On Monday, February 21, 2022, from 12-1pm, Dr. Sera Linardi (Associate Professor of Economics, Pitt GSPIA, and Founding Director of the Center for Analytical Approaches to Social Innovation "CAASI" ) will represent CAASI at CMU's Metro21.

Sera will be presenting "Lessons from Imperfect Attempts to Serve (out of Academia)," a discussion about incubating student-driven social justice projects across classrooms and the benefits and challenges of this tech-for-good production model. After George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, Pitt GPSIA faculty Sera Linardi started Grief to Action, a student-and-community driven incubator of web projects to support the efforts of local racial justice organizations, as an initiative at a fledging new center that she has just founded, the Center for Analytical Approaches in Social Innovation (CAASI). After a year and half of weekly open meetings and more than 180 volunteers, Grief to Action launched two platforms, the Allegheny County Policing Project and 412Connect, a Black-owned Business scavenger hunt for university students.  This talk will cover what it is like as a faculty to put students on the driver seat of data science for social justice while collaborating with local communities and partners, and the benefits and challenges of sustaining such a movement in an academic setting.

This session will be recorded.

Zoom registration: LINK