Power of 32 - This Weekend

It's always nice to chat with Selena Schmidt. Whip smart and funny, she's always (ALWAYS) got good things to say, good things to think about.

My chat with Selena the other day revolved around something called the "Power of 32." It's a political (though in a completely non-partisan sense) initiative covering the 31 counties surrounding Allegheny County (hence the "32") and this weekend, they're going to have a training camp of sorts downtown.

Here's the place:

Regional Enterprise Tower
425 Sixth Ave. – downtown
Friday – 23rd Floor
Saturday – 31st Floor

9 to 5 on Friday
9 to 3:30 on Saturday

So what is it all about?

From the initiative's website:

The Power of 32, launched in May 2009, is a two-year process to provide an opportunity for every resident of the 32-county, 4-state region to participate in creating a shared vision for the region's best future. The 32 counties included in the visioning project- fifteen in southwestern Pennsylvania, ten in northern West Virginia, five in eastern Ohio, and two in western Maryland - represent the economic region centered on metropolitan Pittsburgh.

For Selena, this means that the 32 counties when banded together can leverage the ideas and resources necessary to create a thriving region by 2025. It's an area, she says, that's bigger than Switzerland.

The first step, she says, is to find out what issues the people in those 32 counties think are important. That's the point of the training camp - to train people to go out into those communities to find out what's going on. Only when that's established, can solutions be found.

Here's the initiative's contact page. And if you see Selena, tell her I said hey.