Pittsburgh Organizations and Their Websites, at a glance

The first organization’s website I chose to focus on is East Liberty Development Incorporation (ELDI). The second website I compare and contrast with ELDI is Hosanna House and the third organization’s website is Thomas Merton Center. All of these organizations are located in the city of Pittsburgh, but have very different missions.

ELDI is a non-profit organization in the heart of the East Liberty neighborhood. This organization works with the neighborhood and other agencies to enhance east Liberty in four distinctive categories: planning, advocacy, facilitation, and investment.

Hosanna House is located in Wilkinsburg and is a community center for this neighborhood. They offer this neighborhood a number of different services; Early childhood education, career development help, and food assistance programs being among the many.

Thomas Merton Center is centered towards peace and social justice. They fight for economic justice, environmental justice, human rights, and other projects to bring about peace to the world. This nonprofit organization has been around in Pittsburgh for over forty years and continues to raise issue domestically and internationally that are not inline with their values of peace and equality.

These three nonprofit organizations all have websites that are informative to their mission and values. The boards of directors for these three organizations are all volunteers. The Thomas Merton Center has the largest number of people of their Board and Hosanna House has the least number of people on their Board. ELDI and Hosanna House seem to both have people that are religiously affiliated as President of their Board. ELDI is the only website that has a short bio of each of their members of the Board. The other websites only list the names of the Board members.

All of these organizations, according to their websites, are a “horizontal” organization. This means they do not have a parent organization in charge of them. All of these organizations are different when recruiting people to volunteer. Thomas Merton Center’s website has almost twenty links to click on with how you can help their causes from your own home. These include writing to your representative, attending different community groups, and receiving their newsletter. There is a volunteer link, but it just tells you how to contact the organization. Hosanna House has a form they ask people interested in volunteering the fill out, but they do not give any additional information about volunteering. ELDI has no link and tab on volunteering with them. The closest to a volunteering opportunity I saw was their information on internships. But, this obviously does not include everyone interested in giving their time to help this organization.

ELDI’s website shows that they are interested in working with the East Liberty neighborhood to “literally invest dollars into projects as well as investing in the quality of life for neighborhood stakeholders.” This organization does not seem to directly interact with the people they serve, the residents of East Liberty. Hosanna House, however, directly interacts with the people of Wilkinsburg and helps them receive basic needs and other important services. The Thomas Merton Center is involved with numerous projects. These projects include economic justice campaigns, educating the public on certain important issues, and projects to advance the rights of prisoners. All of these organizations have very different projects that they are working on. ELDI is development and architecturally centered. Hosanna House helps people everyday and comes in contact with the people they assist constantly. The Thomas Merton Center is directly involved with some of their projects, but they are very politically active.

The Thomas Merton Center has their own newspaper and monthly newsletter to keep people up to date on what they are doing, new projects they are involved in, and things they have accomplished. ELDI does not have this but, they put a link up on their website to give people the chance to see their monthly reports. Hosanna House has a section on their website called “News and Media.” This section allows a chance for people to see what the news and media has said about the organization.  

All of these organizations seem to act in accordance with a structural approach. They see the people they serve in their present situation because of the way society is constructed, not due to their behavior or culture. All of these organizations perform and serve their populations with an asset-based model approach. Hosanna House provides extensive programs and services along with services already offered in society. They make these services fit their population to help them in a more specific way. ELDI does not directly interact with the population they serve, but they believe they are fixing the community for the good of the people. The Thomas Merton Center also uses an asset-based model, instead of a deficiency model. This is so because they believe the people that they serve are wrongly treated and that this needs to stop immediately. All of these organizations believe that the people they serve need a little extra help to get to a good place. This is due to society, not due to the choice they have made.