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Production and distribution of City club forums and ideastream Public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black, fond of Greater Cleveland, Inc.. Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to creating conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, April 11th.

And I'm Mark Ross, retired managing partner of BWC and president of the City Club Board of Directors.

What a pleasure it is to introduce today's forum to a sold out room of 330 people comprised of passionate citizens, as well as business, nonprofit and economic development leaders in Northeast Ohio.

We all know that for decades, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County have struggled with a myriad of challenges and that have impeded economic empowerment and growth.

Many, myself included, believe that one of our greatest obstacles is that Cuyahoga County is comprised of 59 separate municipalities.

While our friends in Columbus work through this structural issue to allow for a much more streamlined, collaborative and effective approach to economic development.

At the same time, Cleveland's business, philanthropic, governmental and civic leaders and organizations have invested mightily over the years in numerous initiatives to address our challenges.

Yet improved quality of the outcomes remain elusive to some of our most at risk citizens, which only complicates our broader efforts toward economic, job and population growth.

The urban agenda created earlier this year is an unprecedented collective of leading organizations committed to working together to define the track and enhance economic opportunities.

Their agenda has a keen focus on poverty reduction, increasing average household incomes and closing wealth gaps, just to name a few.

These leaders of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, several of whom are our panelists today, are united behind a bold vision for systems level change to bring about a more just economically robust community for all citizens.

Today, we will hear from a few of these individuals and understand the goals of the urban agenda and its potential for significant impact.

Joining us today are Brian Hall, chairman of the President's Council, which is Northeast Ohio's African-American Business Chamber of Commerce.

Chris Ronayne are Cuyahoga County executive.

Phase UCAR, president and CEO of Greater Cleveland Partnership.

And Sharon Sobol Jordan, president and CEO of the United Way of Greater Cleveland.

Moderating the conversation is Randell McShepard, chairman and co-founder of Policy Bridge.

To set the stage before we move to the panel discussion, we'll first hear brief remarks from Randy, who will provide some important background and context on the urban agenda.

If you have questions for our speakers, you can text it to 3305415794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the Q&A portion of the program.

Members and Friends of the City Club of Cleveland please join me in welcoming our guests today.

And over to you, Randy.

Well, good afternoon.

It's great to see so many wonderful friends and Clevelanders in the house.

Excuse me.

My name is Randall MC Sheppard, and I'm excited to be here today.

And I'm going to drop this because it's in my way.

That's fine.

Thank you.

I'm excited to be here today with this August panel on behalf of the Policy Bridge organization.

For those of you who are unaware, Policy Bridge is a public policy think tank that was established 20 years ago with the mission of researching, analyzing and responding to public policy from a minority perspective.

Our six target areas over those 20 years have included education, economic development, workforce development, neighborhoods and housing, health and wellness and social justice.

So why an urban agenda?

We have research these categories that I just mentioned over the last 20 years, and we have consistently found Cleveland at the top of too many egregious lists that track quality of life, including poverty rates, black infant mortality rates, reading scores and the digital divide, among many others.

So when I'm asked Why an urban agenda?

My response as a lifelong Clevelander is that we are sick and tired of being sick and tired of policy.

Bridges acknowledges that many organizations, institutions and governmental entities have tried myriad programs and initiatives to address issues related to poverty.

However, we felt that the missing piece was a collective effort that brought all the players to the table to build a collaborative strategy where we could learn from each other and hold each other accountable.

Policy Branch released a report in 2021 titled Resetting the Table An Urban Agenda for Cleveland, which listed potential areas that might be the focus of a collective urban agenda strategy.

Areas of focus in the report ranged from economic opportunity, education, career launching, community mobilization and many more areas as we analyze the critical needs of the urban agenda.

It also became clear to us that we needed to incorporate systems change as a part of our strategy or process.

We realized that merely creating new programs would not get us to our desired future.

We thought it was time to take a hard look at the systemic policies and practices that have often presented barriers to black and brown people seeking economic and social progress.

With much excitement about what an urban agenda could mean for Cleveland and Cuyahoga County policy, Bridges began hosting meetings in February of 2023, with lead leaders representing different sectors and their support to seek their support and involvement in an urban agenda, planning process and for the last two years, those partners have worked with us, and for that we are grateful partner organizations to date and there will be more coming include the mayor or Mayor Bibb and his administration.

City Council President Blaine Griffin and his council, our county executive Chris Ronayne and his administration.

The County Council president, Pernell Jones, started with us.

And then when he stepped down, Dale Miller mightily stepped into the role with County Council, the Greater Cleveland Partnership, the Cleveland Foundation, the Gun Foundation, United Way of Greater Cleveland.

Cleveland Neighborhood Progress.

Cuyahoga Community College.

Cleveland State University.

Levin School of Public Affairs and Education.

Case Western Reserve University.

Center on Poverty and Community Development.

The Urban League of Greater Cleveland and Policy Bridge.

Now, if this isn't worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize, ladies and gentleme what?

But after two years of planning, I am happy to report that on January 31st of this year, we had a press conference event where each of the partners publicly signed an email U committing to work together to move the urban agenda forward.

