By SHANNON O. WELLS
As much as Pitt is a flagship for higher learning, the University also is an engine for investment, ideas and innovations for the economic and cultural vitality of the region and its areas of greatest need.
Pitt’s Anchor Initiatives, with Shatara Murphy now in place as its assistant vice chancellor, is geared toward amplifying the University’s regional impact of buying, building and hiring locally, and engaging in community-based partnerships, real estate development and life-sciences innovations.
“The creation of an assistant vice chancellor for Anchor Initiatives, for me, demonstrates that (Pitt) is institutionalizing this work,” said Lina Dostillo, vice chancellor of engagement and community affairs. “It’s pulling the work into its foundation. It’s everyday practice. And that’s important.”
These Anchor Initiatives, part of the Plan for Pitt, regularly engage University resources from Facilities Management, construction, procurement and Human Resources to invest in areas such as workforce development and housing affordability, and Dostillo said, “it needs to be somebody’s job to make sure that the work happens in a centralized, coherent, coordinated way.”
Taking on the new role in late August, Murphy leads Anchor Initiatives’ ongoing coordination, management and development. She will serve, a statement from Dostillo’s office said, as a “strategic leader, thought partner, project manager and collaborator” to foster relationships with Pitt and community-based stakeholders “that advance the University’s role as an anchor in the region.”
A Pittsburgh native and Pitt alum, Murphy comes from Highmark Health, where she served as the community health and employee engagement programs manager. There, she led direct community health initiatives throughout Highmark’s footprint, as well as company volunteerism and employee engagement programs in 10 regions across four states.
Murphy describes her community affairs-oriented career as focused on “how organizations are intentionally impacting the lives of residents in a positive way — and looking for positive outcomes,” she said.
She finds distinct parallels between previous responsibilities and her Anchor Initiatives role, particularly in the aspects of breaking down barriers to accessing services and opportunities.
“I look at this work as very similar: diving into our policies, our hiring practices, those barriers that might prevent Black businesses from doing business with universities or other institutions of those sizes,” she said. “It’s all centered around improving the quality of life of residents.”
Real-time connections
Prior to Highmark, Murphy was deputy director for community affairs in the city of Pittsburgh’s Department of Public Safety. Comprising five offices focused on community and economic-engagement strategies, the department sprung from a Murphy-led initiative to connect a “focused deterrent” model of policing — combining law enforcement, social services and community mobilization — with additional programming, investment and capacity-building strategies.
Noting that city government “can be an intimidating institution,” Murphy said she examined policies and hiring practices to ensure equity, “so response times don’t vary from a predominantly white community to a community of color, (and) making sure that there’s access.”
Working in communities with high poverty levels, she found many returning citizens lacked access to health care facilities, job opportunities, connecting bus routes, “and the list goes on,” she said. “So it really affected the quality of life of individuals in those communities.”
Dostillo said Murphy’s community connections in the region — from “the head of a company or the head of an organization or grassroots leaders, or resident leaders in their communities — and instinctual approach to bringing the right parties to the table will serve her well in the role.
“Shatara is, we think, the best person to take on this inaugural role (at Pitt),” Dostillo said. “I have just been so impressed by Shatara’s vast network, and her agile ability to be connected with people in real time. And I think that’s the kind of leader that this effort needs.”
Clyde Pickett, vice chancellor for equity, diversity & inclusion, said Murphy is a key resource in building “proactive and collaborative relationships” as Pitt examines new approaches to how it buys and hires.
“I would say that (Murphy is) incredibly connected with the community in terms of her professional relationships,” he said, and will bring Pitt on board “with some constituent groups that will help us out, and a new, fresh set of eyes, and another incredibly competent professional to help us move this work forward.”
Buying, hiring in the backyard
Murphy will play a pivotal role in supporting the Anchor Initiatives’ “Buy, Build, Hire Local” program. It is dedicated to hiring more of Pitt’s business neighbors, helping those businesses grow and awarding more construction, service and purchasing contracts across the region.
The goal is to ensure that as the University grows, it creates opportunity — not just in communities, but with them, the Anchor Initiatives website says. Through this approach, Pitt is “developing lasting change” that supports its neighbors, communities, and the University “for generations.”
Some successes of the program from fiscal year 2022-23 include:
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191 full-time staff employees hired from Oakland, Homewood, the Hill District and greater Hazelwood.
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$161 million in direct construction and non-construction investment was made with Pittsburgh-based suppliers and vendors.
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21 percent minority business enterprise construction contract participation (July to December 2022).
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40 percent minority- and women-owned business contract participation for the construction of the new chilled water plant.
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20 major categories of procurement identified, including IT services, security services, painting and more, that over the next five years are conducive to being satisfied locally.
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Created an operating engineer apprenticeship program, developed business capacity-building programs, and placed a dedicated employment development counselor within focus neighborhoods.
Murphy’s role in Buy, Build, Hire Local is based on “the procurement side: around hiring, making sure that we are tapping into local talent within those four specific communities (Oakland, Hazelwood, Hill District and Homewood),” she said, “making sure that we are looking locally first — really diving into that Anchor framework.
“The thing that I really like about this work, and what I was most excited about, is that it’s intentional work,” she added about the diversity initiatives. “There is an intention to make sure that we are bringing more diverse talent into the University, and the focus on making sure that we address those economic inequities.”
A regional model
Pitt, like most large-scale hiring institutions, has what Dostillo called a “very rigorous” bidding process for evaluating businesses, but Anchor Initiatives aim to make the process “more relevant and doable at the local level.”
This also extends to hiring, where an employment counselor in Pitt’s Human Resources office works out of Pitt’s Community Engagement Centers “to meet with job seekers, help them work through our process of application, and make sure that there’s a warm handoff to hiring managers so that they are among a group of other applicants being evaluated.
“It’s a good example,” of Anchor Initiative goals, Dostillo said. “I think scale is typically the headwind (challenge) that is often at the heart of Anchor work, and that’s for any institution of Pitt’s size. Another is really thinking about the regional disparities that do exist.”
That is, focusing on longstanding barriers and challenges for businesses and individuals historically underrepresented in contracts and hiring with the institution, she says. “The strategies are (based on), ‘Let’s address those barriers and challenges.’”
The Anchor Initiatives, Pickett said, position Pitt as a regional standard bearer.
“Each region has its own challenges. Ours has its own,” he says. “And so I think the Anchor Initiatives will allow us to continue to maximize and impact what we do by helping our region in different ways.
“And I think the fortunate thing about this is to understand that we can continue to have an impact in how we invest in community, how we operate as an organization,” he added, “and become a model for others to make that same investment.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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