Local Government Academy has a long legacy of providing non-partisan education to public officials and staff. With this as our history, it should come as no surprise that professional development opportunities for public sector employees and public officials is something that we’re passionate about.

The need for quality, fact-based education for our local government employees and leaders is real and urgent. With municipal elections, communities can experience constant turnover in leadership every two years. While new leaders can bring fresh perspectives and positive intentions, many have no government experience or understanding of laws that establish municipal obligations.

It is within this environment that the Local Government Academy exists to provide training for public officials and municipal employees. We continually evaluate our programs with participant satisfaction surveys and by measuring learning comprehension of educational content. By capitalizing upon our extensive relationship within the Civic, Academic, and Business communities, we can pivot to new and emerging topics.

For instance, we were faced with a very specific challenge created by the COVID-19 pandemic: how to deliver our flagship program, the Newly Elected Officials Course, to incoming officials taking office in January 2022. Thankfully, our partnership with Pittsburgh Community Television (PCTV) provided media services with professionally edited recordings of classroom sessions that could be reviewed later or multiple times, substantially increasing the value of the Newly Elected Officials Course overall.

The partnership with PCTV gave us the confidence we needed to meet this challenge and ultimately demonstrated the success of a virtual learning platform. We have seen increased engagement from participants who appreciate their own video library of educational content and look forward to capitalizing upon technology and our relationship with PCTV to expand the potential for community impact.

– Joy