By Mason Fish
SPC
4/30/2026
On her first morning at the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission (SPC), Rena Liu-Belshe would never have predicted she would still be there 26 years later.
It was the Summer of 2000, and she had just arrived for her first day as the agency’s export assistance manager. By mid-morning, the organization had received devastating news — its executive director had passed away unexpectedly after being struck by a motor vehicle, and a team of people she had only just met was suddenly faced with an unimaginable loss. For most people, that kind of start might have been enough to reconsider. Rena stayed anyway.
Twenty-six years later, she is retiring as one of the longest-tenured members of the SPC team, leaving behind a program that has quietly shaped how Southwestern Pennsylvania businesses compete on a global stage.
Her colleagues celebrated her with a breakfast last week, a send-off that drew people from across the organization. For Rena, it was a fitting way to close a chapter defined far less by titles and trade missions than by the relationships she built along the way.
Rena’s Work at SPC
Ask Rena to explain her role, and she will stop you before you get too far into the phrase “international trade.”
“International trade is a pretty broad term,” she said. “But export is very specific. We only do export, and export is helping our people sell their product overseas.”
In practice, that means being the first call for a small regional business that woke up one morning to find an inquiry in its inbox from a buyer in Japan, Germany, or South Korea, and had no idea what to do next. The services SPC provides through the program are free to businesses, which Rena said is part of what made her work feel meaningful.
“I truly want to help this company,” she said. “I don’t have anything at stake whether you use my service or not. I’m not selling anything.”
The companies that come to her are almost always small, she said. Whether it be a family-owned manufacturer or a local food producer looking to test an overseas market, she would walk them through pricing strategy, export documentation, cultural differences in doing business abroad, and when to refer them to someone with more specialized knowledge.
“Today I’m talking with somebody selling coffee,” she said. “The next day, talking with somebody selling airplane parts. You just have to learn all kinds of different things.”
A Region on the Rise
Rena has worked under six Pennsylvania governors and watched the export landscape shift considerably. When she started, leading trade delegations to China was a major undertaking. She would serve as interpreter, guide, and logistics coordinator all at once. Today, she said, that kind of handholding is largely unnecessary.
Additionally, Rena has watched SPC itself transform. When she arrived, the organization was relatively unstructured and, in her words, operating well under the radar. A new executive director brought professional systems and a clearer organizational identity, but the organization remained largely unknown to the general public. She recalled a business owner who told her he had lived in Pittsburgh for decades and had never heard of SPC, only to discover at a bar one evening that his neighbor’s wife worked there.
That began to change in recent years. Rena credits the organization’s current leadership under Executive Director Rich Fitzgerald with raising SPC’s public profile significantly, bringing visibility to work that had always been strong but rarely celebrated.
“Before, we were a great book without a good cover,” she said. “Now we have that cover.”
Within the state’s export network, she said Southwestern Pennsylvania has emerged as what program partners now call a rising star, driven by the region’s growing technology sector and the attention it has attracted from state and national leaders.
What Will Rena Miss Most?
Rena confidently stated that she never once dreaded coming into the office. In nearly three decades, she could not recall a morning when she woke up and did not want to come in to work. That, she said, is not something everyone gets to say.
She will miss the people within the organization the most. Particularly, Jackie, her colleague of 17 years, whom she described as the second most important person in her Pittsburgh life after her husband. She also cited that loyalty as one of the reasons she decided it was finally time to go.
“If I keep working, Jackie never gets the chance to be promoted,” Rena said with a laugh. That was something she knew from her very first day.
Ultimately, retirement has turned out to be much less daunting than she originally expected. Her husband retired a few years ago and has barely slowed down, having enrolled in the Osher Lifelong Learning Program at Carnegie Mellon University, a national initiative that offers retirees the chance to take courses without the pressure of grades or exams. Rena has already followed him into the program.
There is also travel. She noted that she has been to Chile many times on business and never once made it to Patagonia, an iconic travel spot located at the Southern tip of Chile and Argentina, known for its stunning landscapes.
“My friends would always ask me, ‘You lived in Venezuela for so long, how have you never been to that place [Patagonia]?'” she said.
Last Christmas, along with her husband, sister, and brother-in-law, she finally went.
“Business travel and leisure travel are two completely different things,” she said. “You can go to a foreign country on business and probably never see the sky. When you go on your own, you can do whatever you want. You see the things that are meaningful.”
She plans to stay subscribed to the SPC newsletter. For an organization she stumbled into in one of the strangest ways imaginable, that feels about right.