ith additional funding from the National Fund for Workforce Solutions and Westfield Group, the Fund is working with partners across Northeast Ohio to increase equitable access to recovery training in the near term and generate improvements to the training and placement system in the long term by deepening collaboration between community-based organizations (CBOs) and workforce development institutions.

While there have been great success stories of CBOs and workforce and training service providers working together, these efforts have generally been programmatically siloed and difficult to scale. More common is minimal connection. As local organizations trusted by residents, CBOs are in many ways better positioned than the more centralized workforce system to help advise and connect residents to career services and training. At the same time, a fully decentralized approach is not cost-effective.

The main focus of this initiative is to develop consistent, accurate and culturally competent outreach materials and navigation supports for career and workforce training options that are co-shaped by CBOs and workforce partners.

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A second core focus is on exploring current connections and handoffs between CBOs and workforce organizations, surfacing opportunities to strengthen the process. The funding is supporting demonstration efforts in Cuyahoga, Summit and Stark counties, with the potential to spread to other parts of the region. Each pilot is taking a different approach to outreach and navigation support. This diverse portfolio will help inform what works. Measuring outcomes is central to this initiative, and the Fund will consolidate findings into recommendations for the future.

A lot must happen to eliminate employment disparities; this one intervention is not meant to be a silver bullet. Rather, it is seeding new ideas that have the potential to drive systemic improvements—something that is difficult for partners to do on their own within existing systems.

trategically coordinating development and focusing resources in these areas is different from the current, long-standing approach, which prioritizes short-term gains. The Fund’s assertion has been that focusing development within job hubs — both the places that meet the definition currently and those with high potential to — can lead to highly attractive, accessible business locations and be a differentiator for the region as it competes globally. (The region becomes even more competitive when this strategy is combined with a well-functioning talent development system and sector-specific strategies for growth of in-demand, family-sustaining jobs.)

To test this belief, the Fund and its partners have been advancing a multi-part strategy to build up and reinforce job hubs, focusing on building organizational capacity, understanding the fiscal impact of such an approach, awareness building, and the support of pilots to demonstrate the efficacy of the approach.

In 2020, the Fund engaged the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research to explore whether the clustering of business locations in proximity to each other and to civic resources is beneficial to competitiveness and to the fiscal health of a community.

The research team found that measurable competitiveness benefits are created when companies locate in proximity. The ability to share infrastructure increases access to talent and fosters the spread of ideas and connections. Concentrated development provides fiscal and economic benefit, too, even though traditional modeling techniques don’t typically reflect the potential positive impacts.

The Fund also has been supporting three job hubs pilots — in the “Aerozone” located around Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, in the city of Barberton in Summit County, and in northern Stark County — to demonstrate how the approach can benefit both urban and rural areas.

In each of these places, local leaders have come together to map the job hubs and prioritize sites available for development. This work is leading to near-term, tactical site improvements and is expected to support longer-term plans for the hubs to attract investment.

For instance, the Aerozone has developed a strategic plan that focuses on expanding technology transfer and maximizing the impact of business retention and attraction all within a highly-connected physical district. This strategic work is the result of leaders in local and county government, business, transportation, workforce, and utilities coming together to coordinate around a bigger vision.

Positive results can also be found in Stark County, which has become the first recipient of grants from the Ohio Site Inventory Program (OSIP) from JobsOhio. OSIP offers grants and low-interest loans to support speculative site and building development projects with no identified end-user.

Perhaps most importantly, these efforts represent strategic alignment and meaningful commitment to both short-term gains and long-term opportunities — evidence that business as usual isn’t the only way.

Over the course of three rounds of competition, an Advisory and Selection Committee comprised of leaders in transportation, planning, workforce development, community development, and business sifted through 141 proposals from 12 counties. From this pool, nine pilots were awarded a total of $764,000 to test a range of mobility solutions across different geographies with expectations to serve up to 700 users.

Funded innovations promise to:

• Improve effectiveness within transportation agencies through innovations in how routes are tested/added/optimized, how agencies can integrate non-bus solutions, and how to manage non-car-based solutions in rural counties.
• Activate leadership beyond transportation agencies from the private sector through employer-designed practices and better, more creative integration of transportation into workforce programs.

