Cuyahoga County residents have picked which two large-scale projects will get funding through the Cuyahoga Arts & Culture (CAC) Creative Culture Grants competition.

* Dancing Wheels received $130,421 for a television documentary that will expand on the dance company's performance of the multi-media ballet, Dumbo. The film will explore issues of bullying and social injustice using the life stories of artists and community figures.

* LAND studio was awarded $150,000 to fund a multi-faceted light installation illuminating public spaces in downtown Cleveland.

Both projects were selected by 6,500 county residents in a public voting process held February 1-20. The winning arts programs, scheduled for completion in 2014, were chosen from a list of six finalists selected by an independent panel of arts and culture experts.

Officials from competition sponsor CAC were pleased by the voter turnout, and believe the winning projects will engage the region in creative ways.

"All six finalists had a different spin on how to connect arts and culture to the community," says CAC executive director Karen Gahl-Mills. "The two winners did a great job of reaching out to the general public."

CAC's pilot voting program revealed just how much creativity exists in the area, Gahl-Mills maintains. "It was delightful to see it come forward in new, exciting ways," she says.

The nonprofit is now assessing the program for possible future iterations. Gahl-Mills is not certain CAC will put on an annual public vote, but she can certainly envision county residents stuffing the ballot boxes for future arts projects.

"It's a great investment of public dollars," she says. "It isn't just the organizations that win; the community wins, too."

 
SOURCE: Karen Gahl-Mills
WRITER: Douglas J. Guth

Last week at the 2013 Movers and Shakers Awards, the Cleveland Professional 20/30 Club honored 25 area professionals under the age of 35 who are active in their communities. The event was held at Ariel International Center.
 
The up-and-coming leaders were honored for their work as volunteers or board members in the communities and businesses they are involved in. The keynote speaker was Jonathon Sawyer, chef-owner of Greenhouse Tavern and Noodlecat.
 
Sawyer spoke about moving back to Cleveland and how he and his wife wanted to make a difference in the city. He set out to open Cleveland’s first green certified restaurant, eventually succeeding and opening the Greenhouse Tavern. He spoke about his excitement that Cleveland is becoming recognized for its restaurant scene.
 
Honorees included Ryan Anderson, Chijioke Asomugha, Andrew Bennett, Emily Campbell, Michael Christoff, Rachel Ciomcia, Samantha Schartman-Cycyk, Katie Davis, Dave Diffendal, James Gasparatos, Donté Gibbs, John Hagerty, John Hausman, Julie L. Hill, Dominique LaRochelle, Amanda Leffler, Amanda Maggiotto, Timothy McCue, Kelly McGlumphy, Bryan Schauer, Lori Scott, Brent Shelley, Jeff Sobieraj, Jessica Wallis and Jonathan Wehner.
 
Gautam Pai, president of the 20/30 Club, stressed the importance of honoring young professionals.

“We hear constantly that young professionals are the future,” says Pai. “However, the future is the result of those things we're doing right now, in the present. Movers and Shakers is the Cleveland Professional 20/30 Club's opportunity to showcase those young professionals that are doing just that:  Making positive contributions right now and serving as leading examples for all to follow.”

 
Sources: Gautam Pai
Writer: Karin Connelly

Filing a federal income tax return is far from the most enjoyable activity one can do. It can even be intimidating for people who don't understand the process or know they are eligible for an Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit providing free tax preparation and other services to low- and middle-income Cuyahoga County residents, aims to bridge the knowledge gap and help hard-working individuals and families keep more of what they earned. Nationwide last year, the average credit handed out was about $2,200, but the credit can provide as much as $5,900.

"About 20 percent of people eligible for [EITC] don't claim it," says Mark McDermott, Enterprise vice president and Ohio market leader. "We get the word out."

That word is spread in conjunction with the Cuyahoga County Earned Income Tax Credit Coalition and a host of other local partner organizations. This tax season, Enterprise has recruited over 350 IRS-certified volunteers to assist in the effort.

Eligible residents can access the free service by dialing the United Way of Greater Cleveland's 2-1-1 help line. Appointments are scheduled at one of 25 sites located throughout the country. There are also a handful of Saturday free tax-preparation events taking place right up until filing day.

