My sustainability capstone group focused on three main deliverables throughout our semester working on our Appalachian Collegiate Research Initiative project. The first of these focused on educating high school students on career options for them post-graduation that are available in Fayette County, both for those who continue on to college and those who pursue a job right out of high school. We chose this because of a conversation with students at Uniontown Area High School. They noted that a difficulty they and their peers were having was finding a potential major or career that sparked a passion for them, as they had not been exposed to many. Learning of paths that can be taken to find a job that overlaps with one’s interest can be very helpful in motivating students to pursue college or employment and being successful in their endeavors. We’ll be taking two routes to address this. The first one is video interviews with college students and local professionals that will be compiled and posted on the high school’s social media site. We’ll also be going with other college students in person to the high school to talk about our majors, internship experiences, and career plans.  

Another deliverable we have is the Celebrate Uniontown campaign, which involves working with high school interns to create posts for the city’s official instagram page. The campaign as a whole is designed to help bolster a sense of community and increase pride in the city. The posts typically feature upcoming events and on-the-street style interviews with attendees. The students do the vast majority of the work for this project, but we helped them plan out some content. One initiative that is currently taking place is highlighting small businesses for holiday gift shopping.  

Lastly, we finished creating and disseminating a community survey for Uniontown. A past Pitt student had worked with two residents, Bill Talkington and Brad Trott, to make this survey. We continued his work by tweaking the questions for clarity, adding in a few relevant one, and then getting it out to the public. To do so we made flyers and other content that could be posted on social media. Our contacts helped get them posted widely on various Facebook pages and even on the official Uniontown Instagram.  

This survey asks questions regarding residents’ demographic information, employment and commuter data, as well as general views of their city, including satisfaction with public services, recreational opportunities, and city government. It also gathers opinions on specific changes community members would like to see and what their vision for the future of Uniontown looks like. While the survey is currently geared towards Uniontown residents, the plan for the future is to expand it to more regions of Fayette County. Our goals with this survey are to get a better idea of community demographics, needs, and preferences. This information will be used by future cohorts of Pitt students working on this project to provide resources that address the needs and wants of the citizens of Uniontown. It will also be a resource for community organizations such as the Uniontown Redevelopment Authority who can further use our results to promote positive change in the area.  

So far, we have received over 240 responses.Throughout these, five common themes have emerged. One is the lack of public transportation. Many respondents expressed a desire for it. Car dependency is also high, with 100% of respondents who commute to work saying they do so by car, even if they are less than 2 miles away from their place of employment.  There was also a desire for more recreational opportunities, especially a public pool.  From the responses we gathered that community members want to engage more with their local government, and that fostering that connection could be beneficial. Residents also expressed that they think bolstering promotion of the city, to people along with business, could go a long way towards helping grow and enliven the area. Another very common theme was the desire to work on remediating blighted areas. This came up many times in the responses as well as our conversations with community members. These themes and more were also highlighted in answers to our final question, which asked survey takers to finish the sentence “I want a future for Uniontown where ___.”  Some responses included “the beauty surrounding the city is integrated with the business and culture of the city,” “I can walk to the grocery store,” “My daughter will have opportunities to build a career here,” “There is a revitalized business district,” and “people will use our area as an example of success and not of failure, and to be celebrated for preservation and opportunity and not known for blight and obstacles.” Understanding these hopes that residents have for their community is a great way to identify what we’re striving for with our work in Fayette County. 

Of our deliverables, I’m most looking forward to the implementation of our ideas for meeting with high school students to introduce them to various career options. When I was in high school we had various opportunities to speak with different college students and early career professionals about their jobs and trajectories to get there and it made me feel much more confident and open-minded about my future when I went into college. I ended up changing my major sophomore year and having been introduced to so many options along the way made and hearing stories of others doing the same me feel secure in doing so. I think that this work of ours can have the biggest direct impact out of the three. Talking to various adults in the community, many of them were also very concerned for the youth and their opportunities after high school, so it’s known that this is an issue felt widely.  

The work I’ve done this semester has differed greatly from anything I’ve done so far in college. The first way it differed was working on the same team the entire semester on just one project. My freshman year I had a big semester-long research paper that was group-based but that was four years ago and was not nearly as large of a venture. Having that smaller group of three people who I saw and worked with at least three days a week was great for building connections and making sure there was a healthy team dynamic. More significantly, I’d never done community-engaged research like this before. For my classes, research usually is all done at home on my laptop. This class got me out into Fayette County talking to individuals and learning from them. Although many of the ideas I got from researching the county held true when corroborating them against my observations in the county and conversations with community members, you don’t get the full picture. I don’t think my view on the Appalachian region changed much after this course, as I grew up here and have spent time in a good stretch of it, but I think my appreciation has grown some, especially of specific areas. I think interacting and building connections to an area has always made me develop fondness for it, and Fayette County is no different. Reading all the responses from Uniontown residents about their thoughts on and hopes for their town made me care for it all the more. I think that the impact this project has left on me, that I’ll be able to reflect on when I’m old, is the importance of community-building and a more developed understanding and respect of community-based research, which I hope to continue centering in my future.