Met with Mark Pestak, who has lived on the near west side of Cleveland with his family for the past 15 years. For this man who has a Ph.D. in physics and is working on a NASA space station project, it was a conscious decision to live in this depressed area. He said the city needed his time and energy, much more than a suburb did. While here, Mark has been involved with the “Church in the City Project,” a Cleveland Diocese initiative to connect suburban parishes with city ones and get more resources to the urban poor. Conversely, parishioners in the city churches share their time and talent with the suburban parishes as well. Besides this volunteer work, Mark advocated for the poor by helping organize a successful effort to get a hazardous waste site removed from the area. He said it was tragically typical that such a plant would be located near the heart of a densely populated “poor” city area. (Something a more well off suburban area would almost never have to contend with.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Met with Mark Pestak, who has lived on the near west side of Cleveland with his family for the past 15 years. For this man who has a Ph.D. in physics and is working on a NASA space station project, …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}