History Books – Making the Connections

Making the Connections Book Launch Party
Friday, April 17, 2009, 4-7 pm
Shadow Loung, 5972 Baum Blvd, East Liberty
RSVP on Facebook here.

One of the final events of the Pittsburgh 250 celebration was the community connections wrap up session back in December.  The afternoon turned out to be a lot more fun that I had anticipated.  As part of the Pittbsurgh 250 birthday celebration – the folks at the Sprout Fund helped to distribute over $1,000,000 in grants to communities around western PA to celebrate pride and progress in their community.

I was honored to serve on the grant making panel and hearing about the projects at the end of the year long birthday celebration exceeded all of my expections.  People came from all over the region to talk about the projects that took place in their communities to celebrate the 250th birthday and they had great stories to share and the sprout fund had a great story teller to document the stories too.   These stories were way more than just tales of an extended birthday party.  The community connections grants engaged people in more ways than just parties.  Sitting there in December I learned about all kinds of projects that happened from these grants – from mobile agriculture labs, Jazz communities, car car ministries and some very entertaining tales of fishing trips.

So the folks at the Sprout Fund wrangled up their story teller to  document these stories in a book which debuts tomorrow – Friday April 17, 2009 at a reception at the Shadow Lounge.

I stopped by the Sprout Fund office earlier this week for a sneak peek of the book which is titled Making the Connections – it is great – they have done an outstanding job of compiling and capturing the region in a convenient book format.

Stop by the Shadow Lounge to celebrate and pick up a copy or order one from the Sprout Fund’s website here.

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