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Class trip to Homewood to tour Cluster 4

Recently, Dr. Grossmann’s master-level course, Building Sustainable and Resilient Cities took a field trip to Homewood to have a tour of Cluster 4 with Operation Better Block’s (OBB) Gabby DeMarchi. The current Homewood grant project team members are in this class along with other first and second year Falk School of Sustainability graduate students. Gabby […]


Meet our newest team members!

During the first weeks of this semester, Dr. Grossmann connected with the new incoming graduate cohort and recruited the newest members for this team to continue to build on the work with the community partners in Homewood.   Lilly Freedman, MSUS ‘20, With a background in both sociology & environmental studies, she is interested mainly in […]



Camilla Cook: Tree Inventory Update #6

On August 7 and 9, I completed Blocks 1, 11, and 12 – finishing the Business and Institutional Core Cluster! On the small portion of Block 1 (Hamilton Avenue), I identified Catalpa speciosa (Northern Catalpa). On Block 11, there were Cornus florida (Flowering Dogwood), Taxodium distichum (Baldcypress), Tilia cordata (Littlelead Linden), and Liquidambar styraciflua (Sweetgum), as […]


Morgan Block: Conducting Property Surveys in West Homewood

At Operation Better Block, we are continuously conducting property surveys throughout the rest of the summer. According to our survey map, many of the homes surveyed are owned by either the City of Pittsburgh or the Urban Redevelopment Authority, which is an interesting find for anyone thinking about the future of Homewood. A stark contrast […]


Updates from Lydia Aceto

My first weeks I helped out by organizing information about the various projects OBB has done. Through access to meeting notes and emails relating to the projects, I now have a deeper understanding of how non-profits create projects and how they go about reaching out to their community. It’s very rewarding to help OBB keep […]


Meet our Homewood Community Project Team!

Thanks, Bank of America! Thanks to the generous grant funding by Bank of America, Chatham University professor, Iris Grossmann, Ph.D., of The Falk School of Sustainability and Environment, was able to recruit a team of students and other faculty members to work on what we hope to be a multi-year community-based sustainability project in Pittsburgh’s […]