Lindsey Ramsey became an aide in an infant room at a child care facility as a 19-year-old single mom looking for work so she could afford diapers for her daughter. Never having thought about entering the sector, she learned how to care for children from a group of passionate caregivers.

“I had no idea what I was doing,” said Ramsey, 34, now the executive director of Shady Lane School in Point Breeze North. “But we had a wonderful group of educators who helped uplift new people entering the field … and they taught me how to change diapers and be a mom … I started to fall in love with early childhood education.”

The pandemic, though, exacerbated a multitude of underlying problems that had long haunted the care industry, such as high costs for parents and low wages for employees, according to child care advocates and providers. Now some child care practitioners are anticipating crisis.

While Congress injected $39 billion into child care through the American Rescue Plan Act [ARPA], it didn’t address underlying problems in child care infrastructure. 

More than half of that funding ended in September, igniting fears over a mass closure of child care facilities dubbed the “child care cliff.”

While the end of federal funds will not lead to wholesale closures, Cara Ciminillo, executive director of Trying Together, an Allegheny County-based child care advocacy group, said the decline of providers will continue if long term funding is not brought in.

Despite the mounting challenges, Ramsey said caring for the community and her love of childhood education keep her working in the field.

“I’m driven by equity, because it is so important that we are elevating those who don’t have the resources, who don’t have enough to be able to succeed and thrive in life,” Ramsey said. “Having access to early childhood [care] early on, is one of the leading contributing parts to human development. So I consider it to be a key component to equity, and that’s why I am rooted and stuck here.”

Ramsey is one of many child care providers in Allegheny County who shared concerns with the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. They fear that affordable and accessible child care could take major hits without new funding and government resources. 

Pennsylvania shuttered 2,189 child care programs from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to June 2023, Emily Neff, Trying Together’s public policy director, said in an email. And even with new facilities opening, the net loss was 597.

Neff said 181 child care programs permanently closed in Allegheny County from 2019 through November of this year for a net loss of 18 in the county.

Diane Barber, executive director of the Pennsylvania Child Care Association, partly blames the closures on high operational costs of facilities and rapid staff turnover that occurred throughout the pandemic.

Barber said utility bills rose over the pandemic, compounding bills for child care providers and families. 

As the pandemic dragged on, employees at child care facilities across the state left for better-paying — and often easier — positions in public schools or even at retail locations, Barber said. And when the pandemic wound down, they didn’t return.

“I’ve heard this not once, I’ve heard this multiple times, that [a new child care staff worker] will show up and they’re gone by lunch because this is just not the job that they thought it was going to be,” Barber said. “They thought they were gonna play with kids and that’s not what it’s all about.”

Ramsey, who worked at Shady Lane as an educator before the arrival of COVID-19, returned as an administrator in the midst of the pandemic, while a budget deficit and record low enrollment prompted talk of closure.

Ramsey said Shady Lane received more than $200,000 in federal funds through the county to expand its programming for young children to accommodate eight new infants and 10 new toddlers. The grants sat on top of additional federal funds it used to subsidize employee wages.

“And that’s what really saved us,” Ramsey said of the Allegheny County grant. “We had a long infant-toddler waitlist. That gave us the ability to open more classrooms.”

How one of the county’s youngest departments distributed ARPA funds 

Allegheny County allocated $20 million of its $380 million ARPA allotment to organizations providing or advocating for child care under the designation “Healthy Childhood Environments,” according to the county ARPA spending dashboard. 

The county established the Department of Children Initiatives and assigned it to administer ARPA funds in December of 2021 following the recommendations in a report from the Allegheny County Children Fund’s working group.

So far, the department has disbursed a little over $6.1 million across 25 child care providers, advocacy groups and a consultancy firm, according to Mathew Singer, the chief of staff at the Allegheny County Controller’s office.

Rebecca Mercatoris, the department’s executive director since its inception in 2021, said the first goal when allocating the money was to build the capacity of existing part-time and full-time child care providers. 

Federal spending deadlines stipulate the county needs to allocate the remaining $13.9 million to organizations during 2024 and distribute it within two years.

Mercatoris said since the department’s establishment, it’s focused on mapping out the problems impacting child care in Allegheny County. Now, it’s trying to solve them. 

