By Courtney Balestier, Contributing Writer
November 25, 2025
What happens when more than 500 creative thinkers and bold doers get together? Just about anything they put their minds to. That was evident at the Bridgeway Capital annual event, held November 5 at the August Wilson Cultural Center. The evening was a celebration—not only of Bridgeway’s past 12 months of community support but of 35 years of enduring impact. But it was also an opportunity: a place for the next 35 years of impactful ideas and meaningful partnerships to take seed.
Over cocktails and hor d’oeuvres, amidst tunes by the Center of Life Jazz Band, guests caught up with old friends and made new ones. Conversations buzzed with possibility, connections that could yield exciting collaborations at some later date. Networking, yes, but also something greater.
“Really, it’s connecting,” said Tammy Spencer Bey. She is Vice President of Community Development Market Manager for Citizens Bank, one of the evening’s sponsors. “I’m a connector; I love to connect people. So this is great: I’m meeting people that I don’t know, organizations that I haven’t met before.”
Citizens often refers clients to Bridgeway when the bank can’t work with them. “It’s very meaningful, because we at Citizens want to help everybody, but we also know that this work is not done by ourselves. And so where we may not be able to help, we have partners that we work with that are able to step in,” Bey said. “It’s community, and that’s what we need more of. The more that we do these types of collaborations, the better we all are.”
Brent Rondon—Senior Management Consultant for the Small Business Development Center, Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence, Innovation Institute at the University of Pittsburgh—knows the value of those collaborations firsthand. The SBDC is a longtime Bridgeway partner, linking up its entrepreneur clients with Bridgeway after assisting with developmental steps like business plan preparation.
Rondon works with a lot of food service clients, from catering businesses to food truck operators, and many clients in the growing sector of Latino business owners. This work gives Rondon an opportunity to witness Bridgeway’s commitment to underserved communities.
“My [Latino clients] are newcomers to the region,” Rondon said. “They don’t know the legal aspects of doing business: regulatory aspects, permits, financing. Bridgeway is not afraid of meeting with them and helping them. They can reach out [to me] anytime, and then I reach out to you. It’s a good ecosystem.”
That promise of a thriving ecosystem—a living, breathing, growing community—was on full display as guests began to migrate to the auditorium for a presentation of the year’s work. Bridgeway clients, in a variety of sectors from fine art to steel fabrication, walked alongside sponsors in fields like bookkeeping, IT support, and, in the case of UPMC, insurance.
UPMC invested with Bridgeway to create an affordable housing loan fund. Bridgeway offers UPMC a unique opportunity for community involvement, said Ray Prushnok, Executive Director of UPMC Center for Social Impact.
“We are really a first-in-the-nation insurance company taking insurance capital and then investing it directly into the communities we serve,” Prushonk said. “We wanted to be part of affordable housing for people with Medicaid. We wanted to open up opportunities in neighborhoods that were high-density, with bus routes and access to amenities like groceries. Bridgeway helped us make that happen.”
Having a partner willing to think about hyper-local impact is crucial, Prushnok said. “Community development doesn’t happen without the Bridgeways of the world.”
Looking Back and Moving Forward
At 7 p.m., everyone settled into the auditorium to enjoy a special presentation of the year’s work and a speech by Bridgeway President & CEO T.J. Bogdewic.
“This year, we’re closing out a five-year strategic plan,” Bogdewic said. “It set a bold goal to lend $100 million into our region’s most underestimated towns and neighborhoods.”
He paused.
“We didn’t just reach that goal: We surpassed our goal by 25%.”
That’s $105 million in mission-driven capital, plus more than $20 million through other means, like COVID-response grants and business-education programs. Bogdewic listed the tangible results of these efforts: 92 buildings, 325 small businesses, 600 affordable-housing units, and 2,700 jobs.
“Behind every one of those numbers are people: small-business owners seizing opportunity, nonprofit leaders extending impact, families finding stability and renewed hope,” Bogdewic said. They’re the people whose success lifts us all.”
Short films spotlighted some of the borrowers who have experienced that opportunity, impact, and hope. Like Clayton Scott, of American Drain Cleaners, whose first loan from Bridgeway Capital was in 2016. His fifth was this year. Or the multitalented artists and entrepreneurs of the Greenwood Plan, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting Black businesses: Bridgeway supported this mission-driven work not just financially—with flexible financing and a rainy day loan—but also with pre-development support.
