We are an alliance of funders—foundations, corporations, universities, health care systems, business and civic associations, government entities and individuals—who pool their resources and collective know-how to advance economic growth and increase access to opportunity for all people of Northeast Ohio.
Check out our latest annual report by clicking below.
Supported by more than a decade of research and practical experience, we operate on the belief that to sustain our region’s economic growth, more of the community must have the opportunity to participate in and benefit from it. To achieve this, we support efforts that create good-paying jobs, prepare our workforce for the jobs of today and tomorrow, and improve connections of people and jobs.
Our connection with the Fund is embedded in our mission. Workforce is just as important as the seniors we serve because our seniors wouldn’t be anywhere without those who serve them.
The Fund’s efforts to bring together elements of philanthropy, business and government to help foster economic growth in the region are helping to create jobs for the very students that the John Huntington Fund targets for its giving.
The Fund for Our Economic Future brings a lot of benefits to both our organization and me personally. What [the Fund has] been able to do in identifying projects that encourage economic growth has been very positive, and also very much aligned with the objectives we have as a foundation.
We've set some very ambitious goals for Northeast Ohio in terms of job creation. Every single one of us has to come together and share our expertise, share our talents, so that we get this job done.
What we're learning is that this whole area of workforce development is quite complicated. It requires many different players to work together.
The exciting part about the Fund is the way it creates a common convening ground for different entities in the business community, higher education and others to come together for common goals, in this case to improve the economic vitality of our great region.
If you could significantly increase economic activity and job opportunities in the region, you’d go a long way to lifting people out of poverty. The Growth & Opportunity strategy of the Fund fits perfectly with Bruening’s approach.
Fund President Brad Whitehead reflects on how he met Steve Minter and the impact he had on his career, and life.
Too many residents in Northeast Ohio find themselves stuck in an intractable scenario: no car, no job; no job, no car. The Paradox Prize seeks to break this paradox.
Eliminating racial disparities in employment and income isn’t just the right thing to do. Our region’s economic success depends on it.
Bill Leamon, an Innovation Mission Fellow at the Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland, writes about the importance of mentors in college and career success and the power of "micro-mentoring."
Why Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland is investing in big ideas.
Fund grantee Towards Employment chooses to be extraordinary. In this blog, Executive Director Jill Rizika shares how Towards Employment is working to advance the job preparation priorities laid out in our Two Tomorrows report.
Our Fund's Kevin Alin and Peter Truog write on the Brookings Institution blog about new federal program Opportunity Zones and its potential to shape the landscape of inclusive economic growth across the country.
Fund President Brad Whitehead writes in this City Club blog post that he agrees with a recent call to lead more effectively, and adds "I think our greatest act should be to change the power paradigm."
Newly appointed Fund Chair Mark Samolczyk of Stark Community Foundation reflects on what made 2017 such a big year for Stark County, and how he anticipates building on this momentum in 2018 and beyond.
Incorporating the findings from our Fund's Job Creation Growth & Opportunity Impact Assessment
Our outgoing Chair Brian Frederick leaves behind challenge for future Fund leaders: "Be bold and use this remarkable vehicle as a transformative agent for the entire Northeast Ohio community."
Our Fund is as important today for the future of our region as it was 13 years ago when it started, and our region’s biggest challenges will benefit from collaborative philanthropy.
A map of Northeast Ohio's job hubs is a starting point to understanding where we should prioritize future business expansion, public transportation, workforce services, and other community assets so that we can improve connections of people and jobs.
On the Brookings Institution's blog, The Avenue, our President Brad Whitehead reflects on how understanding where a region's job hubs are and priortizing those best positoined for growth can improve a community's economic competitiveness.
Shari Harrell, president of the Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley, writes about her task as a Foundation leader in addressing racial inequities: "I must consider my role as a gatekeeper and find ways to be different and to do better."
Deborah Hoover, of Fund member the Burton D. Morgan Foundation, writes about the startup ecosystem in Northeast Ohio, of which we're proud to be a long-time supporter. Learn more from this Meeting of the Minds post.
The Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland launches new fellowship to help fight poverty through innovation.
Using our Fund's Collaboration Handbook, "you can actually walk through whether the right preconditions exist for a collaboration to be possible and how, if it is, to make sure it’s successful," writes Mark Samolczyk, president and CEO of Stark Community Foundation and vice chair of our Fund, on the Philanthropy Front and Center-Cleveland blog.