If you could have been there, you would have seen the smiles and sheer joy that each of these leaders exhibited as they signed that memo you document.

I do want to say we are using the collective impact model with Policy Bridge serving as the backbone for the entire effort to keep everything moving.

We agreed early on that our primary objective would be economic mobility.

That was a consensus priority.

We believe that economic mobility and we study this is defined as a measure of an individual family or group improving economic status over time, usually in terms of income and wealth.

And we have three primary goals that we are working to achieve through this effort.

We want to increase median household income of black and brown families.

We want to create or close the black Hispanic white wealth gap and reduce poverty among black and brown families.

And to do all of this, we have an operating structure, a wonderful policy bridge team policy and staff.

Would you please stand and be recognized?

Yes.

The whole team, in addition to those wonderful people we have established three working committee.

So we have a shared measurement committee that will identify population level indicators and create a community dashboard.

We have a systems change committee that's really engaging and looking at systems level policy change and advocating for the removal of barriers that impede progress.

And we have a community engagement and outreach committee that solicits thoughts and perspectives and insights from diverse groups of people in sectors across Cuyahoga County.

So, ladies and gentlemen, breaking news today April 11th, 2025, we are launching the Policy Bridge, Urban Agenda Dashboard.

We are very excited about this.

We encourage all of you to visit P.B., you a dot net and you can learn all about this.

We want you to give us your input, your ideas, your suggestions.

But this is a place that we will every year report on our progress towards our goals of the Urban Agenda to ensure that the community can see what the scorecard looks like, what our grades look like, and help us to improve when and where we need to.

And then finally, before I move to the panel discussion, taking on an urban agenda for a city like Cleveland, as you can imagine, what are you doing?

Again, there's so many issues, so many challenges.

And based on that reality, we decided that we should really sink our teeth into a few areas, at least to start in 2025.

So we decided that homeownership, business ownership and workforce preparedness would be the focus of our work.

This year, we're coordinating several meetings, planning sessions to really sink our teeth into those three areas, and we think that there will be some exciting things that positively impact economic mobility as a result.

So I thank you all for your attention.

Sorry for talking so fast.

I'm trying to make as much time as possible for this wonderful panel.

So with that, I'm going to transition to our panel and the mic stays on with me on.

Okay, I like that.

It's magic.

So we will start with our panel discussion.

And my first question I'd like to ask our county executive to kick off, why is the urban agenda important to Cleveland and Cuyahoga County?

Well, thank you, Randy, and thanks to everybody of policy Bridge, table 15 over there.

Appreciate the work you guys are doing.

This could not be any more important.

And right now in our country, in our county, thanks for the work you're doing in the 330 plus people who are out here at the city club today.

Thanks for showing up.

You care about what we're talking about as far as with why to Cuyahoga County, It's an honor to serve 1.2 million people across 59 communities of Cuyahoga County.

Truth be told, it is a tale of two counties.

It is a tale of two counties as it relates to income, as it relates to prosperity, as it relates to most every human indicator.

We've all learned the hard way about the issues of social determinants of health, where you can be in a community, one community over a neighborhood of Buckeye next to the city of Shaker is an example I'm looking at my old friend Fred Collier, the former city planning director.

He talked about the social determinants of health and how it affects community outcomes.

Right?

To be in a community where you can be in one community in the city of East Cleveland, which is now the poorest city in the nation, and be in the same county where you can be seeing communities that are the wealthiest in the state of Ohio, in the nation.

There's something we've got to do.

The issue of the honor of working for you in 59 communities, it is wonderful to work across this diverse community of people, but it's also an ambition that we bring together the communities and we address the inequities.

And I think that's what the urban agenda is all about.

Randy asked me to just give a couple of factoids about the county.

But, you know, I'm you know, I'm by the heat maps that you've seen and all the demographic reports we've had.

We are a community that suffers about 16% poverty in the county.

That roughly equates to 200,000 people of our 1.2 million people.

We live in a county where 20% of our county residents are food insecure.

We live in a county where as you look at poverty, that number goes up three fold for the African-American community.

Three times as many persons in African-American households are likely to be impoverished relative to their white counterparts and neighbors.

It's about two and a half times in the Latino community.

So we have disparities when it comes to homeownership.

70 plus percent of our Caucasian community in Collier County owns a home, just about 40% of our African-American community.

So I think this agenda for homeownership, up for business ownership and development and workforce preparedness as it particularly relates to our urban core of our county matters.

That's why it matters to Cuyahoga County.

I'm looking at my team table 11 over there, the Cuyahoga County workforce.

It is also a bridge between community.

I thank you for the work you do every day.

The Health and Human Service function matters, but we are up against tough times.

The state of Ohio's budget issues today promulgated by the federal government today means let's just use one statistic.

If there's any drop in the federal Medicaid provisions to us, there's a trigger mechanism in the state now in the budget that's currently proposed, where everybody that came on to Medicaid in the Medicaid expansion in 2014 would lose their Medicaid benefits.

That's 96,000 people in Cuyahoga County instantly will lose health insurance.

So we've got to lean in with the urban agenda to the state and it's budget in the federal government, it's budget.