During the past seven years, more than 55,000 participants have received over $77 million in refunds and saved millions of dollars in fees from paid tax preparers, notes program director Kathy Matthews.

"That's about $13 million going back into the local economy," says Matthews.

Tax help isn't Enterprise's only offering. Those who use the service also have access to benefit screenings, debt management and more.

"The tax work is our foundation," says McDermott. "This has proven to be a great program."
 
 
SOURCES: Mark McDermott, Kathy Matthews
WRITER: Douglas J. Guth

Rene Polin founded his design consulting firm, Balance Inc., in Chagrin Falls. Yet as he grew, he felt cut off from creative opportunities in Cleveland. In October, he moved his eight-person, nine-year-old firm to 5,500 square feet of open, custom-built office space in the Tyler Village complex in St. Clair Superior.

"Tyler was the most interesting space we found," he says. "It had great character, an incredibly open floor plan and high ceilings. There was the opportunity to build the space exactly our way as well as to build a physical workshop for prototyping."

"Our offices in Chagrin Falls were a little formal, and we're really pretty informal," he adds. "This space is great because it allows us to run around a little more freely."

Polin has also enjoyed the opportunity to get to know his neighbors at Tyler Village, a place he describes as having the amenities of an industrial park, but "so much cooler." It's also a perk that food trucks regularly show up at chow time.

"The Tyler folks are genuinely interested in bringing forward-thinking companies into the space," he says. "They reach out to companies that are bringing something new. There's a certain vibe and energy you can’t find a lot of other places."

Balance Inc. is one of those forward-thinking companies. Polin, an East Cleveland native, majored in Industrial Design at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Balance works on products like Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners and Ninja kitchen gear.

When the work gets boring -- which we imagine rarely happens -- employees can now find inspiration simply in staring out the window. "We have a straight shot to the north, so we get some pretty incredible sky views. It's a pretty good vista."


Source: Rene Polin
Writer: Lee Chilcote

For a number of years at the tail end of the 20th century, Greater Cleveland's public and private leaders attempted to pull the city up through ambitious marketing campaigns. For awhile it seemed to work. The national media began referring to Cleveland as the "Comeback City" in conjunction with the grand openings of ambitious projects like Tower City Center, Jacobs Field and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.
 
But toward the end of the '90s a strange thing happened: The city, for all intents and purposes, stopped marketing itself.
 
Why?
 
"We began to believe our own press," says Rick Batyko, president of the Regional Marketing Alliance of Northeast Ohio, which conducts the Cleveland Plus campaign. And civic officials "moved on to other tasks and defunded marketing."
 
In essence, Northeast Ohio stopped telling its tale with the tale barely begun -- a rather large mistake in retrospect. "The underlying economy wasn't doing that well," Batyko says. "That's something you couldn't see in the skyline shots."
 
During the mid-2000s, the region's narrative thread was picked up by Cleveland Plus campaign. Established in 2005 -- with founding members that included Greater Cleveland Partnership, Positively Cleveland and Team NEO -- the organization champions Northeast Ohio as a culturally rich, yet affordable place to live.
 
Read the rest of the story here.

Back in 2011, Fresh Water ran a feature about Ohio's newly instituted Film Production Tax Credit, which helped attract big-budget productions like "The Avengers" and "Alex Cross," plus smaller films like "Take Shelter" and "Fun Size." We decided to revisit the topic to see how it's working out for Cleveland, and Ohio.

The St. Clair Superior Development Corporation and artist-entrepreneur Stephanie Sheldon are hoping to start a new tradition in Cleveland come spring -- an urban flea market that celebrates Cleveland's maker community and helps locals turn trash into treasure.

The Cleveland Flea will take place on the second Saturday of the month at E. 64th and St. Clair Avenue beginning in April. It will feature a mix of artisans, food trucks, pop-up and bricks-and-mortar retail, and educational demonstrations.

