Lighting a

By Chloe Forbes

MEADVILLE TRIBUNE

Just over a week ago, the state announced its first-ever Housing Action Plan, a strategic five-year roadmap to expand access to attainable, affordable housing. The plan marks a turning point for the commonwealth, addressing the urgent need to build 450,000 new units by 2035. And working from Hatch Hollow in Meadville was one of its key players: Sally Guzik.

Guzik was recently named president of Fourth Economy, a national economic and community development consulting firm founded 15 years ago in Pittsburgh by Erie native Rich Overmoyer. Having grown up in the Pittsburgh area, Guzik wanted to move closer to family in 2021 when she joined Fourth Economy as vice president, but she found herself wanting a See CONSULTING, Page A7

Sally Guzik is pictured at Hatch Hollow, where she runs consulting company Fourth Economy with her family. Shown are her husband, Theodore C. Jones, daughter Sylvia Guzik-Jones and son Theodore Guzik-Jones.

KELLY RHOADS PHOTOGRAPHY/Contributed photo

Continued from Page A1 different atmosphere. Having kept her eye on Meadville for the past several years, she decided it was where she ultimately wanted to raise her family and grow her career remotely.

“When I got the job, I said, ‘OK, I’ll take it, but I want to be in Meadville,’” she recalled. Now, she serves on the county’s planning commission, the Common Roots Land Trust board, and just finished a term on Meadville’s planning commission. Her pathway to this work wasn’t linear, though.

She grew up in the Turtle Creek area of Allegheny County and received her undergraduate degree at Chatham University in gender studies, environmental studies and Spanish. She worked for a nonprofit in Pittsburgh that focused on urban forestry and tree care maintenance as her first job out of college. Then, she met her husband and they moved to Miami, Florida, where she went to graduate school. She received her master’s degree in global strategic communications with a focus on crisis management and diffusion of innovation.

“It’s a fancy way of saying how do you study how things and ideas get to people that need them the most?” Guzik explained.

She began working for the Cambridge Innovation Center: an incubator, accelerator and workspace based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, that had other locations. She worked as part of the team that opened one in Miami in 2016 then moved to Philadelphia to open a space there that included a wet lab — the nation’s largest one at the time.

“Typically, to have all of the equipment that you need as a scientist and have a lab bench, it would take millions and millions of dollars to have access to all of the things you need,” she said. “So the model really was working with companies so that they paid $2,000 a month, but they could have access to $10 million worth of equipment, and we would help them get access to the suppliers and the partners that they would need.”

She said that she grew up in with a poor background, so it’s always been important for her to get resources to underserved areas and people who would otherwise “have to work twice as hard.”

She continued to switch paths a bit, working for Teach for America for a stint, before she came across Fourth Economy.

“The way that they explained the work was we’re working at the intersection of economic and community development but instead of looking at economic development as ‘OK, this is what your place physically needs to look like’ or ‘here’s the infrastructure for it,’ it was looking at what’s the community health of an area,” she said.

The company looks at social determinants of health like access to child care, health care, education, workforce training and housing and figure out how they intersect with the local economy.

“You can’t just focus on one of those things and expect to see success,” she said. “There’s really all of these layers to things that need to be brought up so that people have access to them.”

That’s why Fourth Economy was a leader in the team that brought forth the new state action plan for housing.

“It was a big team coming together with the governor’s office, but we supported the analysis and engagement and then bringing the strategy together,” Guzik said.

The process took about six months, which is a faster timeline than most projects because Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office stated this was an urgent need. Guzik said the plan helps people figure out how to build the housing stock and how to assist first-time homebuyers. It also found what benefits and incentives need to be enacted to reach those goals.

Working with the state didn’t stop there, though. Fourth Economy also worked with the Shapiro administration to create the 10-year strategic plan to make the state’s food and agriculture industry more sustainable, resilient and competitive.

That process also took about six months and the plan is expected to be released shortly.

Guzik said living in Meadville has given her a unique perspective, and she sees it as a microcosm for the challenges that these state plans are trying to address. Here, she sees the population decline and access to quality resources like health care and education as major issues but says it also makes working across party lines easier because everyone agrees on what the challenges are.

“We need better jobs, we need better housing, we need better health care,” she said. “We want our kids to be able to stay here. We want to protect natural resources that we have. We all agree on that.”

She said Fourth Economy is in a unique position to solve those issues because it looks at issues holistically and focuses on existing assets.

That’s part of why the firm was able to help Pennsylvania launch its Outdoor Business Alliance, an organization that unites and advocates for outdoor-related businesses statewide — like those in rural Crawford County.

She said leveraging what already exists is the best way to ensure that economic development is possible and that places don’t just plan themselves to death. “Especially in this time where people are losing population and things are really expensive and difficult, they’re not able to hire a whole new department of people to do all these things and bring in all of this money, necessarily, right away,” she said.

Instead, Fourth Economy helps places decide what they can do with the capacity they have and figure out what capacity, time and funding would be needed to implement anything further. Now, with Guzik at the helm, she hopes to not only continue that work but make it as impactful as possible.

In a statement about Guzik being named president, her predecessor said that Guzik “brings clarity and of direction for where Fourth Economy is headed and has a vision that keeps us relevant as communities and economies evolve. Sally has been central to shaping our strategy for the past four years, and I am confident that she will guide Fourth Economy into its next era of growth.”

Since Guzik joined in 2021, the firm has doubled in size, growing from 10 Pittsburgh-based consultants to 20 national experts across the country. The company was acquired in 2021 by Steer, a global transportation consultant, which helps it expand its reach as well to over 25 offices worldwide.

The key to the future? Guzik said it’s being proactive. Already, she’s thinking about issues like artificial intelligence in the workforce and how to balance the needs of technology companies with environmental protection.

“All of those things I think are becoming even more important,” she said. “We’ve been focusing on them for a while, but it’s just maintaining that too.”

And as for what she sees in Meadville, she’s excited. When she first began coming here, visiting coffee shops and hiking with her husband, she said, “there were kind of sparks of what’s going on now,” and she’s ready to see those sparks catch.

Chloe Forbes can be reached at (814) 724-6370 or by email at cforbes@meadvilletribune.com.