Heather Roszczyk, our Fund's Akron Entrepreneurship Fellow, dispels myths about the entrepreneurship scene there and shares insights on why now's a great time to start something in Akron, in this post for the Meeting of the Minds blog.
ideastream's latest Listening Project focused on the Northeast Ohio community's sentiments on poverty. Mike Shafarenko, formerly of the Fund and now manager of civic engagement, web and social media at ideastream, shares some of the interesting conclusions that emerged through the process.
Fund Akron Entrepreneurship Fellow Heather Roszczyk shares her top five takeaways from the recent Hometown Summit, a gathering for community leaders from small and mid-sized cities, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Kevin Alin, our director of regional engagement, observes how increasingly in Northeast Ohio, employment is contingent upon having reliable access to a vehicle. Without one, many jobseekers are stuck in a cycle of no car, no job, no job, no car.
Our 2016 annual report celebrates our Fund as a "learning laboratory" where philanthropy of all stripes comes together to learn with and from one another, and to test and advance new initiatives that can result in improved job creation, job preparation and job access.
Our Fund's Akron Entrepreneurship Fellow shares her enthusiasm for the entrepreneurial activity happening in Summit County, and how she is working to keep the momentum going.
Bethia Burke, the Fund's director of strategy and resource allocation, implores: Let's find ways to work together and use resources more efficiently so individuals can access a well-balanced set of workforce services. The WorkAdvance model is a good place to start.
Chris Thompson of Civic Collaboration Consultants reflects on the essential elements of effective collaboration, or how to avoid its evil twin, coblaboration, in this post on the Tamarack Institute's blog.
New Year reflections on the power of communications and influence building.
On The Intersector Project blog, Chris Thompson, author of the Fund's new Collaboration handbook, discusses the preconditions that must be present for collaboration to take shape (effectively).
Chris Thompson's "Collaboration: A Handbook from the Fund for Our Economic Future," gets at the how of collaboration, and shares what it takes to design, facilitate and sustain effective collaborations that can catalyze enduring, positive community change.
"We need to start by seeing and acknowledging the systemic inequity that exists in every setting," writes Christine Mayer, president of GAR Foundation. "Only after that honest reckoning can we begin to strategize on how we can create different, more equitable outcomes."
Our Chair Brian Frederick, president and CEO of the Community Foundation of Lorain County, reflects on a racial equity workshop he recently attended and how we might really internalize diversity, inclusion and equity.
Pete Carlson, president of Regional Growth Strategies, explores the role of economic development organizations in driving inclusive growth, or, as we at the Fund call it, Growth & Opportunity.
President Brad Whitehead and our Fund's Job Creation/Regional Strategy Initiative Leader Deborah D. Hoover of Burton D. Morgan Foundation, reflect on how our region can make good on the vision of Northeast Ohio as a national leader in additive manufacturing by 2023.
Summer intern Madison Scagnetti, reflects on her experiences at the Fund.
Chris Thompson, former director of regional engagement at the Fund, reflects on the loss of our good partner and great friend Russ Pry.
Good things in Milwaukee’s 30th Street Industrial Corridor can certainly happen here.
Jeffrey Kruth, a senior urban designer at the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, advocates for multimodal transit-friendly development and investment, the creation of new job centers, and sustainable green infrastructure at the scale of the neighborhoods along Opportunity Corridor.
I’m Madison Scagnetti, the Fund’s summer communications and development intern.
Gregory L. Brown, executive director of PolicyBridge, a Cleveland-based nonpartisan think tank, shares the recommendations that came out of its latest research and engagement project analyzing the spatial disconnection between employment opportunities in Northeast Ohio and unemployed residents in distressed urban core neighborhoods.
Our members constitute one of the most robust civic leadership networks in Northeast Ohio—a network that crosses sector and geographic boundaries, and extends beyond individual organizations to touch many, many more. Need proof? Look no further than our 2015 Annual Report and Network Map (suitable for framing!).
Conexus is the new brand for an effort in Summit County that ties together many things important to a community's vibrancy: workforce, education, business retention and expansion, prosperity.
While there is no easy answer to the question, "What can we do to make sure companies have the talent they need to succeed?"; Summit County leaders are committed to building one through Conexus.
Mark Scheffler, president of Leadership Akron, writes about the changing nature of leadership in Akron, and other takeaways from a recent Knight Foundation/Greater Ohio Policy Center report on key trends in this city.
