In an effort to foster collaboration between Northeast Ohio’s public, private and nonprofit sectors and create a climate that is supportive of regional action and change, The Fund for Our Economic Future (the Fund) unveiled an 18-month engagement project entitled Voices & Choices at its annual meeting today in Akron. AmericaSpeaks, a not-for-profit organization based in Washington, DC that has a successful track record for facilitating large-scale citizen engagement initiatives, will manage the project. The organization will work in partnership with the Fund and the Universities Collaborative, composed of the University of Akron, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University, Kent State University, Lorain Community College and Youngstown State University.
Voices & Choices aims to create a climate that can sustain economic revitalization for the region by mobilizing tens of thousands of people to confront the tough choices facing Northeast Ohio, create a public mandate for change and make decisions about the future.
“This initiative will develop a set of priorities that can be used by government, civic and private-sector organizations to inform and guide plans for transforming our region,” said Robert Briggs, chairman of The Fund for Our Economic Future.
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. Citizens will be pooled from each of the 15 counties that make up Northeast Ohio to capture the diversity of the region. Others in the community will be reached through different forms of media programming and editorial news coverage. The Fund has committed $3 million for this effort, which will involve public education and engagement.
Fund Chairman Robert Briggs believes public engagement is critical to building a strong regional economy. “Most of the pieces needed to make Northeast Ohio a global economic powerhouse are in place,” explained Briggs. “One of the missing pieces, however, is a shared vision and understanding that the residents in Ashland and Summit, Stark and Cuyahoga and all the other counties in Northeast Ohio are interconnected in a regional economy. By breaking down jurisdictional boundaries created by cities and counties and thinking regionally, we will create economic transformation to stimulate exponential growth.”
The method and techniques that will be utilized in the Voices & Choices project have helped other regions resolve difficult public decision-making issues. Most recently it was employed by residents in Chicago and Cincinnati to facilitate regional planning, guided citizens in Charlotte in improving children services and assisted New Yorkers in deciding how to redevelop the World Trade Center site after the 9/11 tragedy. No collaboration of this magnitude, however, has ever been attempted around regional economic development.
According to Carolyn Lukensmeyer, founder and president of AmericaSpeaks, the outcomes of Voices & Choices will be both tangible and intangible. “Voices & Choices will help the region to think differently and act differently,” said Lukensmeyer. “By convening tens of thousands of people we will shift how people identify with the regional economy and craft a public constituency for regional action.”
At its annual meeting, in addition to launching Voices & Choices, the Fund presented preliminary findings from a Gallup Barometer Study conducted on perceptions of residents living in Northeast Ohio. Questions posed to the more than 2,000 participants focused on the economics of the region. When asked how they would rate economic conditions in the region, the answers were overwhelmingly negative. The same was true with regard to the residents’ future outlook for the local economy and on the region’s ability to keep jobs, create new jobs and help existing businesses grow. The study did reveal that there is a strongly favorable view of building the economy through regional collaboration, and an acknowledgement of Northeast Ohio’s many assets that contribute to the quality of life in the region. The barometer also revealed that engaged citizens have a much more favorable outlook on the region’s economic prospects.
Presenters invited to speak at the Fund’s meeting included Lieutenant Governor Bruce Johnson, who discussed his vision for the Northeast Ohio region; nationally recognized economist and author Manuel Pastor, who answered the question why regionalism; Randall Eberts, executive director of the W.E. Upjohn Institute, who spoke on the Fund’s economic dashboard project, which is defining and tracking economic indicators; and client representatives from organizations supported by the Fund’s four grantees: BioEnterprise, JumpStart, NorTech and Team NEO. Mayors from Ashland, Cleveland, Elyria and Fairlawn also participated in a panel discussion on balancing the reality of regionalism with jurisdictionally based demands.
The Fund’s annual meeting was hosted by the Ohio Grantmakers Forum and was sponsored by FirstMerit Bank.
About The Fund for Our Economic Future
The Fund for Our Economic Future is a collaboration of 65 philanthropic organizations throughout Northeast Ohio dedicated to advancing long-term economic prosperity by uniting the collective assets of the region and formulating a shared vision for growth. The organization’s goal is to raise and deploy $30 million over the next three years to foster regional economic dialogue, issue grants to support growth initiatives and monitor and report on economic progress. Go to www.futurefundneo.org for more information.
About AmericaSpeaks
AmericaSpeaks, based in Washington, DC, is a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that seeks to transform democracy by engaging citizens more directly in the public decisions that impact their lives. Since its founding in 1995, AmericaSpeaks has engaged 65,000 people in over 50-large scale forums in all 50 states. Events led by AmericaSpeaks include: American Discuss Social Security; the Listening to the City forum in New York on rebuilding the World Trade Center site; Washington, DC’s Citizen Summits; the World Economic Forum’s Global Town Hall held in Davos, Switzerland and the United Agenda for Children forum in Charlotte, NC. For more information, please visit: www.AmericaSpeaks.org.
About the Universities Collaborative
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University, Kent State University, Lorain County Community College, The University of Akron and Youngstown State University formed the Universities Collaborative in January 2004.