http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08105/873094-52.stm

Winning contest would fund Hill greening
Monday, April 14, 2008
By Diana Nelson Jones, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Fiona Cheong wants to get out the vote. The deadline is April 22, but this election is not about electoral politics. It's about the greening of the Hill District.

Ms. Cheong, an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, is one of 20 finalists nationwide vying for a Case Foundation grant of $25,000 if enough votes put her project in the final four. Case chose the 20 finalists from among 5,000 contestants.

"Reimagining Our City" is her proposal to bring Hill District and Winchester Thurston School students together to help design and create green space as part of the Hill's economic development.

She already has a $10,000 seed grant from the foundation. The top four vote-getters each will win $25,000 more to follow through. Voting is online at www.casefoundation.org, and everyone is eligible to vote.

As part of her proposal, Ms. Cheong said she has a dream "to give young people of all backgrounds a say in shaping their city" and to make this diverse council of teens "full partners" in a grass-roots community vision.

Her plan's collaborators are the founders of Find the Rivers!, a green development program in the Hill District.

Denys Candy, a community development consultant, and Terri Baltimore, vice president of neighborhood development at the Hill House Association, have met regularly with Hill residents to mold a land use plan that creates connections between development, green spaces, the rivers and adjacent neighborhoods. The Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy is a Find the Rivers! partner in raising money for an Allegheny River-Strip District overlook park.

Mr. Candy and Ms. Cheong met with a dozen students at Winchester Thurston School in Shadyside this week to pitch the idea of a student committee on the Hill District's consensus design group.

Ms. Baltimore said that Hill District and Winchester Thurston children "will get a glimpse into worlds that may seem to be polar opposites, but they will find their commonalities."

"A great part of this project will be helping [them] appreciate and acknowledge each other's strengths and challenges. We will have to concentrate as much on the relationship building as we will the project development."

She said the relationships, despite disparities in race, income and class, "may minimize the need to have this same conversation in 20 years."

The Hill House is in charge of generating interest among children who attend Weil and Miller, both pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade schools. Hill District children also will be included in the fall when a ninth-grade, university-mentored school opens at the former Milliones Middle School.

Two Winchester Thurston students are out stumping for votes and hoping to be on the youth committee.

Mireille Ngokion, a junior from Mount Washington whose career leanings are in human rights work, said the interconnectedness between use and design of space "seems like a rebuttal of the way I've seen my neighborhood park being used: Kids just sitting around, smoking or staring into space.

"There's graffiti, the slides are broken, the checkerboards nailed to the tables are crudded up and the water fountain is broken," she said of the Eileen McCoy Playground. She played in the park when she was in elementary school, when it was an inspiring place, she said.

"What's around you can define you and what you do and what happens in your life."

"Park planning sounds interesting," said Andy Persky, another junior at the school, who will canvass Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, where he lives, and the South Side to get votes for "Reimagining Our City."

Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626.

First published on April 14, 2008 at 12:00 am