Audaciously Equitable

If the collective talent at Carnegie Mellon partnered with community leaders, what kind of change could we drive? 

That’s a bold question, and the answer is university’s new Center for Shared Prosperity. The center convenes stakeholders and problem solvers, infuses resources and will ultimately help implement solutions. The sweeping new initiative could have stunning implications for economic equity and social justice — and the Pittsburgh-based Heinz Endowments is putting its support behind the center’s work.

Creating the Center for Shared Prosperity

Heinz Endowments president Grant Oliphant sees a big problem. Research institutions are packed with the smartest people and the biggest ideas, but that intellectual wealth is not shared often enough with local communities and neighbors.

Illah Nourbakhsh, K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies at CMU’s School of Computer Science, sees the same problem from a different angle.

“One of the challenges that we have as an innovation creator is that our innovations help society, but they also exacerbate inequalities because the new tools belong to the most privileged and the most prosperous in society,” he says.

Oliphant and Nourbakhsh were pondering these problems separately. But when Oliphant and the Heinz Endowments funded one of Illah’s CMU projects, a melody found its harmony. That music could change the world.

“A relative handful of major research institutions, Carnegie Mellon among them, are literally inventing the future, with significant global benefits and impacts,” Oliphant says. “We wanted to see if Pittsburgh could reinvent that paradigm, and Carnegie Mellon — with its long history of tackling real-world problems — has risen to the challenge.”

In April 2021, The Endowments announced its largest grant to date, a $30 million gift to create and sustain the Center for Shared Prosperity, housed in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. At the macro level, the center will do three key things:

• Change the relationship fundamentally between CMU and its community, from distinctly separate entities to partnerships that work in concert.
• Give community stakeholders agency when it comes to university projects.
• Create a local and, ultimately, national model to address social barriers to equity.

The center has created a new model of collaboration, uniting the expertise of both the community and the university. A Center Community Committee has been recruited and charged with identifying specific equity, economic and social justice challenges in the Pittsburgh region. The committee is composed of Western Pennsylvania community organizations and residents; CMU faculty, staff and students; and Heinz Endowments staff.

Then, working groups of community members and CMU participants partner to study the selected issues, identify structural barriers to opportunity, and develop and implement innovations that address them. These innovations will be piloted, and ultimately scaled up to create real change for the region’s residents. An important ingredient for the initiative’s future success is the marriage of community members’ lived experiences and skills with CMU expertise in areas such as data science, public policy, technology, humanities and the social sciences.

This new entity within CMU realizes the wildest dreams of Nourbakhsh, the center’s inaugural executive director. Right now, the center’s staff is launching planning committees to tackle its first three initiatives:

• Increasing home ownership, especially for members of Pittsburgh’s minority communities, through housing cooperatives that break down initial/frontline barriers to securing mortgages.
• Improving options for halfway homes, which help formerly incarcerated individuals make successful transitions back into communities.
• Developing advocacy skills through a “power of education” project, which will empower community members to identify their own needs, as well as voice their preferred solutions.