Thanks to @buzzfeed​ for including our latest story in the “Growing Up Through the Cracks” series on child poverty as part of their “8 Photo Stories That Will Challenge Your View Of The World” list.

The Brown family lives in rural Saltlick, Pa., where 2/3 of children are living in poverty. As milk prices continue to dip and Mary Beth Brown struggles with the physical, emotional, and financial pain of Stage 4 breast cancer, the Browns fear they will be the first generation in their family in 200 years to lose the dairy farm they feel call home.

In the rural area, government services are hard to access. The local officials don’t see social services as their job, while federal and state benefits are funneled through the county seat in Uniontown, a 40-minute drive with no transit options, writes reporter Chris Huffaker.

For the Brown children, a strong social network, centered on their family and their church, has shielded them.
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“They go fishing, they shoot bows and arrows,“ Ms. Brown said. "They don’t know they’re poor.” Read more and see more photos at the Post-Gazette here.

Top photo: Michelle Kenney looks out of the Allegheny County Courthouse window before the start of the homicide trial of former East Pittsburgh police officer Michael Rosfeld, charged in the fatal shooting of her son, 17-year-old Antwon Rose II. “As a mom, you can’t prepare for this — you just have to do it — there is no go-to map on this,” Ms. Kenney said. “I’ll treat it as any other role that I have as Antwon’s mother. I just have to do it.”

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“We will continue to reach out to the community, to call on the community to come together,” said 1Hood activist/musician Jasiri X during a vigil in Rankin to honor Antwon. People gathered on the basketball court in Hawkins Village where Antwon once played, a painting of Antwon’s smiling face looking out above an altar of flowers and candles. Addressing Antwon’s family, Jasiri said, “We will not abandon you in this time… We are with you.”

The words came after a weekend of marches into businesses and through the streets in dark, rain, and shine after the acquittal of former East Pittsburgh Police officer Michael Rosfeld in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Rose. The marches continued through the week, with hundreds of students walking out from school and into the rain to flood the streets of downtown Pittsburgh and chanting the name of Antown Rose II. Third grader Esme carried a painting she made of Antwon that read, “This is why we kneel. #JusticeforAntwon.” Across town at Woodland Hills High School, Antwon’s mother addressed his former high school classmates. “I got up there and said what I would have said to Antwon,” Ms. Kenney said. Don’t walk out of school in protest, she told them. Get an education and work to effect change. Vote. “Do what Antwon isn’t here to do.”

If you have suggestions on stories you want to see from your Western PA community, feel free to contact me to start a conversation.

“It might not happen with one image, it might take thousands of images layered in a consciousness - a national consciousness, and individual consciousness - to really move people forward, move people to action, but I do believe images have that power.” -Lynn Johnson says it best.

Join me at Robert Morris University, let’s talk photojournalism and storytelling!

A year after our original reporting published, Rich Lord and I traveled back to see how “OD Road” is changing, slowly, into Recovery Road. Here in Pittsburgh’s once most fatal ground for the epidemic, overdoses are dropping, and 1,050 “saves” have been made — almost all by other opioid users — using naloxone distributed by Prevention Point Pittsburgh since 2017.

I had to check that my mouth wasn’t hanging open while visiting Donna Williams. She had opened up from her “raw, get out of my neighborhood” approach to people in addiction to wanting to offer clean needles and health services on her block instead. She baked cookies for the men in the recovery house up the street, she is partnering with a man who formerly sold and used drugs to transform the minds of her neighbors.

Despite the cautious optimism, ripples of trauma are still carrying through families for generations. Here’s what people shared with us.

The (dino) geese are back atop the 10th Street Bridge by Pittsburgh’s South Side. “There’s a real risk right now to the city losing the character and the history that it’s had and people are starting to be aware of that and don’t want to just wash everything off and turn it into a shiny new place again,” said Brandon Barber, who assisted longtime friend and fellow artist Tim Kaulen as they perched 100 ft. above the street to try to match up to the painted geese Tim painted on the bridge some 20 years prior.

I’ve gawked up at those paintings since I first moved to the city, wondering about them, about how they got there and what they meant (and thinking they were dinosaurs). 995 people who signed a petition to save the art have been wondering alongside me, creating their own stories and meaning for the four-foot-tall figures.

Tim says he loves that people have crafted their own meaning behind them. “I felt that my community needed a spark, a highlight, something to say: there’s something here, there’s a pulse here that’s important, and there’s a voice here.” From his seat at OTB Bicycle Cafe in the neighborhood where he came of age as an artist, Tim talks inspiration from his grandfather’s primitive, handmade decoys, why he took risk for art in the 1st place, and being mindful to stand against the erasure of culture, work, character, and history in the city as it goes through a period of rapid change.

Sound on for the video, and see/read more at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette here.