it. And I got asked, you know, well, if we do

The outside?

On the outside in the historic district. And the historic a volcano. They've not I mean, they were gonna build a a volcano. Yeah. And so the project was killed in, historic review. And, ultimately, that building sits vacant today, and it's been vacant vacant for five, six, seven years. Nothing nothing has gone in there. Someone had a plan to make that happen, but when we killed the volcano, we killed the project, and it sits empty. And that's, you know, the kind of things that can happen from the historic review commission, and I I need to move move the district forward. So I I see it you know, I do see it as a double edged sword.

A lot of that tax credit money has has dried up and and does not exist in the way that it does before. So I think the last thing and this isn't a question. I know I've been long here. But I also see one of the roles I would like to see from you is advocating for more tax credit money for historically designated properties to make this possible. If this is actually something we wanna do, it's not gonna come locally, but it's we we need that money to come in and make it make it viable.

I've got a Chinese restaurant that might go out of business because they don't wanna repair their windows in a way that's historically accurate, and they just can't afford they can't afford it. So, you know, that that that money needs to I I hope that you can see yourselves as advocates to the state to to try to get that money to come come back to us.

I The East Carson Street is a is a great example of something that's not it's a district. It's a part of Pittsburgh's history that is not just a freestanding building. And I think that whether it's the volcano or not, but kinda chipping away piece by piece and saying, oh, this particular building in this district is not historically significant, but the might be okay to do that one, two, or three times. But the more times you allow it and the more times you set precedence, whether the volcano was warranted or not. But, the more you chip away, you're not necessarily doing the district as a whole justice, and you might be doing it a disservice because people see East Carson Street as a a historic you know, it's it's an it's very historic significant part of Pittsburgh.

I know it's

The longest Victorian main street.

Yeah. And and if suddenly you know, I've seen in many other cities where the right procedures have not been in place, and then suddenly there's a new Walgreens, and then this thing pops up. And, you know, it might not seem like much on a single standing project basis, but then suddenly ten years later, this the area has lost its character. So being guardians of seeing, looking ahead and it is a very challenging a challenging thing to have an opinion about because Mhmm. How am I to say that my opinion is better than yours or your it's a very, personalized opinion, I guess, to have about historic character.

But being able to see the bigger picture of of Pittsburgh as a whole and and seeing ten, twenty, fifty years ahead, I think, would be the goal, hopefully.

Yeah. I mean but at

the same time, I understand, like, the chipping away you know, if we built a volcano, we chip away at the historic does. We also chip away at the historic value of the district when this the building sits vacant.

Don't get me wrong. I'm I'm an architect. I like to get things built and get things through, so I'm I'm certainly a development forward, but, again, it's it's a matter of looking at what what fits right. And the the right projects will will fit in that context, and they should be supported, of course.

Yeah. They should be supported. If that if the Chinese restaurant if the only reason why they're leaving is because of that building, let's find ways to either through tax credits, etcetera, to help them succeed. They're a member of that community now and help them, you know, preserve the building in a right thoughtful way and exist there and not you know?

I'm wondering about that as well. Some of the facade money, some of the other ways that you can improve your building, would they be eligible for that? I I think I think exploring other ways to keep the Chinese restaurant open in spite of them needing new windows that they can't afford at this time.

Yeah. I but, you know, at the same time, the, you know, the facade grants, the the the money doesn't go very far. So, you know, that's a limited budget there, and and we've got other other storefronts that also need that money to to stay open businesses and make our other main streets thrive. And and we're putting this requirement on a business, that is is now gonna be happy to to take their business out to Cranberry or wherever. You know? And then I've got another storefront I've got to fix. So alright. I think I've I've gone a lot longer than I intended to. Thank you, mister Scheher.

Thank you. Councilman Warwick?

Yeah. Thank you. And thanks to everyone for being here and for putting your hat in the ring for the commission. It's so, yeah, I have some I mean, it's all sort of along the same lines. The first thing is, like so with historic designation and, you know, any any building that's named to you know, the sort of and maybe this is sort of to the councilman's point.

It that really scares people off. Like, I have a I have a building in Hazelwood, it's the old Hazelwood Library. It's a beautiful old building and there have been three, maybe four different folks who have come through with ideas for projects. Luckily, we just got a grant to to fix the roof so that we don't lose the building entirely. Right?

But, you know, I have someone who's interested in the building now for a you know, this is very just very early stages. But when I talked to them, this idea of like, it it was like, oh, is the building designated historic? Like, oh, and it was like, yeah, it is. And it was just like, oh, I mean, you could it was just, like, grown, like, to the and so this notion that, again, this building could just disappear because we make it too hard for someone to to to, you know, come in and and just kinda do what they wanna do with the building. So I don't know if you have thoughts about that and what the role that the commission might play in those conversations.

That's the balance that we talked about earlier. You don't want it to stay vacant. You don't want it.

It's awful. I mean, it's just like terrible for

a building.

To affiliates. Yeah.

Any structure to be vacant for five or ten or whatever, it just falls apart. So you don't want that. But you have to be able to negotiate that balance of what's the building going to be used for. Is the outside integrity of the building, at least the way it appears if it's a historic district, is it going to be maintained? There are all kinds of questions that I would ask going forward and I understand.

I've heard the groan of people that I know that are in, historic buildings, but I'm inclined to preserve that integrity of the street or of the building or or whatever it is, but I'm not inclined to do it in in the instead of allowing it to move forward in a different kind of mix of uses that would, as I said, preserve what it looks like to the historic district, but would keep it from falling down. I'm I think that balance is something that we all would have to struggle with.

I assume it also ties to the to the guidelines that we're adhering to and and reviewing those in in ensuring enough flexibility in order to be able to respectfully address a number of different types and styles of project that it the guidelines are not too rigid, and they allow for that for that reuse for a modern purpose, but without letting someone just do exactly whatever they want with it, which could be, you know, paint it purple or clad it in corrugated metal. I you know, I Right. So it's it is that balance, but, you know, ensuring the the the flexibility in the commission's guidelines and the workings that we're bound by, I think, is is very important.

I I think the the issue is more I I mean, I I see what you mean, but, you know, the interest in the building is to preserve right? It's sort of an opportunity to preserve to do something good for the community, but I think the concern is more about material. I mean right? Yeah. Like materials. Like, you know, this kind of roof versus the roof that's gonna cost whatever, four times as much because it's, like, the historic this or that.

The appropriate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, anyway, well, that that's good to know. I mean, just that that I feel like that flexibility definitely needs to be there. Right? And because, I mean, like, with the Neil and and also maybe the history of why the building is because this, you know, much like the Neil Log House is a building that the city of Pittsburgh just let rot, right, for a very long time. And that's why it is the way that it is.

Right? Like, we should have cared for that building long ago, and we didn't, you know, for whatever reason. Yeah. Sort of and this this this conversation about historic districts, it's funny because we had a meeting of of RCOs from around the city. There was some talk of changing, you know, the RCO guidelines and whatnot. And we had there was it was and I I don't have a historic district in my district, but there was one person on the call from I think it was, like, the Mexican War streets, and they

were