Jan 25, 2018 6 min read

Many know her by her delicious cookie-baking. Others know the name Johnna A. Pro for the many years it appeared as a byline in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette or in the cast listings of local theater productions.

Now, small communities throughout Western Pennsylvania, including the Monongahela Valley, will know her for the work she does advocating at the state level for their prosperity and success.

“I really believe in small communities,” Pro says.

For the past three years, the 53-year-old resident of Fallowfield Township has worked as the southwest regional director for the state Department of Community and Economic Development. She covers 12 counties, working with community leaders, nonprofits and developers to help connect areas like the Mon Valley with state grant and development programs to boost local economies.

She says some of these areas, especially near and around Pittsburgh, took a huge economic hit when the steel industry collapsed. Some of them have still not fully recovered.

“What we learned is that we need to diversify and can’t rely on one industry,” Pro says. “It’s very easy to be a critic. If you look for the negative, you will find the negative, but I tend to look for the positive. I really want to see these communities get rebuilt.”

Pro says the Mon Valley has great housing stock, easy accessibility to the interstate and access to the river and railways.

“There are small business owners up and down the mid-Mon Valley who have withstood the test of time,” Pro says. “They never gave up. We need to set a positive tone.”

Pro recently won an award for her work from the Mon Valley Initiative, a coalition formed in 1988 to restore the Valley’s economy. In October, she received the Sen. H. John Heinz III Award for Community Service during the Mon Valley Initiative’s annual dinner and community awards ceremony, which Pro thought she was just emceeing.

“We surprised her,” says Laura Zinski, executive director of the Mon Valley Initiative. “She’s very humble and doesn’t really ever want to be in the spotlight.”

Zinski says Pro was considered for the award because of her “attitude of service and care for the whole region.”

“This award is not about one community but the entire Mon Valley region,” she says.

Zinski credited Pro for advocating for the Braddock Neighborhood Partnership Program, which saw the renovation of the Free Press Building and the development of a large park in Braddock.

“She goes to her downtown job, but she is representing the people from where she lives,” Zinski says, adding that Pro’s “total integrity both professionally and personally” also won her the award.

“She tells the truth,” Zinski says. “Sometimes that’s very difficult for people with political or government jobs. She always does it in a great way that is helpful.”

Pro says that her position now encompasses everything that she’s done in her career to this point. She graduated from Charleroi High School in 1982, and from Indiana University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and public relations in 1986. She spent 18 years as a reporter for the Post-Gazette, first covering the Mon Valley, then everything from Pittsburgh city government to food and features, to state government in Harrisburg.

“I was able to cover just about everything a journalist could cover,” she says.

She also taught journalism as an adjunct professor at Point Park University. “That was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life,” Pro says. “I really enjoy teaching and mentoring young journalists.”

In 2005, her career took a political turn.

“At that point in my life I was ready to change careers,” Pro says. “I felt journalism had given me all it could and I was looking for an opportunity to expand my skills in other ways.”

Beginning in 2007, she spent five years as press secretary for House Appropriations Chairman Dwight Evans and commuted back and forth from the Mon Valley to Harrisburg. When Evans lost his position as chairman, Pro used the opportunity to move back into her childhood home in Fallowfield Township, where she took care of her mother, Virginia Lama Pro, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s.

“It was a long and difficult road for my brother and I,” Pro says. “It also taught me patience. Until you are a caregiver, you don’t know what kind of inner strength you have.”

Pro says she picked up her love of baking, specifically cookies, from her mother, who died in 2015. Pro says she usually bakes dozens of cookies around the holiday season and for friends of the family who have weddings in the area.

“My mother was a phenomenal baker,” she says. “My mother always said, ‘Never bake for money because it will become a job – always bake for love.’ And I’ve followed that advice.”

But aside from baking, reporting, politics and community development, Pro says her first of many interests was theater.

“My first love, since I was a little girl, was acting,” she says. “If my work is what I’m passionate about, theater is what I truly love. You always have to find things outside your career path to challenge and interest you – for me it was theater.”

Since 2001, Pro has played several roles in local productions and participates in several shows at her “home theater,” Little Lake Theatre in Canonsburg.

She recently was a featured extra in the 2015 Christmas film “Love, the Coopers.” The day she spent on the film set for that movie in a studio outside Pittsburgh turned out to be a very important day for her non theater-related career. She was temporarily unemployed, and that role was the only thing on her schedule for months. When she returned to her car after eight hours in the studio, she saw a missed call from Harrisburg on her phone.

“I had missed the phone call offering me the position I’m in now,” she says.

She still was able to secure the position, however, and now she’s doing what she’s most passionate about.

“Community has been the tying thread throughout my career,” Pro says. “As a journalist, I was able to tell these communities’ stories.”

In her political roles, Pro says she was able to see where the needs were in those communities. “Now, I can advocate for them.”