Audio File
Transcript
My name is Marisa Williams. In title, I am the Regional Executive Director for the YMCA of Greater Pittsburgh. What that means is I have 4 branches that I am responsible for and have fundraising goals associated with that. When I came here, I went to the University of Pittsburgh as a student, graduated immediately, left, went to Chicago, was there for a couple of years. Came back and the way that I ended up living in the Hill District was through my husband when he came here from Long Island, New York. He was living at the Encore, and that’s a downtown apartment complex and everybody said, why are you paying so much money for an apartment? His friends told him about the Hill District and the houses that they were building and so he ended up purchasing a home. Became a first time home buyer in the Hill District about nine years ago, and so when we started dating and we got married, then I moved into the Hill District. The question was always OK, Marissa, what are you going to do in the Hill District now you live here, you’re a resident, what are you going to do? And I think I’m still trying to figure out how I can support the change that’s happening, but I’m noticing through my work with the YMCA, people are paying attention to what’s happening here and I think there’s a lot of good things that are happening. I think we just need to figure out how to promote the good stuff that’s happening in the Hill District, whether you live on Wiley, Webster, Bedford, you have little communities within the big community as well. I left banking three years ago to get into nonprofit because I wanted a job that meant something, and I wanted a job that would help other people. When I think about how does my job at the YMCA tie in to helping the community, we just most recently launched a project that I’m extremely passionate and excited about. Which is called Y Achievers and so. This program is designed to expose 7th through 12th grade students to career and college through the lens of black and brown professionals in the city of Pittsburgh. Bringing kids from various schools to the Y every 1st and 3rd Saturday and exposing them to lawyers, engineers and entrepreneurs. Folks that really care about what this next generation can potentially do and showing them all the different avenues of how to achieve success. We don’t necessarily always get to see ourselves in the positions that we ultimately want to be in. Putting this program together and thinking about how great would it be if a child said I want to be an engineer and I can introduce them to a biomedical engineer that looks like them.
One of the biggest changes that I’d like to see in this neighborhood. Because I am a newer mom, I have a 2 year old son, is the cleanliness of the playgrounds and the streets overall. I’d also like people to drive up and down the streets like they would want people to drive up and down their streets if they had toddlers and little kids living there. They have a very fast toddler and I’d like this place to be a safe space for kids to walk up and down the street, go to the playground. I think a lot of the time we spend our preteen and teenage years comparing ourselves to other people, thank God social media wasn’t a real thing when I was a teenager because I don’t know if I would have made it. God made you the way that he made you for a reason. Love yourself and you probably won’t figure out what that reason is for a little bit but I think you guys are a lot smarter than the previous generations coming up, so you might figure it out a little bit sooner and there’s beauty and the uniqueness of all of us and I think the sooner that we can figure out how to love on each other and support one another instead of constantly attempting to tear each other down, we win.