David Meredith has been a gardener since childhood, and the plots he created and nurtures in Uniontown have not only helped to feed people who live in a food desert but also served as outdoor classrooms so they can start their own vegetable gardens.
Jan Shipp found Vintage Center for Active Adults when she retired from a health care career and didn’t want to stay home alone, looking at four walls. She enjoyed all its activities designed to promote seniors’ social and physical well-being and became a volunteer. Now she leads the East Liberty-based nonprofit’s lunch program.
Both received United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania’s 2025 IMPACT — Individuals Making Progress and Creating Transformation — Awards on Wednesday. Ford City Public Library volunteer Makayla Flick received an honorable mention award at the ceremony held at Dollar Bank’s Downtown corporate headquarters.
The United Way partner invited agencies receiving grant funding within Armstrong, Allegheny, Butler, Fayette and Westmoreland counties in September to nominate volunteers. The nonprofit’s Tocqueville Society members, leading donors who contributed more than $8.9 million last year, reviewed the nominations. From a record 44 applications, a committee selected the awardees, according to a news release. Colette and Jim Steen served as presenters Wednesday.
With the awards Meredith and Shipp won grants for their nonprofit agencies: Vintage will receive $15,000 for first place honors and East End United Community Center $5,000 for second place.
Meredith retired as a Penn State Fayette Campus associate professor of engineering in July 2020 after 41 years of service. During the pandemic, he started a 2,800-square-foot vegetable garden there, bringing in 20 loads of compost daily as he prepared it.
After his retirement he took a PSU master gardener’s six-month class, learning about everything from grass to trees, Meredith said, including bugs and diseases that can hinder garden crops. Two years later he started the 1,600-square-foot garden at East End United Community Center, a nonprofit that offers educational, social, economic and cultural opportunities to its community through a wide range of programs. Those include day care, out-of-school time, truancy prevention, senior social programs and other community outreach. It helps with food assistance, English as Second Language classes and other community outreach efforts, according to its website.
Both gardens have 80 different varieties of vegetables. “Trying to keep it all straight gets a little crazy,” Meredith said.
At the ceremony, the presenters noted that his work built the East End United Community Center garden’s infrastructure, including a playground, outdoor greenhouse and underground irrigation. “He transformed a vacant lot into a thriving space that provides food, supports diversity and connects residents to nature,” Jim Steen said.
The PSU Fayette Campus will close in 2026, and Meredith is unsure what will happen to that garden.
The East End United Community Center garden’s focus came from an Oregon State University Seed to Supper program, a beginning gardening course that focuses on reducing food insecurity there. Three master gardeners linked up with the Fayette County Community Action and installed two raised beds. “The students that we had the first season — growing peppers, tomatoes and some flowers — were adult students,” Meredith said. “They were new to gardening pretty much.”
They completed what he calls a soul food garden, too, with collard greens, black-eyed peas and other vegetables. From there he taught himself what had not been covered in his master gardener classes to grow what people wanted, and through that process Meredith added other beds. When he found out that East End United Community Center owned the lot across the street from its building on Coolspring Street, he moved the garden there, and that fueled expansion and relocation of an herb bed. Today, he said, “I think we’ve run out of things we need to add.”
The greenhouse, came from a $7,465 Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture grant, East End executive director Steve Strange said. More grants helped East End United Community Center’s garden grow: Giving2Grow‘s three consecutive yearly $10,000 awards and a Pennsylvania American Water Co. $10,000 gift for an underground water system. The last one “makes it easier for Dave to garden,” he added.
They’ve worked together on these grants. “If I see something grant-wise that matches up, I can go to him and he helps me,” Strange said.
Meredith also teaches children about gardening in the East End United Community Center children’s out-of-school-time program at times in coordination with the Great Meadows Garden Club. The children create art from seeds and arrange flowers, he said, and they get tastes of the vegetables, herbs and other snacks from the garden.
It all started because Meredith, who said at the ceremony he started gardening at 5 himself, said he was “just trying to feed the hungry.” He didn’t know anyone at East End United Community Center but looked forward to teaching gardening instead of engineering equations. An important point for him is the nearest grocery store is 2 miles away. People rely on Dollar General instead, and that means they mostly purchase processed food.
It’s a wide-open garden; the plastic greenhouse can’t be locked. People stop by day and night to visit and pick the produce. That’s led to some interesting observations and results.
“Last year I grew 600 tomatoes in that garden. Not one turned red,” he said. “[Turns out] People like fried green tomatoes. You can’t buy green tomatoes in Fayette County. They all came to East End for the green tomatoes.”
Same for the bumper crop of okra there. “You either love it or hate it. Those that love it can’t find it,” Meredith said. “The local grocery store doesn’t carry it very often. Okra, you have to pick it every other day like green beans.”
There have been some issues with people who try to harvest the crops but don’t know what they are doing. For example, despite the rows being marked with the types of crops, someone pulled out all the garlic thinking it was onions, he said. Another time carrots not ready for picking were taken way too early. He put cages on them and red beets now to keep that growth going properly.
