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Transcript
My name is Diamonte Walker. My connection to the Hill District neighborhood, I think, runs relatively deep. My family migrated to Pittsburgh from the South back in the late 1800s and they came here to the Hill District and we’ve been here ever since.
So couple of centuries worth of influence happening in this particular neighborhood. I grew up in the neighborhood. When I was in a position to purchase a home, I decided to buy in the neighborhood because I wanted to be a part of its redevelopment. Grew up during a time when there was a lot of gang violence and gun violence. I come from a very humble background, so I’ve had to work really hard to educate myself and to live my life on my terms that’s not predestined by where I grew up and where I come from, but by my gifts, my talents and what it is that I have to offer. Growing up in the Hill District at the time, I don’t think I knew that we were poor, so to speak, because my family was so supportive in my community, was so supportive. It wasn’t until I got a little bit older that I said, oh, so you know, people live a little bit differently than we do. Growing up in a neighborhood where you don’t see doctors and lawyers and you know and politically well connected people, you may be lacking in role models in that respect. And so I’ve been very fortunate to have people in my life who were able to be strong role models for me to give me something to aspire to.
I only ever really lived in the Hill District as a child. I think I went to some of the best public schools. In the city at the time that the neighborhood schools were really strong, I was a part of the gifted program, which did a lot to help me, you know, get a strong educational foundation, grew up with, you know, my family, my brother and my sister, and a host of friends. The Hill District was our playground. Right out of high school, I went right to work. I worked for Xerox Corporation, which was a really good job for me at the time. I was very young, probably 18 or 19 years old and really wasn’t sure what I wanted to go to college for. So I started developing my corporate career and once I had a better understanding of what I thought my niche might be, I decided to go back to school and proud to say that I started that Community College, Allegheny County, and got an Associates degree from there and now I have a Bachelor’s degree in business administration and a Masters in Management and Leadership from Western Governors University. So. My college experience has been sort of done while working as a working adult and I’m a lifelong learner and so I believe that if we’re not learning, we’re essentially disintegrating like we’re not living up to our fullest potential. So I’m always trying to learn something new, not just books, not just college but I learn from young people. I learn from old people I learn from any experience that I think is gonna make me a better person and give me something to pass on to other people while I’m in the process.
Early on in my career, I really tried to build a certain level of experience and acumen and really worked on skills development and really mastering information technology, like really understanding how to use Microsoft Word and how to set up processes and make organizations more efficient. I firmly believed that if I could pair a certain level of experience with pedigree, I’d make myself a really competitive candidate when it came to interviewing for jobs, my sort of baseline career was built in the legal field. In the legal environment, working in law firms and corporate and working at banks. So I learned a lot from that and then most recently I had worked in the for profit education sector was a very tough environment to work in because it’s, it has a lot of regulations around it, but they invested in my training, they invested in my education and it’s just. It was a really good experience and then going from for profit to a nonprofit environment. So I spent some time working in my community at the Hill Community development corporation and then now I work for the Urban Redevelopment Authority. So all of those experiences have kind of culminated into allowing me to take a leadership role in what’s happening in the equitable development of businesses here in Pittsburgh. You got to think of yourself bigger than race and bigger than gender. You’ve really got to live your life based on your humanity and don’t ever let anybody marginalized or strip you of that because you’re a certain race or a certain gender. I don’t like to debate race because I think that when you want to talk about race, what you really want to debate is how human am I and I’m not going to have that conversation with people. I encourage young people to be very confident in who you are, to understand that you are fearfully and wonderfully made and bring that and put that out into the world in a positive way. You are valuable to the system, even though there’s a lot of things out there that say they hate black people. They like, don’t allow that to be your God, encompass in life as African Americans, we make a lot of contributions to this society and I think that we have to look for opportunities to be valued and appreciate it as much as we’re aware of the things that try to disenfranchise us. So just don’t get so bogged down and being disenfranchised that you’re not able to really activate your full potential.