I want to tell you on a percentage basis, the federal government actually represents over 60% of the funds flow to Health and Human Services.

To Cuyahoga County residents.

The state government represents 20% of the funds flow, so 80% of our health and human service dollars that we depend on.

We depend on the state and the federal government.

The budget right now isn't showing a glorious future for us.

The county is only 9% of that through levees.

And thank goodness for our philanthropic community because that's the other 9% we together represent only about 20% of the Health and Human Service dollars.

The county, through your gracious support of tax levies and the foundation community, the other 80%, we are vulnerable to the state and to the nation.

And these are vulnerable times, which is why this is so important.

I want to, in my opening remarks on with a tale of two hopeful things.

One, this morning, my county team and I opened a child wellness center leaning in on the problem of children being dropped off homeless at our government buildings.

We are now creating a new front door on 114th in Lorain, in the city of Cleveland, 58 beds with specialists, with schools on site, and a campus that cares and heals.

That's the generosity of this community that came together with $14 million to transform a new campus.

And you can give it up to need a thank you.

And we thank the state of Ohio to thank you many partners in this room, the last sign of hope I want to give you is just a meeting I had yesterday at 430, and it lasted until 6:00 last night.

It's with the new East Cleveland mayor, Sandra morgan.

We sat down and we built an operations task force that's going to lean in on budget issues in the city of East Cleveland.

But she went well beyond with her vision.

She went on with a vision like you want for your community in any community in this county.

She went out and for community development opportunities, taking the historic fabric of East Cleveland and turning it around as a turnaround place on the Euclid health line and doing great things ahead.

Her aspiration is why I run for office, because that kind of citizen belief in what's possible makes us think that this urban agenda can work because we live in a county that cares.

Leave it with those two positive anecdotes in an otherwise somewhat cloudy economic forecast.

Well done, Mr. Executives.

We appreciate giving more of a focus.

One want to add to that or shall I move on to the next No burning.

Okay.

Well, we'll move on to another question.

I'm going to go to Sharon and ask how can the urban agenda complement the work of your organization?

Yes.

Thanks, Randy.

I'm very excited about this opportunity to work with all these partners.

We work together all the time, but I think getting aligned around what we're aiming for and really understanding that it is about how people get ahead financially, income, wealth, social capital, the poverty rate going down is really important and United Way.

We're on the front lines of this.

We have United Way two, one one.

We get about 220,000 calls a year.

Last year, and those come from every zip code in the county.

So the face of poverty is changing.

We see the most growth and people who are working often more than one job, but because of rising costs, their pay just isn't enough to cover it.

So there are a lot of resources in this community.

I think we all agree this is a very generous community.

We have thousands of local resources that 211 connects people to every single day, but there are unmet needs and most of those are for the people who are working and but they're living paycheck to paycheck.

So I feel like the urban agenda is really our chance to change that here for good.

Yeah.

Thank you.

And Sharon is not only CEO of the Urban United Way, she's also a board member at Policy Brief.

So we thank you very much for your leadership in both places.

Brian, how would you answer that question?

How can the urban agenda complement the work of your organization, in this case, the President's Council?

Well, first of all, congratulations to all of you for putting this together.

And I think about our community.

29 years ago, the president's council was founded just a little bit before Policy Bridge.

And we're a unique organization in this community as policy bridge is across the country.

And when you think about what's happened over that period of time, there used to be an organization called the Greater Greater Cleveland Roundtable, Cleveland tomorrow and the Growth Association.

They came together and created the Commission on Economic Inclusion about 25 years ago.

And eventually those three organizations merged and became the Greater Cleveland Partnership, which basically leads.

So I've spent a lot of time on the boards of all three of those organizations as co-chair of the Commission on Economic Inclusion, and then as a senior vice president at Greater Cleveland Partnership.

Are you saying you've seen this movie before?

You know where I'm headed.

You know where I'm headed.

So, yes, I've seen this movie a few times.

And the compliment is that our civic system has the inertia and the energy to want to solve problems.

And that's why these organizations continue to come up with ways to do that.

And this is yet another the challenge is and your question is going to come up later, what's different this time?

So I would say that to share this point, it's we've got to have measurements that we will hold to number one.

Number two, we've got to look at the problem where it lies and not look at the results of the problem.

As we've learned, those of us who went through RTI training, you can look at the fish or you can look at the water and we need to look at the water and have a real commitment to fix the water.

And so our organization will be a part of that.

We're happy to play a part of that and we're very hopeful that this time we make further progress.

Thank you.

I would like to ask Biju to weigh in on that.

You haven't said anything yet, please.

Sure.

So first, thank you, Randi, for inviting us to be a part of this discussion from the Greater Cleveland Partnership's perspective.

I think as Brian just shared, this is not something that's new on our agenda.

It's been there for decades, decades before myself, before Brian, before many of our board members are room.

So let me maybe share some perspectives of one.

Why is this important from our perspective?

And then what's going to make it different, I think, to your question or comment, Brian, in that.

So it's important for our region because it's essential to the region's economic growth.

