When Akron Mayor Shammas Malik took office on Jan. 1, a team of veteran and brand new City Hall staffers joined his administration. Within his cabinet, Malik is shaking things up with several newly created positions.
Rev. Nanette Pitt, a local minister and prominent police accountability and social justice advocate, is Akron’s first ever “chief of strategy.” Signal Akron’s Doug Brown spoke with the South African-born Pitt about her new job in the Malik administration, leaving her role as senior minister of the First Congregational Church of Akron and setting roots in the city.
This is a newly created job. What does chief of strategy mean?
The job specifically relates to the way in which our incoming mayor doesn’t want his campaign promises to just be words. He seeks to make those actions by dedicating staffing to continue to work on those initiatives and those promises, to help make them a reality. A lot of the roles in City Hall are to take care of the daily functions of managing and running a city. These roles are specifically to focus on those initiatives and projects which can sometimes get missed within the day-to-day.
What are those initiatives that you are working on? What are the big picture goals you have in this role?
The No. 1 goal is public safety, and that consists of a few different aspects. We’ll have strategists working on youth violence prevention, we’ll have a strategist working on health and education, a strategist working specifically on public safety.
And also the way in which we’ll seek funding and enable and empower groups within the city in partnerships to try to do the work – some of them already are undertaking that work. We have a variety of initiatives for the first 100 days, and some of them will take a lot longer to work out.
As someone in a newly created role for Signal Akron, I’m wondering what success looks like for you in your newly created role?
Good question. The way I see it is, my role is to watch the horizon. Each of the strategists I work with will be focused on a particular point in that horizon depending on the initiative or project they are supporting. All of us know what needs to happen in the City of Akron. We’ve had so many great reports and so many good dialogues and conversations over these past few years, even decades before now. There are a lot of good people working on things within Akron, so my role will be to form partnerships and to be watching the landscape and especially the horizon, which is ever-shifting and moving.
For me, success would be reaching those specific points on what might be the horizon today, but by that point there’s a new horizon with new things we know need to be changed or worked on. Moving a community and a society in ways that we know needs to happen isn’t just doing one thing, it’s a complex set of things that need to shift and change, and that’s why I appreciate Mayor Malik’s “Together” campaign, because it really is going to take all of us, together, to do that heavy lifting in the ways we know the needle needs to move.
Can you walk me through your decision to leave your church to take this job? What priorities did you have to weigh?
I told my congregation that in many ways, what I was walking toward, it was not difficult to walk toward. But it was difficult to decide to walk away from the congregation at my ministry at the church. Many members of the church reflected that this was work I had already been involved in, so in a sense they blessed me to continue that work in a new scope.
The church is a body that is seeking to better the world around it, and so a lot of this is work that we would undertake in any case as we seek the common good. I’m now, in a sense, moving from doing this work from the vantage point of the church to doing more of a public theology and doing that work within the public sphere. I continue to personally see that work within the framework of my personal belief and my faith, believing that I’m called like the Samaritan on the road to bless those whom God puts in my path, and to tackle the issues that we’re aware of.
What can you now do as chief of strategy that you wouldn’t have been able to do as a minister?
As chief of strategy, I get to be at ground zero at some of the issues we are facing as a whole community. And while I may have been able to be at the table before, now my leadership skills, and my vision, and my ability to relate well to multiple stakeholders is an asset to the city as a whole. I get to impact so many more thousands of lives by the efforts we all undertake together, and I have a role at the table now.
It’s a great blessing to me personally and also, I think, a great asset to the city. Some of the things I necessarily wouldn’t have been able to be as directly involved in because my attention would have been taken on the personal level as I tended to the needs of the group of people who called me to be their minister. I am now able to use that time and energy for the greater good, if you like, with these initiatives and projects.
It seems like out of all the places I’ve lived, religious leaders and religious folks play a bigger role in the civic life here. Is it your perspective that religious leaders play a large role in the civic life of Akron?
Yes. First of all, I think that Akron has a very engaged civic sphere with a large number of civic leaders and people engaging in the civic life of the city, and I think that’s one of the things that commended Akron to me when I was deciding whether to move here, and it’s one of the things that led me to fall so much in love with Akron, to choose it as a home longer term than just my role in the church.
And as you mentioned, the religious leaders in Akron have – and I don’t think this is untrue in the rest of the country, but my experience is similar to yours, that in other places, the religious community is not as involved in a public witness in the same way as it is here in Akron. It is unique in Akron. We have many religious leaders who see their role as caring for the whole community, who in a sense are public pastors as well as pastors to their congregations.
We benefit from that voice. And it’s not just pastors of the Christian church, there are rabbis of synagogues, leaders of mosques and other religious communities, who represent the voice of the people and who are invited to the table. This is a great thing and an asset to Akron.
I’m always curious about why people live where they live. I’m from Michigan, and when I was growing up, I wasn’t anticipating I’d be living in Ohio even though it’s relatively close. With you coming from so far away, what led you to decide Akron, out of all the places you could live, would be your home?
Akron is very much like my hometown. I come from Port Elizabeth in South Africa, and that’s where the rubber industry had factories. In fact, my mother worked for Firestone, so there’s a familiarity in the size of Akron and its culture. I appreciated the way in which I was received in Akron and the sense of collegiality, the bonds of neighborliness that were extended, and the openness to working together, the desire to enrich and better the community. Those are values that I share, so I was able to find a way to be here that I appreciated. It felt like a common goal here. They just wouldn’t let me go – not that I tried to leave. I’ve formed so many great relationships here in Akron.
