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Hey, it's Danielle and Jackie and today we'd like to share something new, an episode of Healthy Communities News presented by CVS Health.

State by State, City by City and Street by Street dedicated people are striving to solve the nation's most persistent health challenges.

Healthy Communities News host Melissa Egan interviews these leaders all over the country.

Every month she finds a local story that's representative of broader trends in American health.

Whether she's in Texas or Massachusetts, Georgia or Pennsylvania, Melissa always keeps her ears and eyes open for real world solutions that transform people's health and the communities where we live.

In this episode Melissa tells how a chance encounter between a pastor and a business executive led to an inspiring new partnership in Pittsburgh's Hill District.

Healthy Communities News from CVS Health is available wherever you find new podcasts.

Welcome back to Healthy Communities News. I'm Melissa Egan.

A whole lot of change is about to take place in the Hill District community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania starting July 28th.

That's when an amazing new workforce innovation and talent center, otherwise known as WITSI, opens there.

It was built thanks to an unusual partnership between Ebenezer Baptist Church and CVS Health.

So what does it take to bring change like this to a community?

Sometimes perhaps the most important thing is just believing it can happen or it can be as simple as who you happen to sit next to.

Let's hear from the two key people involved. I spoke first with John White, a senior advisor for workforce initiatives at CVS Health to get his take on how it all came about.

A little bit of luck and a lot of us pleading and we looked at the needs of the community and roadblocks and barriers that these individuals in that community kind of have to deal with every day.

We looked at what the church was already doing and what CVS was already doing and how do we bring the two together and how do we use the trust and the influence that the church had to be able to supply resources from CVS Health.

We asked in the beginning and a lot of times we got nose, it kept snowballing and just through conversations and showing people this is what we're doing and this is how we're going to do it.

Those nose started slowly turning to yeses.

I understand that you were one of the partners in crime along with Pastor Campbell responsible for making the Pittsburgh workforce innovation and talent center come about.

How does it compare with what you first envisioned?

It's what our vision was in the beginning on steroids. It turned into more than either one of us could have ever hoped it would.

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