AKRON — Why would a meeting here February 17 about northeast Ohio’s economic future be covered the next morning in the New York Times? The obvious answer: something very unusual happened.
Twenty-eight charitable foundations launched a $30 million commitment to take the lead in steering northeast Ohio to a better economic future. In grants ranging from $100,000 to a leading $10 million pledged by the Cleveland Foundation, the Fund for Our Economic Future has two-thirds of its pledges in the bank.
It’s uncommon enough for a large group of foundations in one region to engage in a large-scale collaboration; but this one seizes a leadership role that usually falls to business or to government. Well, business leadership in the Cleveland to Canton region is busy re-grouping these days and local governments don’t see any loose change in their revenue futures. And help from the state? Forget that. A legislature still rural-bent loves to loath the state’s northeast corner.
And why the sense that somebody had better do something? Brad Whitehead, a program officer of the Cleveland Foundation, told the New York Times “We’re losing ground even when the economic cycle is on the upswing.” The Milken Institute’s economic-vitality ranking of 200 cities puts Canton at 149th, Akron at 180th, Cleveland at 194th, and Youngstown next to last. The board chairman of one foundation offered a sobering quip: “not surviving is an option.” Among the biggest worries is the chronic brain drain — losing population in that critical 24-39 age group. The region’s lost 90,000 jobs over the last decade, and is almost dead last among regions in creating new ones.
The meeting symbolized the conclusion that speaker after speaker confirmed: if there’s an answer to what ails them, it’s a regional answer, not something that any city or county can do. Collaborative Economics president Douglas Henton moderated a national panel assembled by the Alliance for Regional Stewardship. Joan Riehm, deputy mayor of Metro Louisville, reminded regional leaders that lots of regions envy the assets of northeast Ohio. She rattled off the short list of renowned museums, arts and cultural organizations, universities, the Cleveland Clinic, spectacular recreational areas, Lake Erie, and a legacy of solid business acumen.
Whitehead told the several hundred leaders assembled that the money would be spent “where its impact will spread to the whole region.” The target includes everything from business retention strategies to providing venture capital for some new business starts. “But one thing it has to be,” said George Espy, head of the Ohio Grantmakers Forum, “is real leverage, something that provokes change.”
Edward (Ned) Hill, editor of Economic Development Quarterly and a professor at Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Public Affairs, says this qualifies as authentic “first-mover” behavior, punching a hole in the stereotype of the Cleveland area as a place stuck in the legacy of its proud past.
The fund also breaks free from grant-making-as-usual. In fact, it pushes these philanthropists into a risk zone rarely visited. David Abbott, president of the Gund Foundation, which along with the Cleveland Foundation and the GAR Foundation, made the top three pledges, calls this a “more muscular form of philanthropy.”
So here’s a regional initiative, led by the only sector with real freedom to act, that seems to be breaking from old ways and breathing in the realities of a new era