"It will be a look at the maker community in Cleveland combined with traditional flea aspects," says Sheldon, the energetic driver behind the startup businesses Parfait, Indie Foundry and Kiss and Bite. "It will be a mix of a curated selection of Cleveland artisans and a treasure hunt. It won't be all hillbilly or all highbrow."

While the Flea itself will take place outdoors, it dovetails with St. Clair Superior's Retail Ready project, which has lured new businesses to the area by working with local landlords to offer cheap rent, buildout funding and marketing assistance.

Sheldon says the idea came in part from her realization that Cleveland's artisan community could use a home. "I hear rumblings from people who ask, 'How do people find me in the oversaturated Etsy market? It's become really ineffective."

In addition to makers and locals selling their stuff, ideas for the CLE Flea include a pop-up restaurant for food trucks, educational programs on bike repair and starting a business, and a partnership with the Cleveland Salon.

Sheldon hopes the idea will catch on and grow quickly. A soft launch will take place on Saturday, February 23rd at the first-ever Cleveland Kurentovanje, a traditional Slovenian rite of spring that is coming to the area.


Source: Stephanie Sheldon
Writer: Lee Chilcote

Open Doors Academy, which started in 2002 as an after-school program for at-risk youth at St. Paul's Church in Cleveland Heights, now works with over 330 adolescents at eight school sites each year. Nearly 100 percent of Open Doors' participants attend college or a post-secondary program.

To accommodate its growth, Open Doors recently moved into a newly renovated, 5,700-square-foot office at 3311 Perkins Avenue. Executive Director Annemarie Grassi says that the organization has come out of the closet -- quite literally.

"We started in a space in the Heights Medical Building in Cleveland Heights that was maybe 400 square feet, and that was a huge upgrade from our office before, which was located in a St. Pauls Church closet," says Grassi. "Then we moved to 1,800 square feet, but everytime you turned around there was more growth."

The new office, which was completely raw before the landlord built it out, features open space with pods for various work teams and hoteling spaces for field workers who only come into the office occasionally. The project was paid for by a grant from the Ames Foundation and a donation from a generous individual.

Grassi says that Open Doors is effective because it offers a comprehensive support program for at-risk youth, involving families, teachers and school support staff in efforts to bolster student achievement and leadership. Unique features include required service work as close as Cleveland and as far away as Honduras.

"We combine high-quality programming with strong outcomes," says Grassi. "When a kid sees that their parent is invested in the program, then they're more likely to be invested, too. We focus on creating the whole child."

Grassi says that Open Doors, whose hallmark is engaging youth every school day from 6th-12th grade, is replicable. "We want to be in every high school in Cleveland and the inner ring suburbs 20 years from now," she says.


Source: Annemarie Grassi
Writer: Lee Chilcote

The health of Lake Erie has come a long way in the past 40 years, and it is now considered by many to be a case study of a recovering ecosystem. Yet not very many people know that, in part as a result of cleaning up our water pollution as well as our close proximity to a Great Lake, Northeast Ohio companies have developed rich expertise in water technology.

To leverage this cluster, influence policy, and conduct research and education, a group of organizations have launched The Alliance for our Water Future, a new nonprofit organization that seeks to spur innovative solutions to freshwater issues locally and globally.

"Silicon Valley is an example of what one industry cluster can do for a region," says Byron Clayton, Vice President at NorTech. "Companies all worked together in that region to leverage their strengths. In Northeast Ohio, we have a great legacy in cleaning up industrial waste water. We identified areas where we have the best chance of competing, and that's been the focus of our water technology cluster."

The areas that NorTech identified are automation and controls (identifying the best, most efficient way to control water), absorbents (extracting contaminants from water) and corrosion resistance (preventing water systems from corroding).

NorTech's role is to identify, organize and accelerate clusters. The Alliance will help promote this success story and spur cross-sector collaboration. By working together, the groups involved in the Alliance hope to make a global impact.

"This is about the economic future of our region," says Fran DiDonato, Program Manager of the Alliance. "If we can show that we had success with cleaning water, then that gives us credibility when we export our solutions to other places."

Two Northeast Ohio companies, MAR Systems and ABSMaterials, were recently selected by the Artemis Project as 2012 Top 50 Water Companies. Rockwell Automation is also considered a major player in the water technology field.

