Pittsburgh Local Lab

Background

Walk throughout Pittsburgh and you’ll find community gardens tucked into neighborhood lots, food artisans turning raw ingredients into products, busy kitchen incubators and co-ops sharing resources, and organizations working to get food to residents in every corner. They all make up Pittsburgh’s food production ecosystem: The full web of people, places, and practices that shape how food is grown, made, moved, and accessed in a community.

What draws Mechanism to this ecosystem in Pittsburgh is a gap that local leaders kept describing to us during our initial interviews and research: While there's no shortage of studies, plans, pilots, and passionate people working on food production, the pieces aren't connected. Growers, small food businesses, workforce programs, food policy advocates, and infrastructure builders are all doing vital work in relative isolation, and even with those efforts there are still missing pieces. All of this prevents the food production landscape in Pittsburgh from functioning like a true system.

Mechanism's goal is to bring these efforts into conversation with one another, surface what's already working, and help identify where investment and collaboration could add up to something larger than any single organization can build alone.

About Mechanism Local Labs

Local Labs make visible the challenges and opportunities for starting, scaling, and sustaining production ecosystems. Our process allows business owners and workers to work with and alongside each other and a wide variety of industry, intermediary, and community stakeholders, inclusive of a wide variety of identities (age, citizenship, race, gender, employment status, etc). The Local Lab process intentionally brings them all together to better understand and envision the collective benefits and impacts local production can have on a place. Successful Labs co-create, co-design, and build new resources, services, systems, and policies that better support production ecosystems, leading to more thriving and resilient workers, businesses, communities, and places.

Local Labs have three phases: Learn, Design, and Build.

Goals & Objectives

From January to November 2026, Mechanism will organize and lead a community engagement process to gather and synthesize input from diverse stakeholders. This process will include: individual and small group interviews to gather insights from food system stakeholders in and around Pittsburgh and in-person events to workshop and develop ideas for strategies and solutions.

At the conclusion of this project, Mechanism, along with Pittsburgh-based partners, will generate recommendations for strategies and actions to support local food production in the region.

Community-Driven Engagement Process

An intentional community engagement effort is needed in order to accurately capture the existing needs and identify effective solutions to strengthen local production. Mechanism’s process brings together industry and community stakeholders, including manufacturers and makers, capital providers, economic development, and other support organizations. This engagement process leads to clarity on challenges and opportunities while also fostering new connections in the region and building traction, momentum, and local buy-in for future work.

Recommendations

Taking collective action requires clarity on where and how to invest, including time, social capital, and financial resources. Recommendations for actions – new strategies, initiatives, investments, and shared resources – helps establish a shared vision of what support can look like, helping stakeholders move forward on industry and community vetted solutions.

For an example of this, take a look at our recommendations from our Asheville Local Lab.

Local Lab Snapshot

A project of this scale and scope can be difficult to communicate clearly. The Pittsburgh Local Lab Snapshot makes it easier to communicate the history of the industry, overview, and outcomes of the engagement process, and the set of recommendations. The Snapshot is intended for use, after the Phase is over, by project participants to engage with supporters, including funders, elected officials, decision makers, and the surrounding community.

Working Group:

Abi Kapelewski | CRAFT at Chatham University

Ash Chan | House of Gold Collaborative

Chad Townsend | Millie’s Homemade Ice Cream

Gene Anderson | Prototype PGH

Kellie Wild | Pittsburgh Food Policy Council

Lisa Freeman | Freeman Family Farm & Greenhouse

Zena Ruiz | Homewood-Brushton YMCA