I think both Chris and Sharon shared the human side of this, which is absolutely vital in terms of what it means for individuals in our community.

I'll share the other side of it, which is the business side and the business growth.

We can't grow to be a great region and a great life if we don't have everyone participating.

And that's why inclusive opportunity is one of our priorities, has been one of our priorities will continue to be one of our priorities.

And what's different this time?

Hopefully, is we do have a systems approach ready.

In your remarks, you said we've been great in this community, having shown care and concern, launching individual programs that all have had an impact, but impact not at a scale that has been able to move the needle at the community level.

What we care about in terms of the overall business growth level, what I see this time is we've got everyone aligned around not only the dashboard, but then the work that's going to be required to move those indicators on that dashboard.

So maybe to just bring that down to the ground, I'll also share maybe something hopeful from earlier in the week.

Some of you participated in our annual Construction Utilities and Building Equity Summit, or Cube Summit, as we called it, just two days ago.

I think we held it.

We had about 300 people in that room as well.

And it's an example of systems change, right, Because we've all had programs for many decades on supporting minority contractors, getting into the business, trying to make connections on an ad hoc basis with project opportunities, whether it's in neighborhoods or in major projects in our community.

And we've had a little bit of success in that.

But what's happened over the last two years in parallel to developing the urban agenda in this shared commitment is more of a systems level of approach.

And so I'll break it down in this way.

So it starts with kind of an overall framing in terms of what the norms are.

And I give a lot of credit to the City Council president and the mayor for leading a conversation with a number of our private project owners and developers around setting up what was aspirations for community benefits into an ordinance and then into an animal view that sets sort of a new standard and a new norm for how large project developers in the city of Cleveland.

We're going to be making sure they were creating opportunities for businesses as well as individuals there.

That gets couple then to programs that are put in place to develop specifically new contractors that are entering into this space.

There's also workforce programs that we can talk about.

This week we launched a built strong collaborative with 32 contractors that were looking to build their businesses, created a forum where those businesses could interact with project owners.

So they found opportunities.

The programs are more than just education.

There's also a mentor protege element to it.

And so we have construction firms.

Why didn't Turner I see Vanessa out.

There's one of those firms that are willing to take these contractors underneath their wing and teach them the practical side of business, not just the theoretical side of business, that you get an education.

So it's connecting them into the opportunity, but to get them to scale into the opportunity, you need financial resources.

And again, I'll give credit to the city.

City has put forward some resources from their ARPA funds that have been made available to address some of the barriers for businesses to just enter into contracts, whether that's bonding and insurance, key pieces of equipment and tooling, that's a piece of it.

It's all connected in at this point that think it's tied in to some of the work that we've been doing on our minority business development agency, where we're now looking for a pipeline of businesses that are looking to scale but might need access to additional not only advice but additional capital.

And those are a different set of resources.

That's the type of systems change that we can see through this agenda.

And then finally, on the back end, it's working with project owners, public and private, to say, you know, one way to help scale these businesses is to assure rapid payments on projects.

And that's something where instead of letting the small businesses be the working capital for large companies to give them their pay in a shorter time frame so that they've got the resources to scale that sort of like a system that's starting to be built needs to be optimized.

We're not there yet, but it tries to bring sort of this idea to the ground of like for a set of businesses, how do we help get more and more business owners to a point of scaling?

So they're creating the wealth and they're creating job opportunities in our community.

And it wraps around with policy at the local and at the state and the federal level that we support.

Yeah, please.

I think this is a really important point about systems change, and I feel like systems change has become one of those buzzwords that what does it really mean?

You know, everybody talks about it, everyone's doing systems change, but I think that the thing that we all came together on was that we do have a lot of resources, but we don't need to start more programs.

You know, it's not about more programs.

It's because it's not about fixing the people, it's about fixing us.

And what you just described is a different way to organize us.

The people who are the system to make it work for people.

And I think that's what's most exciting about this and that's why United Way is here.

Beautifully said.

Yes.

Give her a round of applause.

Mr. Executive, you have been very generous with your time on this project and ensuring that good people like Sabrina Roberts keep us all on track.

Can you share your view on of all the areas that we could have focused on with this urban agenda?

We could have talked about housing.

We could have talked about health and wellness or whatever, but we chose economic mobility.

Why, from your perspective, is that the right choice?

Well, one, we're tracking with you and all you got to do is listen to people.

You know, when you when you run, you listen.

You hope it's a listening tour while you're campaigning.

And what I heard over and over again is housing.

So we brought forth our first inaugural housing director of Coggan County, Sarah Parks.

Jackson, who's with us today.

We started the housing Department right to address real housing needs in the community.

And thank you for the work you do on the business development we're tracking with you.

It's what we heard, 30,000 small businesses in Cuyahoga County.

It's the lifeblood of our actual economies because you could speak to as well.

So we hired Von Johnson as the head of small business development at Cuyahoga County government.

Second, to solve it all, but we can be a bridge to problems in case of small business looking out for black and brown businesses.

Is there adequate access to capital?

Can we create seed grants and small loans that make a difference, make or break between a business starting or not?

And I workforce the mayor and I work together to merge of workforce development.