The founding members of the Alliance are NorTech, Case Western Reserve University, Port of Cleveland, Cleveland Metroparks, Cleveland State University, Hiram College, Great Lakes Science Center, Kent State University, MAR Systems and Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.


Source: Byron Clayton, Fran DiDonato
Writer: Lee Chilcote

Each year in Cuyahoga County, 20 fortunate artists are awarded $20,000 Creative Workforce Fellowship grants to pursue their art, which often takes a back seat to more pressing needs. The fellowships also help to brand the region to outsiders as an artist-friendly place to live.

Recent transplants to Cleveland arriving from so-called "big-ticket" metropolitan markets say that they are experiencing appreciable cost savings in terms of housing, transportation, entertainment and food. And that translates to a better standard of life with little lost in terms of quantity and quality of offerings.

Domestic abuse often is treated as a taboo subject and not something the general public likes to admit exists, says Molly Scheetz, development marketing officer at the Domestic Violence & Child Advocacy Center of Cleveland.

This reluctance makes events like the organization's January 5 benefit at Negative Space Gallery vitally important in reaching out to victims of abuse. Funds procured at the gallery will be put toward programming that aids Cuyahoga County residents suffering in-home violence and other forms of mistreatment.

"We'll be grateful for whatever is raised," says Scheetz.

Awareness of the center's programming is just as important as funding, Scheetz believes. The community should know of the variety of services available to teens, adults and families, including:  An education component bringing knowledge about teen dating violence to local schools; a 24-hour family helpline fielding crisis calls and offering referrals for abuse resources; and a shelter available for victims of domestic violence and their children.

"Anytime people can become more educated about the services we provide, it's a good thing," Scheetz says.

The center is working to overcome its own challenges these days. The nonprofit is the result of a merger that took place earlier this year between Bellflower Center for Prevention of Child Abuse and the Domestic Violence Center.

The transition has been fairly seamless, and the organization will continue to shed light on violence shuttered behind closed doors. "We have to acknowledge problems in order to reach solutions," says Scheetz.
 
 
SOURCE: Molly Scheetz
WRITER: Douglas J. Guth

It's crunch time, folks! In less than three weeks, the 2012 holiday season will be a memory. We feel your pain. To help, we've stitched together a provocative assortment of gift ideas that should knock out your list in no time flat. This year, keep it fresh, keep it tasty, keep it local.

This summer, the St. Clair Superior Development Corporation launched an initiative called "Retail Ready" with the objective of filling a slew of vacant storefronts along St. Clair Avenue. In partnership with local landlords, they offered enticements such as reduced rent, free buildout and marketing support. The goal was to create a "big bang" effect in which a number of shops opened simultaneously, bringing new life to this historic street.

Although the project has taken longer than anticipated, it has sparked a lot of fresh interest in the area, says St. Clair Superior Executive Director Michael Fleming. The faded strip also recently celebrated a new tenant, Nx Dance Studio, which opened its doors on Sunday with a room full of line dancers and music spilling out into the street. Three additional retailers are expected to open early next year.

Now, thanks to a $25,375 grant awarded by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, St. Clair Superior is gearing up for a major public art project this summer that will beautify the street between E. 62nd and Addison. "Hope-Sketch: St. Clair Avenue Reimagined" will create large-scale public art with community input.

"We've always known that a major component to the 'pop-up neighborhood' would be public art," Fleming says. "Hope-Sketch will involve neighborhood residents and businesses in working with an artist to put together ideas as to what their hopes are for the neighborhood. Then they'll create a temporary art installation for one weekend and the whole street will come alive. Afterwards, a professional design firm, Agnes Studio, will distill the concepts into permanent public art."

Hope-Sketch will be completed in summer of 2013. In February, St. Clair Superior is also planning to celebrate kurentovanje, a Slovenian carnival event that is based on Pagan tradition. By then, Fleming hopes that new retailers such as an art gallery, coffeeshop and bakery will be open, with more on the way.


Source: Michael Fleming
Writer: Lee Chilcote