Announcements

Cuyahoga Arts & Culture (CAC) has released its 2011 Report to the Community that outlines the broad impact of public funding on Cuyahoga County’s arts and culture sector.

In 2006, Cuyahoga County residents passed a cigarette tax that since 2007 has provided more than $80 million to support arts and cultural programming offered by almost 200 organizations.

The Report focuses on CAC’s work in strengthening community in Cuyahoga County by:

• Investing in our local economy. CAC-funded organizations spend more than $286 million each year, including more than $140 million in salaries for 8,710 workers. And, for each $1 CAC invests in arts and culture, $19 is put back into Cuyahoga County’s economy.
• Supporting education. CAC-funded organizations serve more than 1.2 million school-aged children, offering field trips for 23,000 students, and classes and workshops for more than 396,000 residents.
• Enhancing our quality of life. CAC-funded organizations serve more than 6.4 million visitors each year, with 55 percent of those visits free of an admission charge. And, more than 17,000 volunteers help bring arts and culture to an even greater audience.

The George Gund Foundation has joined with the Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation and the Saint Luke’s Foundation to provide a consumer-friendly guide to the health care reforms that are part of the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The user-friendly information was designed to present factual, unbiased information about how health care reform affects many of Northeast Ohio’s residents. Information has been presented in an easy-to-print format that can be shared with friends, family, co-workers and others who might benefit from learning more about how the ACA affects them. The website will be updated as more procedures and rules related to the law become clearer.

The George Gund Foundation, which in 2010 moved from four grantmaking meetings each year to three annually, has announced deadlines and Trustee meeting dates for 2012.

Winter-Spring Meeting
Proposal Deadline: November 15, 2011
Trustee Meeting: March 1, 2012

The George Gund Foundation 2010 Grantee Perception Report (GPR), a survey conducted by the Center for Effective Philanthropy, is now available for viewing on the Foundation website.

The 2010 survey, which was sent to all of the Foundation’s 2009 grantees and had a 77% response rate, is anonymous. Comments and rankings are aggregated by the Center for Effective Philanthropy and not attributed to individual grantees. The GPR allows foundations to understand how they are perceived and how results compare with other philanthropic peers.

This is the third George Gund Foundation GPR report since 2003, and each time staff have carefully analyzed results and made changes in Foundation operations that are responsive to grantee concerns and improve the grantmaking process.

The George Gund Foundation, which in 2010 moved from four grantmaking meetings each year to three annually, has announced deadlines and Trustee meeting dates for 2011.

Winter-Spring Meeting

Proposal Deadline: November 15, 2010
Trustee Meeting: March 3, 2011

Summer Meeting

Proposal Deadline: March 15, 2011
Trustee Meeting: July 7, 2011

Fall Meeting

Proposal Deadline: July 15, 2011
Trustee Meeting: November 3, 2011

In future years, deadlines will remain the same although dates of Trustee meetings may vary.

Organizations working to promote Northeast Ohio as a place to live, learn, work and invest have created a joint website, www.ThePlus.us, to communicate about the strengths and progress of the region.

The site features information on everything from higher education opportunities to economic development activities and offers ways for individuals, organizations and businesses to engage in efforts to advance and promote the region. The site also includes sign-up for a new monthly e-newsletter with news related to Northeast Ohio at www.theplus.us/en/Engage/Email-Signup.aspx.

The project is a joint effort of The Fund for Our Economic Future and The Cleveland Plus Marketing Alliance, which includes the Greater Cleveland Partnership, Team Northeast Ohio and Positively Cleveland, in collaboration with more than two dozen other organizations throughout the region.

A year ago, the worst financial crisis in half a century compelled The George Gund Foundation, like others, to make some tough decisions in order to deal with a sharp decline in the value of our invested assets. We cut our operating budget and trimmed our grantmaking while focusing more resources on effective collaborations and on public policy advocacy. Fortunately, as the year progressed our assets began to rebound. While the portfolio-and hence our grantmaking — has not returned to its pre-recession level, the trend is encouraging. We face 2010 with greater optimism and also with a continued commitment to fiscal prudence, effective collaborations and policy work.

The reaction to our first online annual report was positive, and we saved thousands of dollars by forgoing the traditional printed version. So, we will once again report to our grantees and others in an online publication that will continue to feature a photographic essay, this year focused on Cleveland’s lakefront.

Another operational change affects our proposal deadlines and grant decision schedule. Beginning this year, we will have three rounds of grant awards instead of four. This is not a financial decision; we will award the same amount of dollars that we would have under our four-round schedule. Rather, as many of you know, eight of our 10 trustees live far from our Cleveland office and in order to maximize the effectiveness of their engagement and to accommodate the many demands on their schedules, our Board of Trustees will meet three times per year. This obviously affects the deadlines for submitting grant requests. Below is the meeting schedule and proposal deadline schedule for 2010:

Winter-Spring meeting

Proposal deadline: November 15, 2009
Trustees Meeting: February 25

Summer meeting

Proposal deadline: March 15
Trustees Meeting: July 1

Fall meeting

Proposal deadline: July 15
Trustees Meeting: November 4

In future years, the proposal deadlines will remain the same and Trustee meeting dates will be approximately the same.

We recognize that this will create some concern for grantees who have been accustomed to working with us on a different calendar, and we encourage you to contact any of the Foundation’s program staff with your questions and to bring to our attention any particular issues this switch raises. We will work with you to ease the transition to the new schedule.

Finally, although the financial crisis has eased, economic distress remains all too prevalent. Consequently, we will continue to emphasize collaborations — among grantmakers and grantees — in order to stretch scarce dollars and to make more effective decisions. Sharing power, decision-making and day-to-day work is difficult — especially for foundations that are accustomed to exercising unilateral authority. But we as grantmakers cannot honestly demand collaboration among nonprofit organizations without forcing ourselves to adhere to the same discipline that comes from working in a partnership. So, we will seek such collaborations for ourselves and among those who do the work that we care about. Naturally, this prompts us to maintain an emphasis on public policy advocacy. Not only is this work essential to attacking root causes of many fundamental problems, it also generates tremendous leverage for our grant dollars. And building effective public policies always involves the hard work of finding common ground among diverse viewpoints, which is the very essence of collaboration.

David T. Abbott
Executive Director

The German Marshall Fund is accepting application from government and nonprofit leaders to spend two to six months in Europe researching innovative approaches to urban/regional challenges as part of its Comparative Domestic Policy program.

Applications are due March 15 and should focus on issues related to urban sustainability, education and workforce development, affordable housing/cost of living and combating social exclusion. Fellows will be based in Turin, Italy but must travel to two other cities or regions during the fellowship.

Additional information on the program and application requirements is available at http://gmfus.org/template/page.cfm?page_id=212.

Positively Cleveland has released a new promotional video, with a sound track by rapper Q-Nice, to attract visitors to Greater Cleveland.