Minimal funds and shrinking staff make a ‘bad combination’

Mercatoris said one of the biggest problems facing child care — one described by many providers and advocates — relates to its business model. Parents across demographics need affordable child care to get back to work, while private child care providers need to turn a profit to retain staff and keep slots for children open. 

“I think one of our largest challenges is around family access and affordability and being able to support families in meeting their child care needs while also ensuring providers have the funds they need to be able to hire great staff and be able to keep them with them,” Mercatoris said.

Despite a constant demand for child care, there’s not enough people staying or going into the workforce due to low wages. This, coupled with a lack of financial support on the county, state and federal level, makes for what Ramsey describes as a “bad combination” that providers can’t keep up with. 

“[Providers] don’t want to price gouge families because they know families can’t afford it,” Ramsey said. “So in turn, they are taking the loss and this loss has impacted the sector to the point where we’re at the brink of collapse.”

According to Ramsey, even after the mandatory shutdowns ended, many facilities couldn’t open because all of their staff either had left for higher paying jobs or their older staff couldn’t come back to work due to risk of exposure to COVID. 

“People started to realize that they had to increase their wages to get people to come back to work there,” Ramsey said. “So those mom and pop centers and nonprofits struggled financially because they were having to raise wages with money that they didn’t have.” 

The Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh [BCAP] provides free after-school programs to families and students in the Brentwood area, but had to close down a program it started in 2019 at Concord Elementary School.

Khara Timsina, BCAP’s executive director, said BCAP will need more funding to continue to operate its after-school and summer programs into next year.

Deborah Gallagher, the director of the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center Early Head Start program, said it’s become increasingly hard to find people who are both interested and qualified to continue working in early child care facilities.

Gallagher oversees both COTRAIC’s Early Head Start program in Hazelwood and the partnerships the program has with several other day care centers.

According to Gallagher, Head Start and Early Head Start received ARPA funding in 2021 and 2022, some of which covered quarterly bonuses for staff. But when the bonuses stopped, Gallagher lost staff. Now she is paying “hefty substitute fees” for subs from a staffing company called Childcare Careers.  

“Parents can’t find care because we can’t find people,” said Gallagher, noting that if facilities had the funds to find and train people the industry would pick up. 

‘I’m just trying to get good care for my kid’

Parents said issues of affordability and long wait lists existed long before pandemic-era staffing shortages added to their woes..

For Shawna Ramsey, 28, of Baldwin Borough, the high cost of child care pushed her out of her career. 

A mother of three, Ramsey – who is not related to Lindsey Ramsey – said she had her first child while in college. In nursing school, she said she couldn’t find a child care facility with an open spot, let alone a facility that matched her budget stretched thin by student loan payments. 

She became a nurse, had another child and then a third — but her nursing salary remained the same. She carried a surrogate child to pay for her student loans, and ultimately decided to leave the nursing field to focus on motherhood.

“I think it’s really interesting that [child care] costs so much when workers get paid so little,” Ramsey said. “Private owners seem to be profiting off of people in need.”

The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, estimates that it costs the average family in Pennsylvania $987 monthly to keep one infant in child care. A median child care worker in Pennsylvania would have to spend more than half of their earnings to put their own child in infant care.

After serving in the Navy, Liz Sterrett, was wrapping up her degree and looking for a child care spot for her 3-year-old daughter. She found a facility that would let her do janitorial work in exchange for a spot, but after college she had to start paying $600 a month — a cost she can’t wrap her head around six years later.

“I’ve had to shape my life and career around the fact that I cannot afford child care by myself,” said Sterrett, 37, of Bellevue. “No matter how much I scream and shout and cry, it doesn’t become affordable.”

Sterrett’s current employer lets her work from home several days a week, saving her hundreds a month in child care. She said it’s not ideal, and her now 9-year-old daughter has “several meltdowns because I can’t give her my full attention,” but child care is still a luxury she can’t afford. 

“Access to child care is absolutely abhorrent,” Sterrett said. “There is no reason why I should be struggling … I am not living some fancy metropolitan lifestyle. I’m just trying to get good care for my kid.”

‘Band-Aid on a historical problem’

While funding initiatives like ARPA sought to help facilities that took a hit during the pandemic build back their staff and resources, providers point to broader inequities that contribute to the issues they are facing.

