By Lydia Morin
CONNECT’s Executive Director Lydia Morin inspiring attendees at our Hot Takes and Hot Snacks event in February 2024.
Six years ago this month, I graduated from Leadership Pittsburgh’s Leader Development Initiative (LDI) and less than a year later I was changing things up at CONNECT’s 10 year anniversary legislative session as their Executive Director. I came in hot and ready to shake things up, and I can say with no doubt that we have done so!
I applied the human centered approach that I was trained in at the Luma Institute during LDI, and subsequently mentored by Abby Wilson while she was the Director of Policy at the Allegheny County Health Department and a trainer at Luma.
Every bit of transformation this organization has seen has at least a crumb of the hands-on facilitation training I got in their downtown offices. Their training reinforced the theory I studied in organizational development, strategy and leadership courses in the Heinz School at Carnegie Mellon University. In turn, I have infused the jobs CONNECT’s growth created with human centered design protocol, because all the systems we are trying to change start with the humans.
Whenever I meet with any of our CONNECTers, I am blown away by the depth of their passion and expertise for local government. We’ve got municipal officials in our ranks who served in some of the highest positions in universities, multinational corporations, start-ups, and all levels of government. It’s incredible, the braintrust we have that just exists among us. It’s the way our braintrust moves, breathes, and produces that has been fascinating to me from my first week as executive director and the way we are evolving that is occupying my mind the most right now.
Whenever I meet with any of our CONNECTers, I am blown away by the depth of their passion and expertise for local government
Lydia Morin
I’ve been noodling around with publishing a guide to our human centered work: The CONNECT Guide to Regional Transformation. I’ve been ad hoc training and coaching our staff in human-centered-design facilitation and some excellent projects and products have been the result, but I know I need a refresher and some guidance myself to put something like this out. Meanwhile, our Director of Public Safety & Wellbeing is developing a new area of programming for our members and had said she’d like to get this kind of training during a staff meeting and turns out all of our staff are eager for it as well. So we’ve engaged Abby Wilson and her partner Emily Askin, two LUMA alumni, to help us develop an annual Human Centered Design training for our staff and members in late June. I’m so excited for it and the bountiful systems change that I know will be a result!