My experience of the Connellsville presentation was probably the most “real” community development work in my entire illustrious career, and, like most important things in life, it felt like it went by extremely quickly. Before the presentation, we sat and mingled with guests drawn from various backgrounds and recruited by various members of our cohort. We discussed our backgrounds, and our connection to Fayette County. There were indeed definite differences between members of the assembled congregation, but perhaps these differences were exaggerated by the rural context. Penn State versus University of Pittsburgh is a debate that seems to hold a lot more weight outside of Pittsburgh than it does inside of it. Mostly though, the stakeholders were from a similar demographic: elderly rich people. Many of them had moved away, and then returned to Fayette County for reasons either relating to nostalgia or family, or, in what was usually the case, a mixture of both. One does wonder if there are other people Fayette County who we were missing in this group of interested parties to our community development. This of course is rhetorical wonderment. Obviously, demographics were missing. The real two questions are why didn’t a more diverse set of people come? And how can we entice them to join our project? I believe the answer to the first question is relatively straightforward- almost everyone else had other more important things to do. Only rich and elderly people have the time to engage in this kind of low rewards community work. That means that our contacts also tended to be those richer and more elderly people who had the freedom to work in this community development space. This ends up with a double bias- most of our contacts being were from a single demographic and the timing of the presentation meant that for the most part the only people who could attend it were also in that singular demographic.

               If this presentation was then a case study of a certain demographic in a certain locality, it was an effective one. Very clearly were the attitudes of the attendees shown, especially during the Q&A after the presentation. The presentation itself I feel I essentially cannot speak on, as I have edited it and practiced it far too much and now cannot look at it straight on. But I can comment on the comments that the attendees had for us. They seemed to follow a certain similar framework: “have you thought of this…?”. The “this” in question varied. One stakeholder asked “have you thought about the high schoolers who don’t graduate high school or do graduate and never go to college?”, another asked “have you thought about large scale chicken farming?”. The ideas were flowing easily in the room, and it became clear, or more likely it was always clear, that these people spent much more time thinking about these issues than we did. So then, what’s the purpose of us? Well, this is part of our education, but I also have to believe that there is a practical purpose for the stakeholders as well, at least so I can feel proud of my work. So I like to think of us as providing the benefit of outside eyes, eyes that can view these highly personal issues through the more theoretical lens that our university education provides. Perhaps this viewpoint will allow us to provide something, even if it is small, to the community we are now deriving an education from.

               The ACRI conference was a completely different story. In contrast to Connellsville it was very professional, with a diverse set of attendees presenting from across Appalachia. Also in contrast to Connellsville, I cared a whole lot less about this presentation than the previous one. In Connellsville, we were presenting to stakeholders, the people whose lives we were effecting, and that felt in important. In D.C., the importance lay in the fact that the audience for the presentation were the people who fund us. That being said, I as a student am intentionally far removed from that part of this project, so it was less visceral of a motivator for me. Mostly, the conference was an opportunity to compare yourself to others, which my therapist says I “unfortunately really struggle with”, so I had a great time. The big realization that came out of my comparison to the others is that quality of presentation did have some correlation to prestige/size of endowment of the university presenting. Our presentation and Auburn’s were probably the best of the bunch, and also we were the two most powerful universities in attendance. The worst presentation came from a school which shall not be named because I’m not trying to start an internet war (lol) but was definitely also one of the least prestigious schools at the conference.

With all of that behind us, I do want to mention one way in which the University of Pittsburgh shined. No other school came close to matching the scale of our projects. This is a function of the 10 year timeline our University has made to Fayette County. Other universities, by resetting every year, limit the scope of their deliverables to the fact that they need to choose a study area, diagnose problems and create solutions, all within 3 months. We get 10 years. This made us stand out among other presentations and played better than even perhaps in Connellsville. There, the length of our commitment built trust, but it still meant new students every year, and a more iterative, less innovative and exciting approach to development. But in D.C. the length of our commitment allowed us to communicate our much larger dreams and ambitions, which, in the rather up in the air and abstract environment of the conference at the capital, played extremely well. This, perhaps was the core difference between the two presentations. In Connellsville, the atmosphere was more practical and on the ground. In D.C., the ambitions were bigger, but the grounding to reality was perhaps looser.