“The Greenwood Plan shows how solidarity strengthens us all,” Bogdewic said. “One space—built with purpose, persistence, and partnerships—becomes a launchpad for dozens of entrepreneurs, each hiring, creating, and opening new doors that ripple change across the city. That’s the kind of progress that renews itself: where one visionary act sparks the next.”
Indeed, vision was a major theme of the evening. The crowd itself was a testament to how many dreams are waiting to be brought to life and how many different ways their dreamers can be uplifted in the process. It’s work that takes ambition, boldness, and community—which is exactly what Bridgeway has in mind for the future.
To close out his speech, Bogdewic announced a new strategic plan: for Bridgeway’s financing to leverage $1 billion in total investment into the people and places it serves.
“That’s ambitious — and it should be,” he said. “But it’s also achievable, because we’ll get there the same way our borrowers do: step by step, project by project, with disciplined risk-taking, partnership, and persistence.”
Leading by Example
As Bogdewic said, Bridgeway borrowers themselves demonstrate how to achieve seemingly impossible goals. One such borrower is Brandy Weatherspoon, of Weatherspoon & Williams LLC, a general supply contracting business founded by her father.
“Bridgeway was our first funder,” Weatherspoon said. “We were a brand new, small, family-owned business. You don’t have enough money to make enough money. You have to have that financial support. That’s such a big thing.”
After her father passed away in 2021, Weatherspoon continued the relationship that he had begun with Bridgeway. Now, a decade later, Weatherspoon & Williams has come full circle as a sponsor of the night’s event.
“Up until two years ago, Bridgeway was our main backup,” she said. “Because we had them, we were able to grow. Then we had $10 million in sales and a backlog of $20 million. One year, we did $25 million. And now, once you start to get big enough, now Dollar Bank will give us a line of credit. We couldn’t have done that without first having Bridgeway say, ‘We’re going to take a shot on them with nothing.’ That’s why we wanted to be sponsors.”
Entrepreneurial growth can often come with that chicken-or-egg paradox. In those moments, the gap funding that Bridgeway can provide is crucial. When the entrepreneurs behind the Greenwood Plan purchased their building in downtown Pittsburgh, their reimbursable grant required upfront funding for development. Bridgeway provided it, so work could continue.
“It’s not only the funding that they provide; it’s the resource,” said Alexis Russell, co-owner of Russell General Contracting and Greenwood Plan Board Vice President. “There is a support component that Bridgeway provides that typical traditional lenders do not. They work with people, provide them with education.” And then they help fund them to do the work they need to do.
That has certainly been the case for Meleak Potter of Realty Thinking, a nonprofit that leverages financial and real estate education to support mental wellness. He received a Bridgeway loan in 2018 to start his title company, Pittsburgh Minority Real Estate Group. In 2023, Potter went through Bridgeway’s developer cohort to connect with architects and accountants and learn how to take his business to new heights.
“Bridgeway has been uplifting me in the community for years, and I love working with them,” Potter said. “They’ve just always got their hand out: How can we help?”
Having attended the annual event every year, Potter sees how sustained investment in community adds up. He noted Emerald City and Greenwood Plan, two projects featured in the night’s video presentations. “I’ve supported them since 2019. I’ve known a lot of the business owners Bridgeway has supported. So it just feels like family when I come here.”
As guests mingled, greeting each other excitedly or chatting in line for dinner, one couldn’t help but wonder what other success stories were being written.
Learn More
Celebrating Impact—Bridgeway Capital’s 2025 annual event occurred on November 5, at the August Wilson Center. You can view the event page or watch the event recap video to learn more.
About Courtney Balestier
Courtney Balestier is a writer whose work focuses on the intersection of place and identity, particularly in her native Appalachia. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland, The New Yorker online, Lucky Peach, the New York Times, Saveur, Oxford American, New York, Wired, and others. Her writing has been anthologized in The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell (Ohio University Press, 2019) Cornbread Nation 7: The Best of Southern Food Writing (UGA Press, 2014) and nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award and a Pushcart Prize. She is also the creator and host of WMFA, a podcast about why and how we write.