In November of 2021, The Village Collaborative of East Liberty became East Liberty’s official Registered Community Organization (taking over from ELDI), an official designation granted by the City of Pittsburgh to community groups that ensures their formal role in current development projects and neighborhood planning processes. The group was founded in 2018 by representatives from three East Liberty churches—Pentecostal Temple Church of God in Christ, Rodman Street Missionary Baptist Church, and Kingdom Light Ministries International—with support from the HELP Initiative. Ever since, they have assumed some of ELDI’s community planning duties, working with developers who are coming into the neighborhood as well as with the City on other neighborhood concerns to ensure that the voices of everyone in the community are heard.
The Vice President of the Village Collaborative is Valerie Parm. Parm was born and raised in Pittsburgh and has been an East Liberty resident for over a decade. With a deep-rooted background in the church and community organizing, she feels called to make sure no one in East Liberty gets left behind. We sat down with Parm for a Q&A to learn more about her background and the Village Collaborative’s work. She shares her journey from working as a FEMA inspector during Hurricane Katrina to the Collaborative’s current work to ensure inclusive food access at the new Shakespeare Street Giant Eagle.
Dive in below.
To start, can you tell me about your background and where your love for community organizing began?
I was born and raised in Pittsburgh. I grew up in St. Clair Village and Arlington on the South Side, and that’s where I spent most of my life. Then I got married and moved to Youngstown, Ohio, where I lived for about 30 years. I raised a family there and was active in the church. One day, a friend of mine recruited me to be a FEMA housing inspector. At that time, Hurricane Katrina had flooded New Orleans, and then directly after Hurricane Katrina was Hurricane Rita. They were desperate for inspectors, so I went off to training and down to New Orleans to help. That was a life-changing experience. When I went down there, I learned that it was like a ministry. I was a housing inspector—I went in and made sure that people’s houses were safe and secure, and if they weren’t, I would help them find alternative places to live—but at the same time, it was like being a chaplain. There were people in such great pain, who were displaced and had lost everything, sometimes even family members, and I really just took it to heart.
When I came back, I formed a ministry through my church called Hope for Nola. Through that, I took young people or volunteers back down to New Orleans to repair people’s houses. I learned a lot through that as well—that in order to make a thriving community, yes, you have to have stable housing, but you also have to have stable community members. People who live in the community have to feel like it’s safe and secure. They have to feel like it’s a place where they can thrive and not live in fear or constant worry. After that, I also did community organizing on school issues. We brought together parents, teachers, and school administrators to try to get parents more involved with the schools when they had felt turned off by them before. It was a very successful program, and all that eventually led me to come back to Pittsburgh and go to the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (PTS) to earn a Master of Divinity, with urban studies and community leadership as two of my focus areas.
How did you get involved with the Village Collaborative of East Liberty?
When I was studying at PTS, some people noticed my love and passion for people and organizing, and I was asked to join the HELP Initiative started by Pam Collier and Councilman Reverend Ricky Burgess. When they began to form the Village Collaborative, they knew I lived here in East Liberty, so they thought that I would be good for the organization and asked me to join the board. When they elected officers, I was elected vice president.
What does the Village Collaborative of East Liberty do?
Our goal is always community focused. We work on the people side. If a developer comes into East Liberty, being the Registered Community Organization, they have to come through us at the Village Collaborative. We hear what kind of development they’re building and challenge them to make sure that development is something that’s going to help the community. We’re not interested in the actual development itself—we’re interested in how the building is going to impact the community and the people who live in the community. Is it going to displace people? And if it is, is there a way that people can come back or not be displaced? When you build the development, are you going to hire people locally? Our goal as the Village Collaborative is to build up communities, but building up a community doesn’t do any good if it’s just buildings. It’s about the human beings, the people that inhabit the buildings. It’s the people who work in these buildings. It’s the people who use their commerce and exchange money with the people who own these buildings.
We want to make sure that all people—no matter their income, creed, or color—are working together so that the entire community thrives.
We are there to bridge the gap between cultures and income levels or between whatever tends to divide people, so that there are streets where people can live and grow and be productive and happy. That’s what makes a real community. When someone is down and others are soaring high, those people who are left behind tend not to be a part of the community, and you lose valuable resources. You lose ideas, talent, and voices. We need to hear all voices. Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you don’t have something to offer. They say a rising tide lifts all boats float, right? That’s the goal. We want to make sure that all boats are able to float and make a positive contribution to society. Not only are we concerned about what impacts East Liberty directly but also what impacts people on the border communities. We meet with the Larimer Consensus Group and Friendship Community Group, for example, so that we can work together to make sure that this whole area is prospering, not just one local community.
Can you give an example of how that plays out with developers?
Once there was a contractor that was going to build an office building. It was an architectural firm, and one of the things we said was, “That’s wonderful, but what are you going to do for the community once you house the offices?” And they said, “We’re thinking about janitorial work and groundskeepers.” We were a tad concerned that they thought our community members could only be groundskeepers or janitors, so we started a conversation about how we could raise up young people to understand what architects do and worked out a program where they would let high school or young college students shadow their architects in a summer program. Unfortunately, a lot of times in poorer communities, you don’t necessarily rub elbows with people who work in those kinds of jobs. That’s why these kinds of programs are excellent to give young people an opportunity to work in those spaces and get exposed to different career paths.
That speaks to the power of a mixed-income community which was the vision laid out by residents in East Liberty’s community plans.
Yes, people don’t often realize it, but when I grew up in the projects in St. Clair Village, they contained people from all walks of life. It wasn’t just segregated to poor people. The projects were initially built for people who worked in the steel mills, and oftentimes they’d get laid off and their rent went up and down based on whether they were working or not, therefore, there were all income levels and all kinds of people who lived there, which was extremely valuable.
What is the Village Collaborative working on right now?
We’re now working with Giant Eagle on their ECHO Realty re-development of their Shakespeare Street store into a Giant Eagle Market District to make sure everyone in the community is included in that development. We will be talking to them about workforce development and working with them to ensure inclusive hiring practices. While the store is closed, we are working to ensure that the community has food access.
What progress has been made so far?
We hosted a meeting on January 25, which was awesome. We got 75 people from the community to come out to Rodman Street Baptist Church where, together with Just Harvest, we met with executives from Giant Eagle. We were able to bring attention to some of the tweaks that are still needed to the programs Giant Eagle instated to help maintain food access for people in the community since the Shakespeare Street Giant Eagle closed. They have instituted free delivery in the 15206 and 15208 zip codes, which is great, but there is a segment of our community like seniors who struggle to access that as they are not computer literate. So, with Giant Eagle, we’ve put together a system where we will have people helping seniors place their orders and take them to their apartments. We also talked to them about their mobile market in East Liberty, which is in a place that is not visible and hard for people to get to. We’re working with them to maybe change the location or park there a part of the day and park somewhere else a part of the day that’s more centralized. It was a very productive meeting.
We also talked about what will happen when the Giant Eagle moves back to Shakespeare Street and becomes a Market District. People were concerned because sometimes Market District prices are not the same as normal Giant Eagle prices, and the food that is carried there is not the same. So, we talked about if we have a Hispanic aisle and an Asian food aisle, why can’t we have a Soul Food aisle? People were really responsive to that, because African Americans eat cultural foods that maybe other cultures do not partake in, and the people who shopped at Shakespeare Street always had those foods available to them.
We will be continuing to work with Giant Eagle until the issues are resolved and everybody has adequate food access in these particular zip codes. We need to make sure that no one—from those who are young and able to those who are seniors or disabled—is left behind or left out.
