The Urban League Young Professionals of Greater Pittsburgh welcomes and encourages collaboration, leveraging existing resources, programming, membership, and education.

Urban ImPAct 2008

The first significant challenge for ULYP‐GP was to reassert our presence as the premiere young professionals organization. That opportunity arose when the ImPAct Conference was held in Pittsburgh in September 2007. For a variety of reasons, young Black professionals and young professionals of color were not included in the planning, development and promotion of this statewide networking and leadership opportunity. The Executive Committee along with the Mayor’s Office challenged the ImPAct Conference Committee to adjust their implementation plans to be as inclusive as possible of the target constituency we served.

As a result of these efforts, the ImPAct Conference Committee selected an African‐American as the Keynote Speaker, added several young Black professionals to present in the workshops, offered our membership a discounted rate to attend, recruited through targeted media and presented in the case study challenge detailing the rebirth if ULYP‐GP. Most importantly, ULYP‐GP hosted a workshop session called “Urban ImPAct Networking: Spotlight on Diversity” to demonstrate the existence and comprehensive resources of diversity and/or young professional focused organizations. An unanticipated outcome was the creation of a network of young people/professionals of color organizations unofficially called the Urban Impact Network (UIN).

 Building in these outcomes, ULYP-GP began to rebrand its community service, political action and social events as Urban Impact Network events in collaboration with UIN Partners.