Category Archives: Pittsburgh

Get your donations matched in Pittsburgh’s Northside!

Pittsburgh’s Northside exemplifies so much of what we love about the Steel City. It’s that energy; the drive to just roll up our sleeves and get good done. And it’s easy to see why! Just take a look around the neighborhood, and you’ll see incredible changemakers like Rev. Eleanor Williams, and the neighbors at Angels in the Garden.

So we’re excited to kick off another season of positive civic change with the One Northside Crowdfunding Match, an opportunity to DOUBLE your crowdfunded donations in the Northside up to $10,000.

Continue reading Get your donations matched in Pittsburgh’s Northside!

10 creative community service ideas

Opportunities to serve our communities are everywhere, and can take many forms. Some of the most popular community service ideas are rooted in volunteering with an existing organization—like a soup kitchen, school, or house of worship. We at ioby think this type of community service is stellar, and we applaud anyone who makes the time to get good done with an organization they love.

But we also know there are some that are moved to act by the unique issues in their own neighborhood, and want to imagine, build, and execute their equally unique community service ideas. That’s why we’ve been helping residents bring their good ideas to life for over 10 years. ioby’s community crowdfunding platform—and the expert fundraising support that goes with it—gives people the tools and information they need to raise the cash, awareness, and buy-in necessary to take the positive change they envision from idea to reality.

Below, we’re happy to share 10 of our (many) favorite ioby projects that illustrate how creative, fun, and impactful resident-led community service ideas can be.

Continue reading 10 creative community service ideas

Miriam Parson: Building a movement in Pittsburgh

We talk a lot about building a movement of positive civic change here at ioby, but how do you do that? The thing is, organizing your community around a project that strengthens the neighborhood is no easy task. But it gets a little easier when you realize many of our neighbors are already doing this work, and already have great ideas to strengthen their communities; our movement is about the tools and support leaders need, connecting neighbors with one another, and working to make getting good done a natural response for even more people.

Here in Pittsburgh, our movement is already starting to catch fire thanks to leaders like you, and 6,000 other neighbors who have played a part in an ioby project in Pittsburgh. That’s 2% of the entire city! Continue reading Miriam Parson: Building a movement in Pittsburgh

Awesome Project: Art in the Garden

For the past three summers, every day that it looks like it might rain on a day that she teaches at Borland Garden in Pittsburgh, Emily Carlson talks to the weather and asks for it hold back the rain until two o’clock. That’s when the kids at Art in the Garden, a youth summer program in the garden, go home for the day. Without any shelter in the garden, programming has been at the whim of the weather, though they’ve been lucky. “Every single day for the past three summers it has worked except for one day,” Emily says. “But that feels like a lot to ask the weather, and it feels stressful to me, so we’d really like to have a structure built.”

So she and her community are kicking off their third ioby campaign to raise funds to build a shelter in Borland Garden for all weather–and extended season–learning, after previously having successfully nearly $8,000 with ioby to fund programming in the summer of 2017 and 2018. Continue reading Awesome Project: Art in the Garden

Erin Barnes & Miriam Parson: What Pittsburgh means to us

The massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue was a horrific hate crime, the deadliest attack on Jewish Americans in history. There is no question that violence like this has no place in our world, our country, in Pittsburgh, or in Squirrel Hill. It’s a particularly cruel irony to see such an explicit outburst of anti-semitism and hate befall a community made famous for its generosity, philanthropy, love and neighborliness.

We have no doubt that Pittsburgh will come together, as we’ve already seen our city do, and lean on one another to mourn and to heal.

As our grief turns to resolve, many of us find ourselves wondering: what next? Continue reading Erin Barnes & Miriam Parson: What Pittsburgh means to us

Ten Year Stories: Northside Resource Mall

ioby was founded in 2008 in order to make it easier for local leaders to gain the funding, knowledge, and resources needed to make positive change on a local level. For the past ten years we’ve worked alongside more than 1,600 passionate, committed community leaders and have watched as small projects have turned into larger initiatives and collaborations have become movements.

In the coming months, we’re taking a look back at the past ten years, and tell some of our favorite stories of positive neighborhood change. We want to know: what kind of things can start with a conversation, a neighborhood meeting, a few dollars raised?

Rev. Eleanor Williams tells us about how she and her coalition of partners in Pittsburgh’s Northside neighborhood is coming together to support their community together, and how they crowdfunded to help bring all their services under one roof. Continue reading Ten Year Stories: Northside Resource Mall

How they did it: Pittsburgh Liberty Interfaith Choir

Sometimes—okay, pretty often—the road to successful crowdfunding is not a straight and narrow one. It can take time, a few tries, and possibly a rejiggering of resources to make the stars align.

Luckily, that’s just our jam! ioby has a decade of experience helping local leaders combine the right resources in the right order to create winning fundraising campaigns.

Here’s a good example: the Pittsburgh Liberty Interfaith Choir, led by Elizabeth Chitester.

Continue reading How they did it: Pittsburgh Liberty Interfaith Choir

AWESOME PROJECT: The incredible multicolored pigeons of Pittsburgh

Linda Wallen has always been an artist. A longtime Pittsburgh resident, she spent her early career painting portraits of “the rich and famous,” and then “retired into” teaching French and Spanish (through art) to elementary school students. But it was in the 1990s that her interest in public art really took off, after a trip to Barcelona.

Continue reading AWESOME PROJECT: The incredible multicolored pigeons of Pittsburgh

What we’ve learned in “Phase 0”

We suspect a very small number of people are reading this right now. If you are, you probably live in a city where ioby has an on-the-ground staff person or you are likely one of ioby’s peer organizations who have over the years asked if we would release all our “Phase 0” reports publicly. So, we went back to all the people who we interviewed to produce these reports, and asked their permission to include their quotes in these now publicly available documents.

Continue reading What we’ve learned in “Phase 0”