You were once a part of the two headed monster that became one and we think greater Cleveland works.

Its name is going to work to teach to the jobs that need to be talked to today of what you know we have job needs for in this regional economy.

So I think three, four, three, you know, bingo, Randi, you've got it.

I think the housing, the business development and the workforce readiness is going to lift, you know, the ships and it's going to deal with the disparity that we've been in if we focus in target areas.

So we're not afraid to say the urban agenda.

You know, in this national and state environment we're in, we're not afraid to say it.

I do want to say I'm glad to have state Rep Anita Bryant out here today, and you may have some other colleagues in the audience, but I just notice our state partners out here, thank you for seeing us, because budgets are policy.

And right now we are watching the state budget closely.

So I mentioned the three things that we're tracking well with you on.

But but I asked you, will this be could this be an advocacy agenda for leaning in on state and federal budgets and policies?

Right.

And you said yes, because I think we need to be heard out of this place.

It represents across five counties, 2 million people here, 20% of the state.

We need to be heard.

We need to be heard that when you take away the governor's proposed early child tax credit, that tax credit that goes to families with children 1 to 6 and was $1,000 in their pocket, it got taken away and the House version of the budget and that's not this House members fault but it got taken away when you put all kinds of burdensome requirements on SNAP assistance.

Stephanie, how's your councilwoman?

How's, you know, this kid in her neighborhood in Huff?

We rely we rely on basic building blocks, the income that keeps families stable so they can go out and find a job.

Right?

So we are also on top of the three initiatives that you've identified is the target areas.

We also want to take that and make that a platform for leaning in on state and federal policy that tracks with Metro America and where we need to be.

Fantastic.

Well said.

And since you brought up the great Stephanie House, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that going back to 2019, Stephanie sat down with Greg Brown and I to start imagining what an urban agenda could look like.

So she's been our advisor since 2019 on this whole effort.

So it's good to have her sitting up front some.

And finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't recognize my CEO, my mentor, Frank Cecil from RPM International, who took the time to be here today.

So thank you.

I think one more question before we transition to Q&A and I guess I'm going to ask it direct a question to Sharon and then I'm going to come back to Brian.

But can you speak to any efforts that have been launched that might be specifically tied back to the urban agenda?

Folks are getting antsy.

They want to know, okay, this sounds good, but what are you guys doing right?

And you're up to something.

So please share that.

Yes, we are.

Yes, we are.

Well, at United Way, we have a lot of clarity about what we're working towards, and that really is greater Cleveland being a place where it's possible for anyone to build their own financial security and fewer of us dependent on ongoing support just to get by.

And so we be through this effort and sitting around the table with all these partners, but with the Cleveland Foundation really found that where our strategies are going and where our work is going is so aligned that for the first time we're partnering together.

And because a lot of what we've talked about here to make systems change, you've got to change the rules that are kind of holding the problem in place.

So that's often public policy.

So we have come together and we have some really important and aligned ideas about how policy could at the state level and some at the county to better align the support that we have with people's own economic mobility journey.

Right now, it's unintentionally causing barriers.

We talked about child care is definitely one that is one of the biggest barriers to working people.

Housing costs another one.

So there are things that we can do and we're starting with the state budget and unfortunately we agree the child tax credit is not there.

But that's a good example.

These are working people paying their taxes and to get that money back would really make a difference for them, not only for where their kids are and the high quality child care they could get, but also ability to work and stay in the workforce.

So we're very excited about it.

We're just kicking it off.

We're working right now at the state budget level, but you'll be hearing more about it and we're going to need more people with us.

But we think that we can approach it a little differently because even though there's a lot of things going on right now that may feel different from different views, the one thing we are aligned on is that it's very important to get people into the workforce and keep them there.

We want people to be financially independent.

I think we all are working towards that.

And so we're we're just staying focused there and staying the course.

That's what we're working on.

Exciting.

The president's council isn't an official partner yet, but the work of the President's council certainly, certainly ties in.

I can read your future.

Brian Hall's our.

Thank you.

But certainly a lot of this work seems to tie in perfectly to the work of the president's council.

Do you see it that way?

I do, even though we aren't a part of it yet, I do have to give compliments to you, the Urban League and you biz, because the four of us have been working together for two years also.

Yes.

To work on the economic portion of what will be part of this urban agenda.

I would start with with a fact and this was from a Cleveland state study that there were 24,800 or so black companies in northeast Ohio, and of that 24,000, only 822 had a single employee, a W2 employee.

The rest of them were solopreneur.

And so when you think about economic mobility and business mobility, we've got to make sure that those companies can hire employees.

And here's an interesting part of their study.

It said that the solopreneur is average income with about $52,000 a year a year.

The companies that had W-2 employees average 1.2 million in revenue a year.

Wow.

And just to take that a little bit further, the solopreneur ers were the lowest among Asian Latinos whites in terms of average revenue by a long shot.

But once they had employees, they were almost equal across the board, at least Asian, Latino and black businesses.

So the president's council, since almost inception, and I should say, unlike most organizations, this was founded by a group of black businesses who put our capital on the table.

