Introducing Coro Pittsburgh Fellow Christina

Moving across the country at any point in time can be a daunting expedition. Moving across the country during the middle of a pandemic is a whole other story, but that’s exactly what I signed up to do when I committed to the Fellowship in Public Affairs at Coro Pittsburgh.

My name is Christina Schwartz, originally from Salt Lake City, UT, I graduated from Brigham Young University, and was fortunate enough to be offered a spot in the Coro Fellowship program for the 2020-2021 year.

The Fellowship is focuses on immersing participants in multiple organizations throughout the region in a variety of sectors. The goal is to learn how to make effective change through cross-collaboration and whole systems thinking.

Now, what does that even mean? What does that look like? And how will I achieve this goal?

In all honesty, I had no idea, but my second placement with Local Government Academy (Academy), a Non-Profit established by Allegheny County in 1983 to help combat fragmentation and duplication of services for better economic prosperity. In other words, it was founded to help build collaboration in the local government sector.

However, another question then arises, how do you build effective collaboration?

While I don’t have all the answers to that question, I learned a lot by watching the Academy operate as a collaboration catalyst through its uniting mission statement and educational programming. Their programs offer a place where people with a wide variety of beliefs come together and put aside their differences to pursue a common goal: to promote excellence in local government.

Ultimately, I learned that a critical part of effective collaboration is giving people a vision to chase together and then providing them with the educational tools to succeed.

I still have much to learn about the intricacies of cross-collaboration and whole systems thinking, but I am incredibly grateful I had the opportunity to work with an organization that taught me so much on the subject.

I’m looking forward to continuously unraveling the mysteries of collaboration during the rest of my time here in Pittsburgh and building on all the pieces of knowledge I’ve managed to gain thus far.

Did I need to move across the country to do this? Perhaps not, but I’m still very glad that I did.

– Christina Schwartz, Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs