By MARTY LEVINE
Much of Christine R. Dahlin’s community work — for which she was one of this year’s winners of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Public Service Awards — circles round to her role as biology professor at Pitt–Johnstown. For the last 13 years, she has taught not only biology’s general education courses for freshmen and sophomores but also ornithology, animal behavior, wildlife management and, lately, a new class, “Apocalypse How?”
“The goal is how to achieve a (sustainable) lifestyle on the planet — how to live in a manner to share resources with all the other organisms on the planet,” she says of the class lessons.
There are biology lessons even in the main focus of her service: Building and running a program called CommuniTEAMS, which provides fun and educational programs for youth and their families in a large public housing community in Johnstown.
The “TEAMS” in CommuniTEAMS stands for technology (and teamwork), engineering, arts, math and science, Dahlin explains. All its programs, in addition to offering a meal, provide multiple activities themed around such subjects as STEM, health, sports or literacy. The kids may learn to build a catapult, identify local rocks brought by Pitt–Johnstown geology students or get acquainted with Dahlin’s cockatoo Yoko.
Lately the programs have been in partnership with Flood City Fitness Academy, another Johnstown group, which sometimes brings the kids to Pitt’s local campus, where they can talk to and get a little impromptu mentoring from both faculty and students.
Dahlin also serves as a member of Johnstown’s Unity Coalition, which for several decades has been bringing together different groups within the region, from different backgrounds. This association helped to make the CommuniTEAMS group part of the Johnstown NAACP’s Juneteenth festival, for instance — to which she also brings her cockatoo.
Her biology expertise stretches also to several pollinator gardens she has helped to create in town. Insect species are vanishing at an alarming rate through loss of habitat, Dahlin notes, and she has worked with the local Girl Scouts to create a garden that especially attracts, and thus feeds, declining pollinator species at the Greater Johnstown Elementary School. She also has worked with Johnstown campus biology students to build a pollinator garden there, which through several semesters has been expanded and improved, gaining educational signs as well.
In her spare time, Dahlin contributes science-focused features for free to the local paper, the Tribune-Democrat. They’re about “whatever topic I feel is pressing at a given time,” such as birds or biodiversity or why we should plant native species, she says. “I care about getting information out to the public that I really value, because I think the public really needs to know about the issues.”
As a personal service project, Dahlin traps feral cats in her neighborhood to have them neutered or spayed and returns them to the wild — sometimes. When the cats are friendly, she fosters and adopts them out.
Followers of the social media site she has set up for this project are always asking how many cats she has. At the moment there are nine, including two recent kittens. She had spent years, she said, trying to trap their mother, who had litter after litter. “I finally got her this summer,” Dahlin says with some satisfaction:
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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