When someone asks you where you are from, how do you respond?

Can you name your hometown and leave it at that? Do you identify, for the sake of avoiding confusion, with the largest city in the area? Do you say southwestern Pennsylvania?

It may sound like a trivial question, but our answers reveal aspects of our culture, our history as a community, and our sense of shared experience. So often, when answering the question, “Where are you from?” our response is automatic and we might be unaware of just how many of us share the same sense of home, the same cultural links that have made our region a true homestead for 250 years.

How can you connect your community back through the ages to those first settlers? How much do you share with the generations who followed? For that matter, how connected do you feel to your neighbors across town, across the county, or across the entire region?

From time to time a moment presents itself as an occasion to consider questions such as these in more detail. Just such a moment is upon us.

2008 will mark the 250th anniversary of the 1758 founding of Pittsburgh. The meaning of this event and its lasting impact on the citizens of southwestern Pennsylvania can be monumental, a watershed moment of truly regional proportions bridging gaps generational, economic, geographic and social.

Or it could pass, barely noticed, as another missed opportunity.

Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections, a newly activated grant-making program, is working to help communities make the most of this opportunity.

Located in Pittsburgh, Community Connections is reaching out to cities, towns and communities in 14 counties in southwestern Pennsylvania, including Cambria and Somerst, to bring the celebration of the 250th anniversary to the people and bring the people to the 250th anniversary.

To this end, Community Connections will distribute $1 million in project funding for community-based activities that encourage civic engagement and provide lasting value to our communities and the region as a whole.

We are inviting neighborhoods, communities, civic organizations and individuals to “Imagine What We Can Do Together.” Community Connections will help the people of southwestern Pennsylvania take advantage of this moment in time.

From north to south and east to west, Community Connections will visit each of 14 counties in southwestern Pennsylvania in search of the ideas, dreams and demands of the people. In town-hall meetings and brainstorming ideation sessions, everyone will be invited to propose ways to enrich his or her community and add to the celebrations of the 250th anniversary.

We will be looking for three kinds of projects:

n Grassroots grants of up to $5,000 will fund projects that affect a single community or county.

n Regional grants of up to $50,000 will offer groups the chance to establish a new program or enhance an ongoing project that will have a lasting effect across larger populations in the region.

n The third class of projects, affiliated, will leverage activity already under way in the region that do not require further funding.

The goal of each project will be to support the broad theme of “Pride & Progress.”

Community Connections will add to the large regional celebration of history by linking the past to the future, reconciling where we came from with where we are headed, and working together in mutual support and cooperation.

This spirit is the essence of a regional community, a shared culture of interdependence and growth that will sustain our region for another 250 years.

Our commitment is to you, the communities of southwestern Pennsylvania. Community Connections is dedicated to serving communities as neighbors in spirit and partners in the work ahead.

We invite you to gather with the people in your community to work together to generate ideas for community projects.

We eagerly await your ideas.



Aradhna M. Dhanda is president and CEO of Leadership Pittsburgh, Inc. Cathy Lewis Long is executive director of The Sprout Fund. George L. Miles Jr. is president and CEO of WQED Multimedia. All three are Community Connections Committee co-chairmen.