Youngstown State University Holds It's First National Alumni Networking Event

Some folks from YSU were handing out flyers telling people about this at the most recent Pittsburgh Gallery crawl.

The somewhat positive upside falling reliability of state funding is that many schools are working harder at building social connections to their alumni and wider communities.

Thursday's event featured gatherings in 10 U.S. cities. Some of the places included Columbus, Phoenix and Washington D.C.

Those at the Youngstown event, held at Cassese's MVR Italian Restaurant & Bar on Walnut Street, hosted a webcam session that broadcast to the other cities. During the webcast, former students talked about new projects happening at the campus.

Free Outdoor Movies In Downtown Youngstown

A few short years ago, there was very little good happening in downtown Youngstown, in spite of a pretty big university sitting on a short hill within walking distance and a core of buildings that usually shock people with their beauty and quality.

Now there's a pretty active restaurant and club scene and the full residential restoration of one of the biggest buildings in town. Actually, it sort of looks like a little small business mecca is developing.

It's hard to say where this all started but one big thing was the opening of a technology incubator which offered, I think free rents and some of the resources of Youngstown State to small start ups.

Other small and incremental changes brought activity and made people more comfortable in the downtown. Like the free outdoor Summer movie Mondays on The Covelli Center Lawn.

Every Monday till August 30Th

June 28 Star Trek: The Future Begins

July 5 Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

July 12 The Time Travelers Wife

July 19 Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns

July 26 Twilight New Moon

August 2 The Blindside

August 9 Casablanca

August 16 The Princess and the Frog

August 23 The Dark Knight

August 30 UP

Details and more positive news about Youngstown can be found on I Will Shout Youngstown.

Readers of this blog know I'm pretty interested in that area. It's just too well located and has too many assets to be ignored.

Would anyone in Youngstown or with a good knowledge of what's going on there like to post on this blog? Email me at Diggingpitt@gmail.com.

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.