While COVID-19 caused delays in the launch of some pilots, eight of the nine were operational by the end of 2020. Early data collection from the active pilots shows promise. Of a total of 336 unique users being served in Wayne, Lake, Stark, Lorain, Summit, Portage, and Cuyahoga County, 163 are persons of color and 128 are women (as of January 2021). All report declines in commute costs and times as a result of their participation in their respective programs. A total of 61 employers are engaged in pilots so far. Of 21 employers that were surveyed, 13 have reported increased employee retention among participating users. Additional quantitative and qualitative analysis is ongoing, and a full report of findings and next steps will be published in the second half of 2021.

What’s hatching through The Paradox Prize? Hear from a few of the winning teams about what they’re learning so far.

Beyond the programmatic success of these efforts so far, the seeds of lasting change have been planted. New federal and local funding, new partnerships and a greater awareness among partners across the economic development sphere—direct results of the effort—ensure these ideas will live on past the pilot period and, we hope, spur additional ideas that can make our region more innovative, accessible and inclusive.

In addition to our Fund, sponsors of The Paradox Prize include the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, The Lozick Family Foundation, Greater Cleveland Partnership, Cuyahoga County, the Cleveland Foundation, and DriveOhio.

When a family doesn’t have the opportunity to build wealth—to accumulate savings or invest in the stock market or real estate or other assets that hold value—individuals are prevented from fully participating in the economy, unable, for instance, to manage an unexpected job loss or access training or education to get a better job. This contributes to inequitable outcomes and is a strain on economic growth.

Among the factors that contribute to the wealth gap are low levels of local ownership and significant undervaluation of assets in communities of color. The harm to communities is compounded by exclusion of residents from development and investment decisions in their neighborhoods, which often leads to displacement and disenfranchisement from the political process and significantly undercuts opportunities to benefit from future growth. At the same time, residents can never benefit if there isn’t any growth at all.

Working in tandem with Metro West Community Development Organization, our Fund is trying to forge a new growth paradigm through real estate ownership. Along with a host of local and national partners, we are exploring a promising model to increase local ownership and decision-making—a Community Investment Fund (CIF)—beginning with the Clark-Fulton neighborhood on Cleveland’s near west side. Recent investment commitments—totaling upwards of a billion dollars—in Clark-Fulton and surrounding areas are driving rapid change and represent a significant opportunity for residents to benefit if the right tools are available.

The design of a CIF requires technical understanding, community engagement and stakeholder alignment. The product must meet rigorous investment standards. It must also be culturally competent and reflect the unique needs of resident investors and the neighborhoods they seek to influence.

We’ve pulled together a group of local and national experts to assist in this work, including the team behind Nico Echo Park in Los Angeles as well as Seventh Hill LLC, the firm that worked with residents on recommendations to develop West 25th Street as a walkable, transit-supportive, mixed-use corridor. Additionally, this work is being supported by The Kresge Foundation, which has developed a “community of practice” to share learnings and advance the concept nationally.

In the emerging post-COVID world, when a “land grab is imminent,” well-designed and executed community-investment models are needed now more than ever, writes Elwood Hopkins, presidential fellow at The Kresge Foundation.

If executed well, this initial CIF could create an avenue for residents of this neighborhood and others across Northeast Ohio to have a real ownership stake and benefit from the upside of growth—necessary conditions for the region to be truly inclusive.

Building on the significant restructuring of our board in 2019, in which eight civic members joined to diversify our leadership and improve our issue area expertise, we convened an ad hoc committee to evaluate how to incorporate better diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) metrics and benchmarks as they relate to the Fund’s governance and internal processes. Through this effort, we hope to provide leadership and guidance for our members in promoting this essential practice within their own organizations. 

Also in 2020, we provided funding to support an evaluation of the Racial Equity Institute (REI) trainings conducted throughout Northeast Ohio over the last several years, of which more than 6,000 individuals have participated. ThirdSpace Action Lab is conducting the evaluation to understand what has resulted from the trainings and to develop and promote an action agenda for participants, both past and future. We look forward to sharing the results of this work in the second half of 2021.