“[ARPA] was not enough, because it was a Band-Aid on a historical problem,” Lindsey Ramsey said. “The historical problem is that the field was never invested in enough because the work isn’t valued and that has further snowballed into an issue of staffing … of the field not looking attractive enough to join, of programs not being able to truly reflect the true costs of the work that they’re doing.” 

According to Ciminillo, the average hourly wage for a Pennsylvania child care employee is $12.43 — not enough, but hard to raise because doing so would increase the cost of tuition for parents.

“We’re competing for folks and we’re not being successful because we can’t get the wages up and it’s because we don’t have a larger government investment in the system,” Ciminillo said.

Ciminillo described the child care system as already “very fragile” prior to the pandemic given that providers were not compensated, valued, appreciated or invested in enough. 

Lindsey Ramsey added that historically women, especially women of color, are the ones who provide child care, which she said is likely the reason why there seems to be less focus on funding the field. 

Maria Manautou, a former worker at a child care center in Pittsburgh, said better pay would be the fast route to alleviating staffing issues.

“If you have two jobs, and the one offers you … $15 and you’re not having that kind of stress and then the one offers you $12 and you’re stressed all day, then you can see how people end up picking something different,” Manautou said.

Ciminillo said the federal government and local communities began to realize how much they needed child care once – after the initial weeks of shutdown in 2020 – essential workers needed to get back to work but couldn’t do so without care. 

 To build a sustainable future child care sector, Ramsey is calling for  a “change and shift in the narrative of how we are looking at the early childhood field.” 

“At a federal level, there needs to be policy put in place for true equitable wages that reflect the level and importance of the work that’s being done,” Ramsey said. 

Calling on Congress: Providers say short term funding is not enough

Barber said short-term funding initiatives like ARPA only address problems in the child care sector as they arise, failing to address the underlying problems.

She compares the influx of short-term funding to building with Jenga blocks that keep moving around.

“Then we know how that game ends, right?” Barber asked. “Everything falls apart.”

Ciminillo said Allegheny County needs to establish a recurring revenue stream to support early learning and out-of-school programming. And for that to happen, she said local officials must hear their constituents’ demands.

“Each of us, no matter our position, no matter our age, no matter whether we have children or not, play a role in affecting young children, their families, and their caregiver’s lives,” Ciminillo said. “So it’s just so important that everybody show up and use their sphere of influence in support of that.”

Democrats in Congress introduced legislation in September to supplement child care funding by distributing $80 billion over five years when ARPA expires.

According to a press release announcing the legislation, this funding request would support more than 220,000 child care providers nationally that serve a total of more than 10 million children. It has not yet received a vote.

U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Aspinwall, and U.S. House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, a Democrat from Massachusetts, toured La Petite Academy, a new child care facility at Pittsburgh International Airport, earlier this month and spoke about the issues plaguing child care and what they deemed as largely partisan opposition to potential solutions.

Clark said that without Republican support, she’s “not very optimistic” Congress will be able to get the $16 billion in supplemental funding passed.

Deluzio, a father of three and member of the Congressional Dads Caucus, described the “death spiral” child care providers enter when they’re forced to increase rates to retain staff but, in turn, price out families, which lowers their revenues. It’s a problem, he said, that can only be resolved through federal support of the child care industry.

“This is about lowering costs. This is about giving folks the ability to work and earn and be part of society,” Deluzio said in regards to the $16 billion funding request, “The federal government’s got to be there to help strengthen [the child care sector], invest and ultimately bring down costs for people.”

Still, several child care advocates say even ambitious fixed-term funding initiatives won’t solve the structural problems plaguing the sector.

“This can’t be a one-time funding,” Lindsey Ramsey said. “This has to be funding that is ongoing [and] sustainable, that’s built into government policy.”

Correction: Shady Lane School is in Point Breeze North. An earlier version of this story included an incorrect neighborhood.

Betul Tuncer and James Paul are students at the University of Pittsburgh. They completed fall internships with the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. Tanya Babbar, a student at the University of Pittsburgh, and Erin Yudt, a student at Point Park University, completed fall internships with PublicSource. Juliet Martinez is managing editor of The Homepage, a community newspaper serving Greater Hazelwood and surrounding neighborhoods.

