Announcements

NE Ohio Citizens to Create Agenda for Our Region’s Future

The Fund for Our Economic Future, a collaboration of more than 60 philanthropic organizations working to improve the Northeast Ohio economy, is launching an ambitious project to involve thousands of area residents in shaping the region’s future.

The 18-month Voices & Choices will include high-tech town meetings, leadership workshops and an internet dialogue involving participants from all sectors of the community.

“This is a significant effort to engage the community in crafting a vision and a plan for the future of this region,” according to David Abbott, executive director of the George Gund Foundation and project co-chair.

Voices & Choices has three major components. The first is public education, which will highlight regional issues and opportunities. The second is public deliberation for generating ideas and fostering dialogue in an effort to establish regional priorities. And the third is engaging leaders to carry forward the mantel of thoughtful, deliberate regional economic decisions. Hundreds of thousands in Northeast Ohio will be invited to participate in this engagement initiative through citizen interviews, group forums, large-scale town meetings and other venues.

The Washington D.C.-based organization AmericaSpeaks has been hired to orchestrate the effort.

To become a Voices & Choices ambassador, click here.

When foundations talk about their work, it is largely the work of their grantees that they describe. Most foundations do not run programs; the non-profits they fund run them. It is certainly true that the work of our grantees is the instrument by which The George Gund Foundation makes an impact on the world. Thus, the relationship between grant seeker and grant maker is vitally important to our effectiveness.

It might, therefore, seem surprising that foundations which routinely assess the organizations they fund rarely seek similar feedback from grantees. Fortunately, this is beginning to change. A nationwide emphasis on accountability and transparency has generated much discussion and some promising new mechanisms. Thanks to the relatively young Center for Effective Philanthropy, one such tool is the Grantee Perception Report (GPR).

The George Gund Foundation is one of a growing list of foundations that has undertaken a GPR as a means of acquiring honest and anonymous feedback from the organizations that are doing the work we want to see done. As part of our newly revamped website, the GPR is now available online. The results are from 2003 and we anticipate going through the same process in 2006. You will be able to read about those results here too.

Click here to download our Grantee Perception Report.

We have been gratified both by the generally favorable comments our grantees made and also by the usefulness of their input. For instance, the GPR was instrumental in helping us decide to eliminate our Civic Affairs program area and also to completely overhaul our website. We hope — and expect — that our grantees will continue to help us help them do a better job.

David T. Abbott
Executive Director
The George Gund Foundation

The George Gund Foundation’s website has been selected for recognition in the Council on Foundation’s 2005 Wilmer Shields Rich Awards program.

The bronze award for excellence in communications will be presented at the Council’s 56th annual meeting in San Diego in April.

The new website, which was launched in October, was described as “clear, compelling and informative” by one judge. Another called the design, which features photographs from the Foundation’s annual report as “both attractive and unique” and said it “sets a new bar for foundations everywhere.”

The Cleveland Foodbank has moved into its new $10 million 110,000-square foot facility in Cleveland’s Collinwood neighborhood.

The Foundation has been a long-time supporter of this organization that provides more than 18 million pounds of food annually to local hunger centers, food pantries and meal programs. The new site, triple the size of its former facility, will make operations more efficient and enable the Foodbank to handle even more food donations and better serve the community.

Click here for more information on the development of Cleveland Foodbank’s new facility.

The George Gund Foundation has launched a new website, www.gundfoundation.org, to provide up-to-date information to the nonprofit community about the Foundation’s priorities and interests.

The site features a searchable database of all grants made since 1997 as well as current guidelines and procedures, links to helpful resources for nonprofit organizations, staff contact information and Foundation-related news. It also includes images from the photographic essays that have been featured in our award-winning annual reports.

The Fund for Our Economic Future (the Fund), an unprededented response by the philanthropic sector to the many pressing long-term economic challenges facing Northeast Ohio (NEO), recently made its first grants to four initiatives viewed as building blocks for the NEO economy.

The grant recipients are BioEnterprise, an organization supporting the commercialization of bioscience breakthroughs; JumpStart, a group backing early-stage entrepreneurial ventures through investment and business development expertise; NorTech, a coalition of technology and business leaders exploring ways to leverage the region’s scientific knowledge base; and Team NEO, a collaboration of regional business organizations promoting business attraction, expansion and retention in Northeast Ohio.

The Fund, launched in early 2004, currently has financial commitments from 58 foundations and corporations in the nine- county region and has set an initial three-year goal of raising and distributing $30 million to efforts that encourage and advance a common and highly focused regional economic development agenda that can lead to long-term economic transformation in ways that recognize the importance of core cities, inclusion/diversity and quality of life. The George Gund Foundation was one of the founding members of the Fund with a $2.75 million commitment.

The four grant recipients were selected because of their alignment with the Fund’s three strategic focus areas: fostering entrepreneurship and business formation, creating new high-growth industry clusters through technology innovation and enhancing the competitiveness of established firms so that they will locate, grow, and prosper in Northeast Ohio.

Grants of $900,000 to BioEnterprise and $2.5 million to JumpStart will help address the Fund’s first strategic area, entrepreneurship and business formation. Both organizations will nurture promising business ventures to commercialization, with BioEnterprise concentrating on bioscience initiatives.

To build new industries through technological innovation, the Fund awarded a $2.25 million grant to NorTech. The grant will be used to develop a regional technology strategy, enhance the region’s reputation for technological innovation, increase federal funding for technology projects and create a program to address the “technology divide” that separates the region’s minority and urban communities from the rest of the area. In addition, the organization will work in collaboration with universities within the region to promote inter-institutional research, as well as research in electrical engineering and computer science.

One of the most pressing issues facing the NEO economy is the recent loss of large, established employers. The Fund’s grant of $2.5 million to Team NEO is intended to minimize future losses by enhancing the competitiveness of existing regional firms. Team NEO will establish ongoing dialogue with the 150 largest and most vibrant employers in the region (the NEO 150) to understand the challenges facing them, as well as opportunities for growth. It will also launch a marketing campaign to highlight the many attributes of the Northeast Ohio region.

The Fund plans to provide grants to eight to fifteen programs over the next three years. Future funding areas will be determined in part through feedback from the residents of Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Portage, Stark, Summit, and Wayne Counties as part of the Fund’s dialogue initiative.

Cleveland’s environmental community has created a new website that will serve as a portal to environmental and conservation organizations in Northeast Ohio.

The new site includes a directory of environmental and conservation organizations, a community calendar and volunteer and employment opportunities. www.thetree.us was developed by EcoCity Cleveland, a Gund Foundation grantee, in collaboration with other organizations in the field.