Her work aims to ‘dispel fear and break down barriers’
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Theresa Orlando, executive director and founding member of the North Hills Anti-Racism Coalition, has been an activist her “whole adult life.” She and her late husband, Harry, began supporting civil rights and anti-war movements in the 1960s.
“We were trying to make right,” the 78-year-old Hampton resident said, “trying to be on the right side of the question.”
In the mid-1990s when some neighborhood children were discriminated against in school she and fellow members of the Thomas Merton Center, a Pittsburgh peace and justice organization, asked, “How can we be good allies to people of color?” In 1996 they founded the coalition. “We were already involved in the peace movement. It seemed a logical thing to do.”
Mrs. Orlando’s continuing advocacy of race, peace, diversity and inter-faith issues has placed her among five 2016 Jefferson Award winners who are finalists for the Most Outstanding Volunteer of the Year Award.
The Jefferson Awards, a national program begun in 1972, have been likened to the Nobel Prize for volunteering. Locally it’s administered by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with sponsorship by Highmark and BNY Mellon. The Forbes Fund will donate $1,000 on behalf of Mrs. Orlando to the anti-racism training committee of Call to Action, a national Catholic organization working for justice and equality.
The most outstanding volunteer will be announced at an invitationonly award ceremony Thursday at the Heinz History Center and will attend the national Jefferson Awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., this summer.
Mrs. Orlando is a Just Harvest board member, an OASIS intergenerational tutor for the Pittsburgh Public Schools, an organizing committee member for the North Hills International Day of Peace Picnic and the City of Pittsburgh International Day of Peace, and is active in the programs at her chosen parish, St. Benedict the Moor in the Hill District.
She joined other members of NORTH (Neighboring Organizations Responding Together for Hope) at the Muslim Association of
one another, sharing the common experience of building faith traditions. We’re all alike. It’s all the same thing if we can take down our barriers and see ourselves through other people’s eyes and vice versa.”
“That’s the bottom line. Being open to others and being inviting. People sense that.”
Anne Wirth, a fellow coalition volunteer who has known Mrs. Orlando for 15 years, said she is “very impressed by Theresa’s generosity of her time but also by her heart and her passion for all these things she’s involved with. She has such a kind heart.
“She’s never lost enthusiasm. She inspires people. She really steps up when there’s something to do. She’s not just a member of a committee. She’s very modest, even though she’s done so much. Theresa is a very very good Christian. She lives her Catholic faith and her belief.”
Mrs. Orlando attributes her tenacity to her faith with which she became more involved in her 20s, “right on the heels of Vatican II. That has formed me. My motive has been to live up to what it means to be a true universal Catholic Christian.”
The significance of her work, she said, is that it “models a behavior that people need to witness. You’re trying to show people how to be a good neighbor, to be good friends. Being a good citizen means being a good neighbor.”
Mrs. Orlando, who has three children and four grandchildren, said she is “hopeful” about the future. “Especially in the young people, there is so much more openness and acceptance. I think these young people are terrific, and they’re playing very significant roles in these activities.”