The post ‘Band-Aid on a historical problem’: Child care providers expect slow collapse of sector without long-term aid appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

For some young voters in Allegheny County, local elections are just as important as national ones – and perhaps even more important. 

Rafay Khan-Afridi, a sophomore political science and economics major at the University of Pittsburgh, believes that having a “livable environment” is among the main issues that young voters could have had an impact on through this year’s election, which took place Tuesday. 

“When it comes to things like rent … waste management … the quality of the public entertainment and options we have in Oakland, all these different issues play into having a neighborhood that’s livable,” Khan-Afridi said. “That’s something that is very directly affected by municipal elections by people who are in charge of the county, the County Council and [county executive].” 

Headlining this year’s election is a rematch between Democrat Matt Dugan and Republican nominee Stephen Zappala for district attorney and a faceoff between Democrat Sara Innamorato and Republican Joe Rockey to replace outgoing County Executive Rich Fitzgerald. Dugan bested Zappala, a lifelong Democrat, in the Democratic primary, prompting the career politician to run as a Republican instead. 

Voters also cast ballots for a new justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and a slew of  mayors, councilmembers and commissioners across the county’s 130 municipalities.

“When it comes to young voters there’s a lot we want to see and I think it translates into a general frustration with the lack of change,” Khan-Afridi said, noting that some of the candidates fall short in representing young voters.

One year ago, Pennsylvania’s youth turnout rate for the 2022 midterm was 31.7% — the sixth highest in the nation, according to CIRCLE. With Gen Z voters overwhelmingly boosting Democratic candidates, according to the Pew Research Center, they might have played a vital role in this year’s Allegheny County elections. 

Although he wasn’t passionate about many of the candidates on his ballot, Khan-Afridi said he felt it was still important to vote. 

“I voted more along the principle of harm reduction as opposed to being super passionate about any of the candidates,” Khan-Afridi said. “A lot of the candidates running on both sides were representative of what’s currently already [represented] in the system rather than something new or refreshing.” 

Grace Kozak, a first-year funeral studies major at Point Park University, voted using a mail-in ballot because she found it challenging to change her address from central Pennsylvania to  Pittsburgh. She said her focus this election cycle was on the school board race in her hometown and the magisterial judge race in her district. 

For the school board races in particular, Kozak said book banning was the main issue that informed her vote. The conversation around book bannings and censorship has remained at the forefront of many school board meetings and has been a contentious voter issue for many parents and students this election. 

“We’re trying to get some books unbanned just because I think it’s very important for everybody to have access to literature that they want to read, and literature that they can make informed decisions about,” Kozak said. “It’s not for a certain group or a party to decide. It should be up to that person to decide what they want to read.”

She added that local elections are especially important as they allow people to have a say in the political and government decisions that affect them on a daily basis. 

For some students at the University of Pittsburgh, the Allegheny County Council’s 10th District race stood out, with longtime activist Carl Redwood on the ballot. Matt Jurich, a sophomore political science and philosophy major at Pitt, said there aren’t many candidates who go against the grain of the two-party system, which is why Redwood’s independent candidacy and empathy-led policies resonated with him. 

“I think that [Redwood] represents what people in Pittsburgh really want to see get done and not just people who have been in the same position for like 30 years, so there’s been some good energy around Carl on campus,” Jurich said. 

Minimum wages, taxes, student loan debt and health costs are especially important issues for Jurich, who said young voters are “desperate for some kind of change outside of the current system.” 

“A lot of things were promised to our generation in previous elections and people have not followed through on them at all,” Jurich said. 

Although Khan-Afridi is not in the 10th District, he said he found Redwood’s candidacy interesting. He said Redwood’s vocal support for Palestinians during the recent escalation of violence in Gaza and Israel was especially important as it reflects what many young voters care about. 

“He has a lot of views that aren’t necessarily as popular among politicians but are super, super popular among voters, which is why I’m so passionate to see somebody like him run for election,” Khan-Afridi said. 

Today’s election was the first in which Grace Cuevas voted in Pittsburgh. Cuevas, a sophomore political science and philosophy major at Pitt, said she was excited to research each candidate and make a change in the community. Redwood was also one of the main candidates she was interested in because, she felt, he could make a “tangible change” in local government. 

