Cleveland's Forward Cities Council Seeks Innovation and Opportunity For All

Cleveland's Forward Cities Council Seeks Innovation and Opportunity For All
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Earlier this year the Economic Innovation Group ranked Cleveland as America's most distressed big city. To Deborah Hoover, that means Forward Cities came to Cleveland "at exactly the right time."

Hoover is the co-chair of the Cleveland Forward Cities Council, the group's local advisory board, as well as the president and CEO of the Burton D. Morgan Foundation. Hoover has been engaged in promoting entrepreneurship in northeast Ohio for nearly a decade, and she says multiple other local organizations have done the same. But until recently, she says the community has "fallen short" on supporting minority-owned business ventures.

"While northeast Ohio is moving forward and a lot of really great things are happening, great things are not happening for everybody who lives in Cleveland," she says. "We still have a lot of distressed census tracts that need our attention so that all of our residents can benefit from the economic growth that we are experiencing now."

So when the Cleveland Forward Cities Council first came together in 2014, Hoover and her other co-chair Randy McShepard worked to identify which areas of the city most needed their help. "Initially the council was asked to identify one commercial corridor or neighborhood to focus on, but being the overzealous group that we are in Cleveland, we selected four," said McShepard.

One of those was the Opportunity Corridor, an ongoing roadway construction project connecting the dense cultural center known as University Circle with several of Cleveland's most distressed neighborhoods. Working with Forward Cities, representatives of the Opportunity Corridor neighborhoods developed an informational map or grid based on a model in Detroit called the "Bizgrid" which they learned about as a result of Forward Cities. This Cleveland grid helps new entrepreneurs to find access to capital, real estate assistance, and other business startup resources and support services.

Another target area was West 25th Street Corridor, a Cleveland neighborhood that includes the densest Latino population in the state of Ohio. McShepard says the community had long struggled to establish an incubator for Latino businesses. As a result of Cleveland Forward Cities' efforts, the neighborhood was able to secure a planning grant from the Business of Good Foundation to help advance the Villa Hispanic project along.

"Small, minority-owned businesses are trying to find their way, and they just need a helping hand," McShepard says. "We advocate on their behalf with the city, plus find ways to get them coaching, community support, civic support and help them with strategy."

In addition to these direct efforts to promote inclusive innovation in Cleveland, Forward Cities has fostered a new sense of collaboration among the many area organizations involved in such work. Before Forward Cities came to town, McShepard says many of Cleveland's key community organizations were divided into "silos" by type (i.e. philanthropic foundations, academic institutions, small business support organizations, etc.) But Forward Cities' collaborative mindset has resulted in some impactful new working relationships and projects.

"The beauty of this initiative has been that it's brought us all around the table to figure out what the problems are, and then working together to quickly respond to those problems," McShepard says.

For example: working with the Innovation Council, Cleveland State University (CSU) recently compiled a comprehensive, up-to-date list with contact information of every minority-owned business in the city. Two days later, the resulting document was mentioned in a meeting between Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson and representatives of the Republican National Committee (RNC) convention, which will take place in Cleveland in July. Encouraging the RNC to work with local minority-owned businesses, Jackson referred the RNC staffers to McShepard, who furnished them with the Forward Cities and CSU list of Cleveland area minority businesses and entrepreneurs.

"It really was wonderful that we created that list and then were able to pass it on," McShepard says. "Had we not done that, they probably would have said, 'Hey, we tried a couple of these lists other groups have, but the addresses weren't valid,' et cetera, et cetera. But thanks to Forward Cities we had an up to date, reliable list, and we hope that some of those minority businesses did get the opportunity to do business with the RNC."

As the two-year Forward Cities project approaches its culmination this month at the Cleveland convening, Hoover says there's still plenty of work to do. She and McShepard firmly assert that the work they've started with their Forward Cities Council members will continue beyond the convening.

"We're not there yet," Hoover says. "But I think the conversations we're having...are getting these issues on the radar screen of more people, so more people in the nonprofit sector and the for-profit sector can really put their heads together, roll up their sleeves and do the work that needs to be done."

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