He has 80 different varieties of vegetables at both gardens. Meredith has researched all types of vegetables to experiment with, focusing on cultural gardening this March for East End United Community Center, geared to help people who attend East End’s ELS classes. That led to 15 different African varieties, including sesame seeds, African cucumbers, also known as kiwano or jelly melons, and Lagos spinach. He has a special Latino bed, with ground cherries, Mexican sunflowers and poblano peppers among other plants.
Last year he grew 1,000 plants from seed in his North Union home’s basement. Some became part of the master gardener’s group’s spring sale. Others found a place in the garden.
Meredith also installed a bed for butterflies at the East End garden that became a monarch way station.
He loves the conversations he has with people who stop by the garden: the roofer who relaxes after his day ends by gardening while his co-workers head to the bar. The woman who told him the garden was feeding the homeless when they harvested vegetables at night. She thanked him because she had once been homeless herself.
He’s pretty much a “one-man band” at the garden. Meredith said he just cleared out the East End United Community Center “the old-fashioned way, by hand.” After harvesting sweet potatoes last Saturday he added 100 pounds of leaves for the worms to eat and begin the composting process. He doesn’t maintain organic gardens but stressed that he does not use any pesticides or herbicides in his work.
Strange said the award will cover administrative costs for programs, a necessity to keep going in turbulent funding times. That money and the work Meredith does for the nonprofit “adds a lot,” he said.
“We’re all about neighborhood revitalization,” the executive director explained. “That’s not a one-step process. … You have to kind of chip away at it. Having a nice, beautiful area out there helps with that. The main part of it is we’re also producing food that people can eat. That part is good. And we can take students out there and do gardening lessons hands on. It’s multifaceted how much it helps us.”
Meredith will spend the winter researching and plotting what he will grow from seeds and attempt next. He and his wife, Linda, also are volunteer cubmasters, and Meredith plays the sousaphone in the local VFW band and his Ohio State University alumni band. “Both are fun groups of people,” he said. “And it keeps my lip in shape.”
After Shipp retired from UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital in 2003 after 20 years, working first as an operating room tech aide and later as a central supply processing lead tech, she enjoyed being with people at Vintage and line dancing there. Once she started having trouble with her knees, she started helping with lunches.
Now she is in charge and arrives every morning to meet the truck bringing food in and makes sure it is ready to serve by 11 a.m. Up to 70 people share a daily lunch together there, Shipp said, and they particularly like the chicken, meatloaf and lasagna entrees.
Shipp had some experience with lunches when she worked at the now closed Fort Pitt Elementary School her daughter, Celitha, attended.
All told she volunteers about 20 hours a week, and at the awards ceremony the presenters said Shipp always accumulates the highest volunteer hours. Vintage Associate Director Jennifer Collins, who nominated her for the honor, said the nonprofit relies on its 72 volunteers. Ten of those volunteers work in the lunch program.
“She’s wonderful,” Collins said. “You can count on her. She knows what she is doing and does it with such a pleasant attitude. She’s just so friendly.”
Shipp lives in the Garfield home her late husband brought her to after they married. The Alabama native who grew up in Detroit had moved to Aliquippa where her grandmother lived. She started her health care career as a Sewickley Valley Hospital nursing assistant.
What she likes the fact that Vintage, a division of FamilyLinks, is “a place a place where people can go and there is help there for them. A lot of people come in and are sick and have different problems. Vintage is there to serve them, [and it has] so many activities that can help them.”
She plays cards when she can — “It’s good for your mind” — and serves as treasurer of Vintage’s Pearls of Wisdom club and is on its House Council. “We discuss ourselves and find out how each are doing, support each other,” she said. “We are like sisters and brothers there.” Outside of Vintage, she is the head usher at St. James AME Church.
She said she has watched East Liberty improve through the years she has been volunteering. And she sees a great deal that needs to be added to Vintage, especially one item.
“We really need it. We have broken things that need to be repaired. Our ice machine is dead. We really need that,” she stressed.
Collins said they have joked that a new ice machine will be dedicated to Shipp. The $15,000 award will benefit many of the nonprofit’s programs.
Colette Steen said in her introduction to Shipp’s award that her nominator wrote that Jan is “the backbone of the Vintage lunch program, leading the daily service for an average of 1,400 meals a month. She ensures a warm, organized experience that is for many, the only hot meal and social connection they have for the day.
“She has managed operations through staff turnover, relocations and construction. She mentors and trains new volunteers and steps in wherever needed with her ‘whatever needs done’ attitude. She greets every Vintager by name and advocates for improvements with a strong and respected voice.”
The presenters noted that this is the first time the society requested an honorable mention award because “for the past four years, Makayla Flick has been an indispensable volunteer at Ford City Public Library in Armstrong County.” She was unable to attend Wednesday’s ceremony.
She started volunteering at 11 and has mastered daily operations— from shelving and cataloging to building furniture. “She now serves as the go-to circulation desk attendant who reliably balances patron service with program support and upkeep,” Colette Steen said.
“Makayla’s professionalism, creativity and consistent initiative have strengthened the library’s services and increased youth engagement. She is a vital, community-centered leader and beloved by library patrons.”
Helen is a copy editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but she's currently on strike. Contact her at hfallon@unionprogress.com.