With rising rent prices and poor housing conditions, Cuevas said Pitt students tend to express their frustration with life in Oakland. Despite this, too many students don’t see the value of voting in local elections, Cuevas added. 

“It’s really important for students to understand that there is a way for us to have a voice and for us to have representation that will allow us to feel safer and more comfortable and happier living in Oakland,” Cuevas said. “So I think that it’s really important for students to [understand] the issues that are presented in these local elections and [vote] for people that they think can make a change for them.” 

On Point Park’s campus, the lack of attention to local elections was also on younger voters’ minds. 

Madison Kline, a junior child psychology major at Point Park, said younger people typically don’t care as much about local elections as they do presidential elections, even though in some cases local elections are more important. Kline made a plan to vote later in the day at her polling place in Homestead, and shared that abortion rights and safety in schools would go into her voting decisions. 

“I feel like a lot of young people don’t follow local elections, since it’s not as big as a presidential election or the governor’s race,” Kline said. “They aren’t as informed and I feel like a lot of people don’t even know that it’s election day.” 

Carnegie Mellon University suspended all classes until 5 p.m. for its inaugural Democracy Day, which aims to encourage young voter turnout, according to the school’s website. Pitt, Chatham University and Point Park still held classes, meaning students had to find time within their schedules to vote if they hadn’t already sent in a mail-in ballot. 

Andrew Salzman, a sophomore business administration major at CMU, described himself as fiscally conservative but socially liberal, and said he typically votes with a split ballot. Originally from Southern California but voting in Pittsburgh, Salzman questioned whether college students should be allowed to vote in local elections because, in his view, they often don’t take time to learn about the candidates. 

“A lot of the time they’re not really engaged in local politics,” Salzman said. “It doesn’t really affect them because they’re only here for four years and like they’re kind of just voting for the party they usually agree with without even reading up on anyone or the positions.”

Anabella Arziate, a first-year information systems major at CMU, said she voted for Dugan and Innamorato, though she couldn’t recall the rest of her ballot. Still, she said every selection she made was blue.

Arziate said unlike left-leaning Hawaii, where she’s from, Pennsylvania can veer to either side of the political aisle, and she’s excited that the first vote she cast was in a battleground state.

“In Hawaii, I’m just adding more to the pile, and then here, the pile size actually matters,” Arziate said.

Like Arziate, Jackson Adkins, a junior management information systems major at Chatham and the executive president of the student government, came out ready to vote Democratic. He said as he was about to enter a polling place on Chatham’s campus, the issues of abortion access and gun control were at the top of his mind.

Adkins said following a 2016 shooting at his father’s law office in St. Paul, Minn., that left one person dead, he wants to see local officials take action on gun laws.

“I think guns are very dangerous, and I think that the more guns we have in circulation, the more dangerous our society becomes,” Adkins said.

Bennett Spencer, a junior interior design major at Chatham, voted using a mail-in ballot and said she had a particular interest in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court race. She said she voted for candidate Dan McCaffery mainly because of his staunch support of abortion rights.

Spencer said in her three years at Chatham she’s seen voter turnout increase drastically, with most of the votes cast leaning blue. She said she hopes this will turn the political tide away from older politicians and replace them with fresher faces. 

“We want to keep our rights, and I think we also want change,” Spencer said. “Lots of the government leaders are pretty old and I think they don’t think as far ahead as we’re thinking because we’re going to have to deal with the repercussions of all the stuff going on right now.” 

Beyond just voting in every election, Khan-Afridi encouraged other young voters to do their research on candidates and get involved in politics year-round to advocate for what they care about. 

“Go vote and do more than that,” he said. “Get passionate about the issues and try and make a change.” 

Betul Tuncer and James Paul are students at the University of Pittsburgh serving as Pittsburgh Media Partnership interns this semester. James Paul can be reached at pjames@pointpark.edu. Betul Tuncer can be reached at betulstuncer@gmail.com.

The post Young voters cast ballots with abortion access, student loans and book bans on their minds appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

In the wake of the Tree of Life shooting in 2018, communities in Pittsburgh began looking for ways to heal from and combat hate-based violence. That search led community leaders in Pittsburgh to form a global conference that aims to “eradicate hate” through education and action.

