2026 Beaver County, Pennsylvania Community Organizing Summit Highlights
On October 17, Community Action Works held a community organizing summit in Beaver County, PA at the United Methodist Church of Monaca with over 40 leaders. The summit focused on learning the lay of the land of data centers, its impacts on communities and learning tangible organizing strategies to build people power.
Our keynote speaker, Elan Justice Pavlinich, a resident of Beaver County, PA, kicked off the summit sharing his story about how he and his community have been educating and engaging their neighbors about the impacts of data centers, and strategies on how to address these impacts.
We were joined by folks across the southwest region of Pennsylvania. The lay of the land panel included speakers such as Wanda Wilson, Western Pennsylvania Advocate with PennEnvironment who went over the environmental impacts of data centers, Vanessa Lynch, Moms Clean Air Force, talked about the public health impacts and Hilary OToole, Executive Director with Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community, talked about the current data center proposals in Beaver County and how residents can participate in the upcoming hearings.
We also held concurrent workshops around local solutions, how to use data in your campaigns, how to talk to your legislator, social media and storytelling and more. Max Haworth, Community Organizer, Community Action Works ran a campaign planning workshop centered on fine tuning community member’s campaign plans.
Katie Jones, FracTracker led a workshop going through their new Datacenter Tracker Dashboard mapping out data centers at the Beaver County Community Organizing Summit.
The big highlight of the day was holding a community round-table discussion where attendees were able to share takeaways from the workshops and panels they attended during the day. Folks were able to talk through upcoming opportunities to organize their community and how to approach getting their town to implement solutions.
There was so much energy throughout the summit. Seeing community organizers, students, advocates and experts sharing their stories, their campaigns; networking and learning from each other was inspiring.
We have no doubt that coming out of the summit, these organizers will be bringing that energy to their own work, whether that be on their campus or in their neighborhood to make real change building healthier and greener communities this year.
