Cleveland Neighborhood Progress has announced that it will be hosting two CLE City Life tours on Saturday, November 29th and Saturday, December 27th.

"Cleveland Neighborhood Progress is pleased to offer citywide bus tours to introduce (or re-introduce) you to some of the coolest and most unique places to live in Northeast Ohio," the website states. "Join us and see why Tremont and Ohio City receive so much publicity. We’ll  show you why University Circle is considered the most intellectual square mile in the nation. And you’ll understand why demand is so high for Downtown living options. All this and more!"

The cost of the tour is $12. You can register here.

Cleveland's ethnic diversity is represented in the city's markets. Replete with dazzling items and intriguing people, they offer a taste of home for newcomers and exotic flavors for the rest of us.

In a report released Sunday by Team NEO, the automotive industry in Northeast Ohio is expected to hold a lot of promise in the upcoming decade. According to the report, the area has the second-largest Tier I auto production markets in the country, meaning the suppliers here make the parts the go directly on the vehicles, second only to Detroit.

Team NEO predicts the Gross Regional Product (GRP) in automotive to grow by 79 percent to become a $4.5 billion industry by 2024. Employment is also expected to grow by 19 percent. Jacob Duritsky, managing director of research for Team NEO, attribute the predicted growth to the area’s diverse mix of auto manufacturing.
 
“No one has a crystal ball, but based on our industry mix, the trend is pretty steady,” Duritsky says.  Add to the mix the jobs brought back to the Avon Lake Ford plant and the scheduled manufacture of Ford’s medium trucks, the F650 and F750, as well as tremendous investment in Ford’s Brookpark and Lordstown plants and Honda’s presence in the state, automotive has a strong hold in an industry that is expected to decline elsewhere in the country.
 
Automotive is one of only two manufacturing industries in Northeast Ohio to grow in the next 10 years. The other is food manufacturing. “We’re experiencing manufacturing employment, essentially, to remain flat,” says Jenny Febbo, Team NEO vice president of marketing and communications. “Automotive is one of only two expected to grow.

In this candid, wide-ranging interview, the leader of the Cleveland Foundation discusses its centennial gifts, the Greater University Circle Initiative, the Transformation Plan and more.

Talent attraction/retention nonprofit Engage! Cleveland has officially kicked off a series of Cleveland-friendly social activities and professional development opportunities through its first annual Cleveland Young Professionals Week.

The weeklong succession of cost-free events aimed at the youthful and talented began Monday and will continue through Oct. 11, says Engage! Cleveland executive director Ashley Basile Oeken. Each day will feature a variety of around-the-clock happenings on both the East and West Side, including fitness classes at local studios, speaker-centric "lunch-and-learn" programs, and nightly networking get-togethers. That's 25 events over six days, if you're counting.

"You hear about other cities and how they've engaged young professionals," says Basile Oeken. "We wanted a signature event to put our name on."

Programming is generally aimed at people age 21 to 40, although the nonprofit is inclusive of anyone who considers themselves a YP. Events are filling up, notes Basile Oeken, so if you're interested in a spinning class at Harness Cycle or listening to a talk by PlayhouseSquare president Art Falco, it's best to act fast.

Basile Oeken views Engage! Cleveland's first-ever CLE YP Week as a chance to show off everything the city has to offer, whether to a lifelong resident or someone who moved here a month ago. Attracting and retaining young talent means linking it to influential leaders and local organizations, she believes.

"It's acclimating people to how much is going on in Cleveland," says Basile Oeken. "There's an opportunity to get everyone living in this community to support it collectively."

While programming will end with a closing party at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, the nonprofit director expects the energy generated by a week's worth of events to resonate throughout the year.

"If you're involved, Cleveland can sell itself," Basile Oeken says. "People are more likely to stay when they're engaged."

The Make Them Pay/Old Angle Boxing Gym in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood offers young people and adults a sense of community and a place to blow off steam. Across the city, other boxing gyms serve a similar purpose.

 
"Think big" was the theme of an Amplify Speaker Series luncheon on making the most of Northeast Ohio's steadily developing information technology presence.

The region must continue to expand its fiber optic infrastructure alongside ongoing efforts to transform Cleveland into a bustling tech hub with worldwide reach, said a foursome of panelists during the October 1 event sponsored by Contempo Communications.

The physical network itself is burgeoning, notes Lev Gonnick of OneCommunity, a nonprofit foundation helping to grow high-speed internet in Northeast Ohio. Since its founding in 2003, the organization has laid 111 miles of fiber in Cuyahoga County alone.

An advanced fiber optic/digital base transporting data at high speeds can be a boon for the area's already robust healthcare sector, says Kevin Goodman, managing director/partner of downtown Cleveland cloud-computing provider BlueBridge Networks. Crystal clear doctor-to-patient conferencing is just one example of how robust telecommunications can aid the industry.

If a healthy digital platform can help build industry and bring jobs, it will give Northeast Ohio an advantage in the hunt for young professionals over similarly sized markets, says Ashley Basile Oeken, executive director of Engage! Cleveland, a talent attraction/retention nonprofit.

"We're falling behind cities like Pittsburgh and Indianapolis in bringing in talent,"  Basile Oeken says. "Cleveland has to find ways to stand out."

