After a long and distinguished career of more than 40 years as both a reverend and community development leader, ELDI Board President The Rev. Dr. Patrice Fowler-Searcy is stepping into retirement—and with it, a new identity.

“Even though we like to think that our jobs don’t define us, in reality, they do,” Fowler-Searcy shared. “I’ve been Pastor Patrice for more than 20 years, and in a lot of ways, it did define who I was, but I recognize that I’m really just Patrice.”

And yet “just Patrice” is already a powerful thing to be.

Anyone who knows Pastor Patrice knows that she has been an integral force steering ELDI and Pittsburgh’s faith community for more than 25 years. Fowler-Searcy started as Director of Outreach at the East Liberty Presbyterian Church (ELPC), eventually rising to Director of Mission Ministries. She holds a Master of Divinity and a Doctorate in Ministry from the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, where she will continue to serve as their board chair in her retirement. She has also served on the boards of the East End Growth Fund, the Western Pennsylvania and the national boards of the  Support Association of Oikocredit, among others.

Serving on the ELDI board since 1998 and as president for the last 25 years, Fowler-Searcy’s insight and open-hearted approach to leadership have helped carry our organization through countless challenges. Working alongside our executive director Maelene Myers, Fowler-Searcy helped ensure that ELDI benefited from a depth of leadership rarely seen in the non-profit world.

“I am grateful for Patrice’s exceptional mentorship and leadership as board president of ELDI. We shared similar goals and objectives: to maintain the agency’s mission, fulfill our commitments to the community, and honor our investors and partners,” reflected Myers. “As we both learned early in this industry, it truly takes all of us to transform a neighborhood, and I am proud to have had Patrice at our helm and am even prouder to call her my friend. As we transition to our long-time vice president Lenore Williams, I am confident that we will continue to fulfill our goals and remain focused as we evolve into a modern 21st-century agency.”

Answering a call

If you had told Fowler-Searcy in the 1990s that she would dedicate her professional life to community development, she might not have believed you. She was initially invited onto the ELDI board when we were working to redevelop the Regent Theater into the Kelly Strayhorn Theater. ELPC agreed to be an anchor tenant for the development, and Fowler-Searcy stepped in as a liaison between the church and ELDI.

Having already worked at the church for two years, she had witnessed many of the community meetings that would eventually lead to East Liberty’s first community plan, A Vision for East Liberty, published in 1999.

“I watched hundreds of residents and community members come into the church over the course of about two years, sharing their thoughts and wishes for the neighborhood and shaping the community plan,” she remembers.

But it wasn’t until a summer leadership program at the Harvard School of Divinity that Fowler-Searcy began to grasp the true scope of community development—and the full breadth of her calling.

“I realized that God was calling me to be out in the community, not only to help develop the people, but also to develop the place in which people were living—to make it safer, more just, and more righteous,” she said.

Taking bold risks for East Liberty’s future

That call to action would define her leadership at ELDI. Around 2000, when we were working to bring Whole Foods and the Eastside development into the neighborhood, Fowler-Searcy was instrumental in supporting ELDI to take an investor role—a novel and risky concept for a community development corporation at the time.

“Mosites needed an approximately half a million-dollar guarantee signed to make Eastside a reality, and nobody else would sign it,” she recalled. “I said to the board, ‘We’ve got to sign this guarantee.’”

For Fowler-Searcy, this willingness to take bold risks is what she sees as one of the defining elements of ELDI’s success in revitalizing the neighborhood.

“Once we were able to do that, we could insist that private developers follow the community plan, but without having a seat at the table, it was really hard to drive that agenda initially,” she noted.

Over the years, this forward-thinking outlook—later codified in our PAFI model of community development—has powered wide-sweeping changes in the neighborhood.

Nearly 40 years after ELDI’s founding and more than 25 years after A Vision for East Liberty was published, we have redeveloped and protected more than a third of all the rental housing in the neighborhood as long-term or permanent affordable housing. Low-income homeowners have had their generational wealth restored as we stabilized the housing market and added homeownership opportunities, and the community vision of a vibrant regional commercial district has been achieved.

It’s these changes, Fowler-Searcy says, that kept her motivated.

“Although there was rhetoric out in the community about East Liberty being gentrified, I always used the language that East Liberty was being diversified,” she explained. “I knew firsthand how just and new housing was benefiting folks who had lived in some of the traditional projects in the past. I knew how bringing all of these national retailers in the community was benefiting folks because they were getting jobs that paid livable wages. I knew how access to food—East Liberty is now a food oasis—was benefiting the community.”

It’s this vision of faith in action that she hopes will remain her true legacy:

“I hope that people will say my legacy is that I led others to understand that being the church, being people of God, being a community meant that we were out in the community—not hiding behind the walls, but out doing all of the things that Christ did, which was tear down structures of oppression and seek to work for justice, equity, and peace.”

Shaping a community for all

Near the end of her tenure at ELDI and ELPC, Fowler-Searcy turned her focus to supporting those in the neighborhood who weren’t yet sharing in the neighborhood’s progress, from encouraging ELPC to reach out to the unhoused in front of the church to helping ELDI make a plan for the commercial core and north side of Penn Avenue.

Looking to the future, she hopes that East Liberty will continue to be a community for all people, regardless of their education or economic level.

As Lenore Williams and new ELDI Board Vice President Chad Restori take up her mantle, Fowler-Searcy has full faith that the community is in good hands.

“I know that they’re going to continue to do what’s best for all the people in the community, not just some. And they’re going to stay true to the community plans and the updates that have come out,” she shared.

And as for her own future, Pastor Patrice is looking forward to embracing a new chapter of life.

“I’m learning to golf. I’m doing a lot of traveling, and I’m just enjoying being,” she said. “Lately, I’ve been sharing that I’m Joanne and Bobby Fowler’s daughter, Johannon and Ian’s mother, Kaylin and Johannon, II’s grandmother, and a friend. I’m all these other things—an auntie, a sister, a daughter. And I’m still Pastor Patrice, just serving in a different way.”