Rebuilding the Cities That Built America Conference Was Great

OK, I gotta call a spade on this one. Substantive, in depth, pretty uplifting and crowded with people and ideas.

I swear this time I will really get back with at least one or two in depth posts about it. One negative was that I failed to network more, in that there just wasn't enough time. Don't worry not all my thoughts are positive and my fear that this was nothing more than a shallow lobbying effort was partially, true. But, believe me it was much more. If you live in Pittsburgh, you know about a lot of the great small scale efforts made by thousands of people and dozens of small organizations. It's great to see that similar and sometimes even more uplifting and spectacular things are happening in places like Youngstown.

We broke down into working groups, one of which detailed efforts by University's in Cleveland, Youngstown and Pittsburgh to create and leverage new relationships with their communities. Several bummers. No mayor of Youngstown--a pretty busy guy these days and almost no chance at all to see the city, even though the event was just at the edge of downtown.