We founded a for profit entity and then a not for profit foundation.

One of our former board members, when he was at BW, was sitting there, and we wanted to not just grow our businesses, but to grow other businesses.

And with the help of this great philanthropic community, with corporate support and with our dollars, we launched a program called Emerging Entrepreneurs.

We graduated 167 businesses over a period of time looking at one at the table right there, and I'm sure there's more in the room, but we were trying to buck the odds.

I said, one out of ten small businesses make it, nine out of ten fail.

And out of our 167, we had about a 90% success rate ten years later.

So today, today, that's evolved because what we've found over the years, that's been decades ago is that other people started similar cohort programs.

But once the businesses graduate from those cohort programs, they had a job, they had something they needed to take care of.

They either had to fix their h.r.

System, their accounting system, their finance.

They had to get capital.

And so we decided to create something called the business solutions suite where because of the generosity, again, of our members and of this community, we were able to give we are able to give a consultant to a business for 10 hours of consulting to help them execute on what they learned.

And we believe putting that human resource in the business is helping take it to the next level.

So we absolutely want to be a part of the urban house.

Then you're hired, you're so I think we have reached the point that we need to begin the audience Q&A for a live stream and radio audience.

I'm Randy MC Sheppard, chairman and co-founder of Policy Bridge and moderator of today's conversation.

Today, we are talking about the urban Agenda, which is a collective of leading organizations working together to address issues in Cleveland's most distressed neighborhoods.

Joining me on stage are Brian Hall, chairman of the President's Council.

Chris Ronayne, our county executive vice president and CEO of the Greater Cleveland Partnership.

And Sharon Sobel Jordan, president and CEO of the United Way of Greater Cleveland.

We welcome questions from every one city club members, guests as well as those joining via our live stream at City Club dot org or live radio broadcast at 89.7 ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question for our speakers, please text it to 3305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

May we have the first question, please?

Good afternoon.

My name is Danielle Sidner.

Thank you so much for everybody that's on the panel.

The one thing that I did not hear in this conversation today was a dollar amount that we think is going take to actually move this forward.

I've had the privilege as well of being involved in these conversations for probably the last ten years.

And we seem to get stuck at this point of having phenomenal plans without a funding mechanism committed to ensuring it happens.

What do you think it's going to cost us to actually get this done?

MM That's a good question.

I'd like to say I wish there were millions of dollars that would fall in my lap to process this.

Are you talking in terms of what it would cost for a group like Policy Bridge to be the backbone to shepherd this or the investments that all of the collective organizations need to make to see the numbers move in the right direction?

I think both because we we need a backbone organization that can own responsibility for ensuring that these working groups stay together and do the things that we're asking them to do.

And then like a groundbreaking coalition in Minneapolis, they've committed $5 billion.

They already have $1,000,000,000 that's been raised in order to reconstruct the way that we do small a commercial real estate and homeownership.

Yes, I would say to do this the right way, putting on my policy, which chairman hat we're somewhere and I'm looking at Greg's six $800,000 minimum per year to sort of staff up and have the researchers and the staff to kind of do this on and on.

But over years, that that adds up to be a pretty hefty number.

I don't know.

The question about economic impact is a good one or the cost, but I could say we know from our research that if we did this the right way, the economic impact on Cuyahoga County would be $6.9 billion if we can close all these gaps that we've talked about.

So that's one number that we are paying attention to.

But I think share I wanted to ask you, I was just going to add that it's a great question.

And I think we're it's still unfolding for us.

But I think that part where we're starting is we're already investing, all of us in the community.

Can we better align what we're doing towards the same end and see if we can make more progress than we've made in the past?

And then I think that would put us in a better position to attract other funding, particularly based on that data point you just made.

Sure.

Thank you.

And I'll just say it to your point is a ten figure number that ends in a B to make the real change happen.

But from the county's perspective right now, we are in this tourniquet mode of putting a tourniquet on the bloodletting of budgets.

You know, that Medicaid expansion that happened in 2014 benefited over 700,000 Ohio families, 100,000 of which are in Cuyahoga County.

To instantly lose that in a trigger if the federal government downsizes Medicaid, which that's where we see things going.

And then the state which doesn't have to trigger a correlative cut.

We need to keep everything we can right now.

My first three months of this year going out with our consultants in Washington, Johnson, was to just save anything that we got pledged to us last year.

You all know that story, right?

Capital dollars operating that was anything was pleasure.

We've been pretty successful at that in saving it because I think the rubber meets the road in these congressional districts where no matter the party, a congressperson to meet their residents, where they're at and say, well, I guess we do need that money here, you ask for it.

So our our mode right now has been save everything we can and lean in on budgets to preserve every institution that we have.

And, you know, I'll just say it, when HUD gets cut and you have no HUD offices, when the Department of Education gets cut and you don't know where to go, all of this falls on the shoulders of the counties and the cities.

And right now, budgeting isn't happening with community impact in mind at a federal and, dare I say, state level.

So right now we're just trying to save what we got to build back up to where we can go.

But I think that number is $1,000,000,000 number.

If I can, before sorry, Brian, just a real quick comment, because I want to just answer the first part of that and answer it and why I think something is different.

