Lunch and Learn Featuring Sera Linardi

On Monday, February 21, 2022, Metro21 hosted Sera Linardi, Associate Professor of Economics, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and Founding Director of the Center for Analytical Approaches to Social Innovation (CAASI) at the University of Pittsburgh.

Sera presented "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.

View the full presentation here.