Growth & Opportunity is an economic imperative as much as it is an ethical one, writes Fund member Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland.
In this post on his Regional Growth Strategies blog, Pete Carlson writes that "small businesses already located in or near low-income communities may hold the key to unlocking good jobs for low-income residents."
Our President Brad Whitehead builds on last week's blog about making resolutions, and shares how our Fund plans to keep those resolutions and reach our goals.
With one week of 2016 under our belts, our Chair Brian Frederick, president and CEO of the Community Foundation of Lorain County, reflects on the resolutions our Fund has made.
Chris Thompson gives his Top 10 takeaways from the recent Grantmakers for Effective Organizations Collaboration Conference. It's a good reference for grantmakers who want to excel at collaboration.
The second piece in a two-part series. For an introduction on how systems change requires collaborative leadership, click here.
Achieving positive change within complex civic systems requires a different kind of leadership. Here, complex civic systems, collaboration and leadership explained.
Green City Blue Lake takes a look at our Fund's latest report on job access in Northeast Ohio, and some of the intial reactions and takeaways of community leaders.
Our President Brad Whitehead writes on the Deaconess Foundation blog about the potential for new pilot program TalentNEO to alter hiring practices in ways that benefit businesses and create more job opportunities for those who need them the most.
What’s working: Wayne County is driving economic growth and creating opportunities for all.
"Let's make sure the lasting story [in Northeast Ohio] is not 'a tale of two cities,' but a tale of many cities and towns and villages and counties withing one region working together to create both growth and opportunity for all of our residents," Fund President Brad Whitehead wrote in this recent blog for Policy Matters Ohio.
Chris Thompson, Fund director of regional engagement, and Jeffrey M. Glebocki, CEO of Strategy + Action/Philanthropy, make a case for going beyond programmatic grants in this post on Exponent Philanthropy's blog.
One of the coolest aspects of working as an intern for the Fund for Our Economic Future has been the numerous opportunities to gain up-close and personal insight into not only the philanthropic organizations working to promote Growth & Opportunity in Northeast Ohio, but also the innovative companies and collectives driving economic competitiveness in the region.
In Growth & Opportunity, the emphasis is on the ampersand. "That's the special part--and the most challenging," writes Jeff Linton, senior vice president of corporate communications and community relations at Forest City Enterprises, a member of the Fund, in this blog post for CEOs for Cities.
Collaboration is everywhere, and appears to mean just about anything. Suffice to say, there’s a whole lot of collaboration going on. But what does the Fund for Our Economic Future mean when it says it supports collaborations that advance Growth & Opportunity? Director of Regional Engagement Chris Thompson explains.
In this guest blog post, Jim Rokakis and Paul Boehnlein of Western Reserve Land Conservancy's Thriving Communities Institute describe a recent undertaking in Akron to survey all 97,000 of the city's parcels. This type of information can help civic leaders across Northeast Ohio make wise development decisions that lead to jobs for those residents who need them the most.
Our Chris Thompson, director of regional engagement, writes on The Intersector Project Blog that public officials are well positioned to help their communities address the three keys to successful collaborations.
The Intersector Project Executive Director Neil Britto asked a provocative question recently in RouteFifty: Are those of us who seek to improve cross-sector collaboration in the United States to improve public welfare forgetting what could be our most important client — the public sector? Our Chris Thompson, director of regional engagement, responds with his own observations on engaging the public sector in cross-sector collaborations here.
In this guest blog post, John T. Petures Jr., president and CEO of the Akron Community Foundation, writes about the importance of understanding the specific issues affecting our region’s individual communities, as well as their interconnectedness, in order to address them properly. He shares findings from the Foundation's recent report, Creating Measurable Community Impact, which examines and evaluates immediate and emerging issues facing Summit County.
Robert Jaquay, associate director of the George Gund Foundation and vice president of our Fund, writes on Brookings' The Avenue blog that in our Growth & Opportunity approach to transforming the economy, "core cities will not be left behind." We must improve job creation, preparation and access on the local level and use these learnings to influence other efforts around the region.
This month, Chris Thompson, director of regional engagement for the Fund, Mark Scheffler, president of Leadership Akron, and Marcy Levy Shankman, director of Leadership Cleveland, described their work to promote collaborative civic leadership in an essay published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Our new chair, Brian Frederick, shares his thoughts on what it means to be a part of the Fund and why he is so invigorated by what the future holds.