Dan Young, founder of technology and design agency DXY, is looking beyond county, state and even national borders when it comes to connecting with the next wave of innovators. Young helped establish a DXY satellite office in Germany, an experience that showcased the need for Cleveland to attract immigrant brainpower.

"The city has to be bigger and bolder about the conversation it's having," he says.

Creating a regional tech epicenter here would make drawing dynamic folks of disparate backgrounds all the easier easier, says Joy Roller, panel facilitator and executive director of Global Cleveland.
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"We need to be open to the flow of ideas and new people," she says. 

When Apryl Beverly signed up for the Bad Girl Ventures education program last spring, she had her eye set on winning the $25,000 loan awarded to one of the class finalists. What she ended up learning was how to make her business, BAAB Writing and Marketing, create its own success and income.
 
“The BGV program is geared around applying for a loan at the end of the class,” explains Beverly. “I was so, I need this money, I need this money. And when I didn’t get the loan I thought, what am I going to do now?”
 
What Beverly did was put the lessons she learned in the program to work and managed to drum up more than $26,000 in contracts from five clients between May and July. BAAB is a business writing service. Beverly and her staff assist their clients with writing business plans and proposals to coaching and marketing services.

“After moving past my pity party, I realized losing was the best thing for me,” says Beverly. “It's not about loans and competitions. It's about perseverance and the drive to make things happen.”

Before she started BAAB (the initials of her family members) in 2011, Beverly had worked in PR and marketing at a few different companies. She used her previous employers as a starting point to grow her own company. “I just started reaching out to previous employers, people I met in the BGV program; asking my existing clients to give me more work,” explains Beverly. “I had to be really focused and I said this is what I need to do. Now I’m not even looking for a loan. I realized I can do it without one.”

With BAAB’s growth, Beverly has been able to hire a part-time editor and a part-time writer to assist with the workload. Eventually, she plans to hire a full staff so she can focus on running BAAB.
 

In its third quarter manufacturing outlook survey, WIRE-Net, a non-profit economic development organization for the manufacturing industry in Northeast Ohio, found that Cleveland area manufacturers are having a good year and are optimistic that business will continue to be good.
 
Of the 89 WIRE-Net members who participated in the survey, half of the companies reported they anticipated increased profits in the upcoming year and 31 percent expected profits to equal last year. The majority of the companies were small manufacturers, with fewer than 50 employees and sales under $10 million annually.
 
In previous years, the top two concerns of WIRE-Net members were around attracting qualified workers and sales and new customers. This year, while respondents still reported that talent attraction was a top concern, other priorities shifted to costs.
 
“They are now talking materials, the Affordable Care Act and electricity costs,” explains Julie King, WIRE-Net’s vice president of resource development and communications. “Sales and customers must be flowing because it wasn’t a barrier. So that’s how we know companies are doing well.”
 
Tom Schullman, general manager of E.C. Kitzel and Sons, a tool manufacturer for the automotive, aerospace, small appliance and mining industries, participated in the survey and agrees with the results.
 
The 30-person company has started to see an increase in business this year. “Toward the end of the second quarter we saw kind of an uptick in business and it’s carried over into the third quarter,” he says.
 
Schullman describes sales as “brisk,” which bodes well for the overall manufacturing ecosystem. “We sell tooling and that’s considered a commodity -- our customers don’t purchase unless they have a need for it,” he explains. “We’ve added new customers in the last six months. The primary thing is our customers are getting busier and it’s causing them to increase orders to us.”
 
Among WIRE-Net members, manufacturing accounts for 21,000 jobs and $1 billion in wages in Northeast Ohio, which in turn is the engine behind 13,000 additional non-manufacturing jobs.
 

When doctors perform surgical procedures, they typically use cold surgical irrigation fluid to expand the patient’s body cavity. The cold fluid can increase their risk of hypothermia, which in turn leads to three times the risk of surgical site infections and other complications. 

Now hospitals like the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals have turned to a local company for a solution. Thermedx has developed the first smart surgical irrigation device to provide fluid warming in arthroscopic and hysteroscopic procedures.
 
“We developed a smart version of an irrigation pump,” explains Thermedx co-founder and executive vice president Mike Haritakis. “It’s a touchscreen, multi-functional irrigation pump that can actually allow a procedure to be done with one device”
 
The Thermedx’s Fluid Smart System, which is used primarily in endoscopic and laparoscopic gynecological, urological and orthopedic procedures, pressurizes the body cavity safely during surgery to improve visibility, warms the irrigation fluid and monitors the fluids and prevents hypothermia.
 
“It really consolidates the devices and streamlines the staff in the OR,” explains Angela Dubik, clinical services manager. “The end result is it makes surgeons’ and nurses’ jobs much easier, it saves the hospital money and it improves patient care.”
 
Thermedx developed the Fluid Smart System in part through funding from Third Frontier and BioEnterprise. The company employs 18 people and is growing. “We’re just looking to continue to develop new products,” says Haritakis. “We want to continue to add jobs to support Northeast Ohio growth in the medical device community. We’re all about growth, essentially.”

As the 2014 Gay Games play out with eclectic events all over town, it becomes clear how they will leave a lasting positive effect on the host city of Cleveland. Uniting beneath a banner of inclusion, collaboration and unity, participants and sponsors establish a spirit that will endure long after the lights have dimmed and the last athlete has left the track.