Faculty, students sweep through Oakland, leave trail of clean

Cigarette butts and broken glass litter the streets in Oakland’s residential section.

Early… Cigarette butts and broken glass litter the streets in Oakland’s residential section.

Early in the morning, as some students passed these broken bottles and assorted rubbish, volunteers from Pitt’s faculty and staff joined graduate students in ridding Oakland streets of such waste.

Every year since 1990, Pitt has sponsored its Annual Pitt Day of Caring, an event inviting Pitt staff, faculty and students to take part in a community-wide service project.

Held on United Way’s Annual Day of Caring, the day of social action brought members representing the Oakland Planning and Development Corporation and the School of Social Work’s Community Organizing and Social Administration program.

“We want to engage students in the community and [make them] feel like they belong,” said Laura Halula, an intern at OPDC.

Many students who live in the neighborhood graduate and leave the community without ever participating in community activism, Halula said, adding that she hopes to encourage students to stay here.

In 2001, an OPDC study ranked Oakland as the third-largest commercial district in Pennsylvania. With residents investing so much money in Oakland, Halula said, the demand for civic action should increase.

Patricia Hines, a graduate student who commented on the bottles and butts, said that along with OPDC, Pitt’s social administration graduate school program works with community organizations and various social action groups committed to change.

Among those various groups, OPDC has established coalitions with student organizations and fraternities to institute programs such as Keep it Clean, Oakland, and the Dumpster Project, which offered several trash collection sites around Oakland streets for students to deposit their refuse.

Kelly Hoffman, the OPDC’s community organizer, said that yesterday’s event helped kick off a fund-raising campaign to get more support among student organizations at Pitt.

Past initiatives have produced projects such as the Adopt-a-Block program, in which organizations can adopt a block — or more — by committing to clean it at least once a month. Keep it Clean, Oakland involves local businesses and community members, short and long term, to help reduce Oakland’s amount of debris and to beautify the neighborhood.

“[We’re] trying to get at the problem by using different tools,” Hoffman said.

One of these tools, Hoffman explained, is educating students about certain landlord/tenant rights. Specifically, she added, Oakland has poor building code enforcements, so the students are sometimes subject to inappropriate living conditions.

Not only did yesterday’s Caring Day activities engage students, Hoffman said, but it also gave Pitt’s faculty a chance to see Oakland’s neighborhood, which they might not have seen otherwise.