In this guest post on the GAR Foundation blog, Chris Thompson, our director of regional engagement, talks about what Growth & Opportunity means for greater Akron.
We cannot have a conversation about our region’s workforce—how to improve it, how to better connect it to available jobs—without first talking about literacy, stresses Kurt Karakul of Third Federal Foundation in this guest post.
Funder collaboratives are a lot like layer cakes. As our Fund enters its second decade, we have much to celebrate for our members have built and sustained a mighty layer cake, writes Chris Thompson, our director of regional engagement.
Our Fund's Brad Whitehead wrote this post for Living Cities in response to a group blogging event, which asked, “What will it take to achieve dramatically better results for low-income people faster?” His answer: Growth & Opportunity.
In early December, the Brookings Institution released The Metropolitan Revolution on paperback. In conjunction with the release, Brookings asked Fund President Brad Whitehead to give an update on how the Northeast Ohio network, featured prominently in the book, is doing. He wrote this blog post about the new Team NEO and our region's ever-evolving network.
Our President Brad Whitehead writes guest post on the Living Cities blog looking at the geography of job growth and its implications. "In the wake of the recession, evidence suggests that middle-skill job growth has continued farther and farther away from our core cities," he writes. If we are to sustain our nascent revival and restore economic vibrancy to our communities, we must start a conversation across our cities, suburbs and surrounding communities about the spatial aspects of growth. While any job might seem like a good thing, any job anywhere can be a disastrous strategy in the long term.
Dr. John Patrick Bailey, director of the Foundation Center-Cleveland, gives an outside perspective on our Fund's role in "reimagining philanthropic engagement" in Northeast Ohio. This post originally appeared on the Foundation Center-Cleveland's blog. It is reproduced in its entirety here.
In the final installment of a two-part series on the Opportunity Corridor project, our research assistant, Cecile Murray, takes a look at other large-scale development projects around the country to inform her analysis of Census data and comes to a conclusion on the number and quality of jobs needed to lift up the economically distressed areas surrounding the project.
In a two-part series on Opportunity Corridor, our summer research assistant, Cecile Murray, explores what it would take for the much-debated project to transform the economically distressed neighborhoods surrounding it and lift up Cleveland's urban core. In this first piece, she dives into Census data to quantify the project's potential.
Northeast Ohio, its economic challenges, and proposed solutions (inclusive growth strategies) are featured prominently in this post on the Confronting Suburban Poverty in America blog. Our Fund's Emily Garr Pacetti, director of research and evaluation, who was interviewed for the post, notes the "surprising disconnect between job growth and income gains that challenges this region and many others to look at growth more sustainably than in the past." Garr Pacetti says that "collaborative, and, importantly, regional approaches can better help connect growth and opportunity for residents."
Emily Garr Pacetti, our director of research and evaluation, writes about how research, our own and that of others, challenged us to raise the bar on economic opportunity beyond “jobs.” We propose a Growth & Opportunity framework that bridges the disconnect between the “growth camp” (economic development agencies, chambers of commerce) and “opportunity camp” (social service providers, non-profits, and foundations) at two levels: cross-sector collaboration and logal-regional collaboration. This post originally appeared on The Intersector Project blog.
Referencing a post by our Fund's Emily Garr Pacetti on the Living Cities blog, this op-ed in the CTMirror highlights the utility of data mapping. The author shares a resource that enables users to filter jobs in the area by mode of travel, maximum travel time, industry, and worker education, underscoring the importance of mapping in unlocking successful strategies that maximize job access.
Notes from the Underground author Jason Segedy explores the ongoing battle between regions and cities, and makes a strong case for why core cities matter.
The Intersector Project blog recently referenced our Emily Garr Pacetti's post on Living Cities, saying that it presents a persuasive case for the connection between intersector collaboration and job creation. The Intersector Project Chairman Frank Weil expanded on this topic. His entry is re-posted below in its entirety.
In a new post on Living Cities, our Director of Research and Evaluation Emily Garr Pacetti explores how recent research tells us that innovation and education are critical to long-term economic growth (income, gross metropolitan product and productivity), and that more must be done to ensure that low-income people are prepared with the skills they need to compete in today's marketplace.
Our Fund's Director of Regional Engagement Chris Thompson shares learnings from a recent Brookings Institution Forum with other U.S. metros on the challenges facing each region's economic growth efforts.