I mentioned that we've been working together for about four years and we've been working on how do we attract federal dollars for the agenda.

That's important to organizations like the Urban League, The President's Council Policy Bridge finance firmly.

When we got to a point, we finally said, let's work together towards the urban agenda.

So I think what's different for us in our community is that we decided to come together and support one of our own organizations to get the money to move this forward and to support that with the hope that we will all win at the end.

But I said this to Evelyn last week.

The definition of collaboration is when you can win.

I can lose and still be happy.

So I just want to answer maybe from a different perspective.

Danielle.

And so I've been kind of reflecting on the question, which is a great question.

So I think about it in terms of also what's the opportunity that we're creating for businesses from the private sector?

And if I go back again to just the CBO example and I'm looking out, I'm seeing the team from bedrock, I'm seeing the team from the Guardians and the major developments that are underway and the commitments that they're signing up for in terms of the opportunities that they're going to create, not only for minority businesses but for also Cleveland small businesses and women owned businesses.

Those are billions of dollars of opportunity that we are seeing in our region.

The city last year issued, I think a little over $3 billion in construction permits.

It's up from about one and a half billion, which is their annual level that they've been at.

It's making sure that we're creating billions of dollars of private opportunity.

It's not just about funding the kind of the infrastructure to connect the dots.

Thank you all for those.

I think we have another question.

Yes.

So happy to be here.

A lot of times when I'm at the city club, I call them conversations of comfort because we never really hone in on what's needed.

So I had the missing piece from Randy to get his Nobel Peace Prize.

And I want to ask the panel, what would you all think about a parallel community based partnership where the barrier to entry for that would be the integrity.

So from a community perspective, when Randy mentioned the community being sick and tired of being sick and tired.

We can all side who the true leaders are.

We can all side fake agendas and we know what you're about.

So I would love to see from a accountability factor a community based parallel of partners that would judge who is at the table for this work.

Otherwise, Randy, we may not have a Nobel Peace Prize for.

Oh, right.

So we have to work on this.

But I don't want the panel to kind of answer that and really search your heart.

Really search your heart before you answer.

Yeah, I'm happy to take it first because I have not been part of the planning process, but I have challenged my friend here, as I said, to make sure this is something different.

And one of the differences is who's involved from the community.

How do we make these plans work if we're not engaging the people we're trying to help and the geographies we're trying to help?

So I agree with you.

That sounds very interesting to have a parallel community like to this urban agenda and I know you're planning to have community input and engagement, but does does it go further?

Absolutely.

Well, first of all, Ms..

Hood, who just spoke up, is on the Community Engagement Committee.

So, you know, we're going directly to the right kind of community leader to be a part of this process.

And she always speaks truth.

And we appreciate that.

Ebony.

I would also say Greg would kill me if I didn't, that we kicked off our community process by holding small group meetings, focus group meetings with different subsets of community.

So we had the Young Latino network we had who else do we have?

The third Space Action lab.

We had neighborhood connections and we had Environmental Health Watch, and each of those groups went out and found community residents that came to the table that looked at what we were trying to do with the urban agenda and gave us honest feedback and helped us to shape what you maybe need to do more of this or don't forget about that.

We will have many more.

I personally said to the group, We're not going to do the come out of the gate town hall meeting with 500 people.

Too many of our residents have seen that movie a thousand times and then they wave goodbye and you never hear anything again.

No, no, no.

We're not going to do that.

We're going to have small groups where people can be heard and people have an opportunity to speak up, offer their perspectives, come back and do it again, perhaps join some of these community based committees.

But the point is well taken and understood.

We really have to always keep the residents at the forefront because they're there.

All of the challenges and the grim statistics that I talked about.

And if we're not asking them for help and guidance and input, we'd be remiss if I might just add to Ebony's point of all that the dashboards end up in the digital netherworld unless anybody's really watching them.

So I think our dashboard, if Table 15 got a little more work out of that question, so be it.

But, you know, to have an engaged citizen group that's actually watching the dashboard with the framers, it means everything.

And the other point I wanted to make, Randi, is average age up here.

No disrespect, colleagues, but we're 50 plus.

We've got to get young voices, younger people, including youth.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for the information and presentation I think was well received as I looked across the three sectors that you presented, the income inequality, the housing and the employment.

To me it seemed like there was a huge omission and that is all three of those are impacted significantly for urban and black and brown folks by the justice system.

How was that taken into account in your consideration?

Well, let me be clear.

The the three buckets that I talked about, homeownership, business ownership and workforce preparedness are simply three areas that we wanted to get started with.

That's not the end all, be all.

I mean, issues affecting any urban community are quite complex.

And we were also told by many of our leaders and advisors don't boil the ocean, don't think you can do everything.

And because our focus is economic mobility, we really felt those three drivers really impact one's ability to generate income and wealth, which is what we hoped for when we wrote the Policy Bridge report.

We talked a lot about the fact that there are many factors that play into poverty and to quality of life that sort of attach themselves one way or another to someone's economic success.

So you can't talk about jobs without talking about housing.