“Eradicating hate, when you say it initially, sounds like something that is impossible to do. We’ve had hate as long as we’ve had human beings,” said Chuck Moellenberg, president of the Eradicate Hate Global Summit. “So the question is, ‘What can I do that will really make a difference?’”

Now in its third year, the Eradicate Hate Global Summit continues to bring together professionals and leaders from different fields to lead conversations grounded in ending hate-fueled violence worldwide. This year the summit will run from Sept. 27-29 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center and includes a roster of over 300 academics, global leaders, law enforcement officials and more.

“The purpose of the summit is to provide a forum for leading experts around the world and for many different professions and sectors to come together, exchange ideas and then develop and deploy effective solutions to reduce hate-motivated violence,” said Moellenberg.

Meryl Ainsman, the secretary of the summit, said to confront hate-based violence, the summit aims to educate and inform attendants about hate in its many forms. This year’s summit will feature discussions on violence against the LGBTQ+ community, identifying red flag behaviors among youths and video game violence.

“The only way to combat anything is education,” said Ainsman. “Whatever the subject matter is, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no way you can talk rationally or do anything about it unless you really have intimate knowledge.”

Read more: Holocaust educator works to strengthen community resilience and tolerance amid rising antisemitism

Ainsman said outside of the plenary sessions hosted throughout the summit, over 20 working groups will meet in private to discuss targeted initiatives. Groups focused on education, sports, the military and more meet year-round to address hate in their areas, according to Ainsman.

The working groups are part of what goes into making sure the summit goes “beyond just talk,” Moellenberg said.

“The working groups are given a specific project, what we call a ‘deliverable’ to turn an idea into a practical, concrete action item,” said Moellenberg. “It could be a best practices manual, it could be some sort of program, but it’s a specific action item that communities or professions can then use back in their own communities.”

Following the Tree of Life shooting, which prompted a wave of community activism,  attorney Laura Ellsworth and University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Emeritus Mark Nordenberg, current co-board chairs of the summit, formed a group to discuss how to combat antisemitism. As Ainsman and many others joined the group, the ideas expanded into confronting all hate-based violence, which laid the groundwork for the Eradicate Hate Global Summit.

Read more: Uncovering Pittsburgh’s long-hidden Asian American history made me feel at home — and I learned I wasn’t alone

The summit first took place in 2021 and has since become a nonprofit organization as of January.

“Originally, at the very, very beginning, it was really to combat antisemitism,” said Ainsman. “But as we started meeting and talking, we realized that unfortunately, there are many, many identity groups that are victims of violence-fueled hate.”

When the summit first launched it featured 100 speakers — including George W. Bush — and hundreds of attendees, according to Moellenberg. This year he said there will be more than 350 speakers, with an expected “uptick in attendance” as well.

Ellsworth asked Michael Bernstein, who serves as chair of the interim governance committee of the reimagined Tree of Life, to participate in a steering committee to help shape the summit’s focus last year. He said hearing from survivors of hate crimes is among the most direct ways to educate people on the harms of hate-based violence.

Read more: ‘We were all blindsided’: Chatham University faces multimillion-dollar budget hole, lays off staff, cuts benefits

“The impact has to be how we change the world we live in moving forward,” said Bernstein, who last year participated on a summit panel addressing survivor testimonies. “So I think if anything, it gives heightened significance to turn the book, turn the page on this episode. Now, how do we really affect change?”

Moellenberg said unlike other conferences that tend to focus on individual sectors, the summit hopes to bring together people from all different perspectives and “put them all in a room together to exchange ideas, to come up with new solutions that we hope will make a difference and reduce all of this hate-motivated violence that we are seeing.”

Ainsman said she doesn’t want Pittsburgh to be defined by its darkest day.

“We want Pittsburgh to be known as the place not of the worst antisemitic act in the history of the United States,” said Ainsman. “We want to be known for the good work we’re doing and not for the terrible thing that happened here.”

Guests can purchase single or multi-day passes online at the Eradicate Hate Global Summit website. Organizers will also livestream the summit for free.

Betul Tuncer and James Paul are students at the University of Pittsburgh serving as Pittsburgh Media Partnership interns this semester.

James Paul can be reached at pjames@pointpark.edu. 

Betul Tuncer can be reached at betulstuncer@gmail.com.

The post Third annual global summit combats hate-fueled violence through education, community action appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.