Allegheny Conference taps Pashman as new CEO

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Allegheny Conference on Community Development has found a new leader, one with deep understanding of the Pittsburgh region’s workforce challenges.

Stefani Pashman has been tapped as the new chief executive officer of the Downtown-based nonprofit that supports economic development across 10 counties in southwestern Pennsylvania. Ms. Pashman will assume the position effective Oct. 2.

The Allegheny Conference announced in April that Dennis Yablonsky, who has served as CEO for nine years, would retire at the end of the year and that it had appointed a search committee, chaired by William S. Demchak, president and chief executive of The PNC Financial Services Group. In 2015, Mr. Yablonsky earned a base salary of $557,000, according to tax filings.

“Stefani is an accomplished leader, well respected by the many organizations and officials with whom the conference partners,” Mr. Demchak said in a press release. “Under her leadership, the conference will achieve great things on behalf of the people and businesses of the Pittsburgh region.”

Ms. Pashman has spent more than seven years as CEO of Partner4Work, the Pittsburgh region’s state-funded workforce development board that connects employers with job-seekers in the Pittsburgh area. She presided over the agency, a nonprofit with an expected 2018 budget of nearly $22 million, as it confronted the region’s workforce challenges following the Great Recession.

In particular, the agency in recent years has tried to expand its reach to the estimated 40,000 people who are unemployed or underemployed in the region. As technology has disrupted jobs across industries, the skills employers are looking for and those workers could offer do not always match up.

This year, she led a new