You can talk about housing without talking about transportation or safety or, you know, even returning citizens.

We I personally have met with several returning citizens that have initiatives trying to get young people involved in the trades.

So I think one of the things we will be doing and looking at is how do we get job opportunities made available for that population in new and unique ways.

I mean, every day we hear wonderful suggestions and ideas.

We just haven't had a chance yet to roll out them into this this initiative.

But we will get there.

And this is a long term proposition.

We actually believe it may take the better part of 25 years to achieve all the things that we want to achieve.

But we do want to see some success along the way in many of these different categories.

Please, I'll just say that one of the things that United Way is bringing to the mix here, we talked about social determinants of health, but we've done a lot of work and there's a lot of research on social determinants of work.

And these are there are eight barriers that are evidence based that stand in the way of people's success at work, both getting the job and keeping the job and moving up.

And clearly access to justice and legal representation is definitely one.

I do think that will bring that this work to these conversations because how we move those population level metrics are going to be, you know, that's that's where the rubber meets the road.

And we've talked a lot about how we have to work differently.

We've got a lot of information.

We've shared a lot of data and information with you.

But what's it's going to come down to is what we do differently about it.

And so but but that's definitely, in my view, in the mix when you're talking about financial independence, financial security, for sure, I just want to say I think the gentleman's point on justice is extremely well taken.

The three areas that we are focusing on, I think on the upstream is is in its own way, dealing with justice.

When you help persons enter the home buyer's market and deal with that inequity of 40% in the black and brown communities and ownership and 70% in the white community, we're we're leaning in on better futures were leaning in when we're talking about job development in business ownership and and again, against the grain of what Brian was talking about and getting more persons on payroll in black and brown owned businesses than just sole proprietorships which we'll have our sole proprietorships, too.

But but these all lean in against a downstream system of jail, right?

I mean, all these.

So I think in fairness to you and the policy, Brad, you've given your own way, addressed sort of the antecedents of justice system problems.

Having said that, I'll just point out a couple of things.

My friend Stan Jackson said on the way, and he's been very focus in his night job, not his day job as an attorney, but his a nice job.

And what does the bench look like in Cuyahoga County?

And to bring on one of the I think in a generation first African-American male judge in Judge Jeffrey Saffold last time out.

Good for you.

Good for you, too.

Thinking about does my bench look like my community?

Is it correlative with our demographics in our community?

Frankly, it hasn't been right.

So just right there, is there a community on the bench that knows their own community?

You know, and that's I think that's something we have to continue to think about.

But on the jail system, I just want to say I do not wake up every day wanting to build a jail in Cuyahoga County.

It's an arduous task.

My friend Laurel Domanski Diaz is in and out of our justice system, trying to understand how we can do better.

It took me one week to walk through that county jail to say we need to do better.

So I thank you, taxpayers, for giving us the opportunity to build a campus that heals and cares out in Garfield.

And when we do that, we need to make sure that folks aren't just bouncing off four walls at night, that they're getting job training opportunities in the jail.

We're working with Tri-C. Ronnie Cannon, where are you?

You know this better than anybody.

You've been through the system and now you're towards employment.

And you know that we need to do job training for people who didn't have a first chance, let alone a second chance.

Right.

And we got to work on what we're doing in the jail.

So we're working with Tri-C on some school based training in the jails.

But what is so critically important is how somebody reenters into a community.

Do they have the tools to actually come back and matriculate in their communities?

Do they have housing leads?

Do they have transportation leads?

Do they have a job?

Skill development is working with us on culinary training in the jails so somebody can come out and go work through the Edwin's program and reenter a community.

It really matters upstream.

I think you got it with you three, but I think the gentleman is right that the real sort of test of all this will be how are we doing with our justice system?

Is that number tonight where there's 1500 persons in our custody at the county jail in ten years, in five years in one year, can that number keep coming down and can come down substantially?

Absolutely.

Thank you very much to Brian Hall, County Executive Ronan Bagshaw, Sharon Sobel, Jordan and Randy MC Sheppard for joining us at the City Club.

Forums like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at City Club dot org.

The City Club would like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by AECOM, Earthing, Beautiful Communities and Housing Partners.

Cuyahoga County.

The Cuyahoga County Democratic Party.

Kyra Cahill, Geauga Land Bank, GCP, Huntington, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland.

Macaulay and Company.

The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District Policy Bridge.

Providence.

House Rock.

Family of Companies.

United Way of Grover Cleveland.

YMCA of Greater Cleveland and Youth Opportunities Unlimited.

A List is next.

Next week at the City Club, we have an incredibly interesting left to right program pairing as our role is to create conversations of consequence and to do so on a nonpartisan basis.

On Monday, April 14th, Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna will offer a vision for what he's calling economic patriotism and a way forward for the Democratic Party.

Then on Thursday, April 17th, State Senate Finance Committee Chair Jerry Serino.

We'll talk about the state budget, Senate Bill one and other GOP priorities.

I encourage you to come to both, regardless of your political ideology.

You can get tickets to each of these forums and learn more about others at City Club dot org.

And that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you once again to our speakers.

I'm Mark Ross and this forum is now adjourned.

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