Production and distribution of City Club forums and ideastream public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland, Inc.. Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, February 2nd.

My name is Dan Moulthrop and the chief executive here.

Thank you all for joining us today.

Our forum today is part of our local hero series.

That's a series that spotlights champions here in northeast Ohio, whose hard work changes the way we view ourselves and our communities.

It's a series we present in partnership with Citizens Bank and Dominion, and we have a wonderful local hero today, Emily Campbell.

She's president and CEO at the Center for Community Solutions.

Yes, we can apply.

That to Democrats.

If heroes are known for their superpowers.

We should know Emily Campbell by her command of data, the way she and her colleagues assemble that data in the form of tables, charts and reports that ultimately shape public policy and then our lives.

And today, no doubt, we will see some of those superpowers in action.

In addition to those superpowers, Emily brings a wealth of institutional knowledge to her role as chief executive, which she took on just this year.

She spent 16 years at Community Solutions with a year of that as the organization's chief operating officer.

Her appointment is also part of a larger trend in greater Cleveland, a wave of new, younger leadership in executive roles.

She succeeds John Corlett, who spent over 40 years in the sector, the last ten as president and CEO of the Center for Community Solutions.

For those not familiar with the Center for Community Solutions, it was established in 1913 to coordinate efforts by area charities.

It's grown over the last century into one of Ohio's oldest, most respected and most important research and advocacy organizations focusing its work on health and Human Services.

Ms.. Campbell previously worked for US congressmen.

She's consulted with numerous nonprofit organizations, foundations, government agencies to provide data and public policy decision support.

Her work on poverty has appeared in every major newspaper in Ohio.

She's been interviewed by a wide variety of media outlets, including The Economist, The New York Times, ESPN, MSNBC and NPR, to name just a few.

In the second half of our program will be a Q&A.

And if you have a question for our speaker, you can text that question to 3305415794.

The number again is 3305415794.

And our team will work it into the second half of the program.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland.

Please join me in welcoming local hero Emily Campbell.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for that warm introduction and for having me here today.

You know, I've seen many, many, many forums at the city club, both here and at the former location.

And so it is great to be on this stage, but things look a little different from up here than they do for I'm from down there.

A change in perspective is a familiar feeling for me these days.

As Dan mentioned, I've been with the Center for Community Solutions for a long time doing this work.

But now that I'm tasked with leading this venerable institution into its next chapter, things look a little different.

You know, fresh eyes see nothing but possibilities.

But those with experience can see how far we've come.

And I hope to bring both of those perspectives to this new role.

And it is not new.

As Dan mentioned, I'm in the early days as president and CEO of the Center for Community Solutions.

I'm counting in weeks, not yet months.

Today marks nine weeks since I stepped into the role.

And today's Groundhog's Day.

As I was preparing my remarks, I kept coming back to this idea that we'd rely on a small rodent to predict our future.

If you didn't see the news.

Punxsutawney Phil did not see his shadow this morning, so he's forecast an early spring and we could always use it here in Cleveland.

Whether or not the groundhog sees his shadow is about where he's standing now and what's behind him.

And in Cleveland, our past sometimes casts a very long shadow.

Historically, the groundhog is a pessimist, much more likely to get scared and to predict six more weeks of winter.

But more often than not, it's wrong.

In the same way, our past challenges and even the struggles of today don't have to preordained.

Our region's prosperity in the future.

And I believe that a focus on people can propel progress in Cleveland and beyond.

My organization, the Center for Community Solutions, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank engaged in improving health, social and economic conditions.

Many of the members of our board, some of our funders and our small and mighty staff are here today, as is my husband, Kyle.

Thank you all so much for your support.

As a think tank, we of course study issues, but we also actively work to engage in public policy and to change policy practices and perspectives.

Community Solutions has become a trusted source of analysis and advocacy, with a century long legacy of pragmatic problem solving in Ohio's health and social service landscape.

The Center for Community Solutions is a legacy organization in a legacy city deeply rooted in the history of Cleveland.

In the 19 teens, a group of wealthy philanthropists and community do gooders combined their money and their energy to create an organization that would examine systemic issues, pull resources and foster collaboration.

When it was founded in 1913 as the Federation for Charity and Philanthropy, the concept was so innovative that it warranted a full page article in Sunday's New York Times.

We have a copy hanging in our office on East Ninth Street.

A lot has changed in the intervening 111 years, but what has never wavered is community solutions commitment to improving health, social and economic conditions, and our belief that thinking systemically working to improve policy and acting in concert can ignite lasting positive change.

Community Solutions has been an incubator, a convener, a resource identifier, a trusted source of information, and a policy driver.

My predecessors pushed for state legislation to establish county boards of developmental disabilities, to get people out of mental institutions and the help that they actually needed.

They were the catalyst for collaborations, which today are the Centers for Families and Children Tear Alliance and Groundwork, Ohio, among many others.

We helped develop Cuyahoga County's first ever strategic plan for Health and Human Services, and today we provide policy support for the Greater Cleveland Funders Collaborative.

Over the years, we've contributed to just about every foundation, nonprofit initiative and government agency in town that works on health and social services.

And we advocate at all levels of government.

Community Solutions is solidly nonpartizan, and we are proud of it, but we still have a point of view.

We believe that good ideas can come from anywhere.

We evaluate policies and proposals based on their merits, not on who put them forth and what political party they may be from.

We are always looking for common ground for the places where interests intersect.

It's not often that we lead from the front for community solutions.

It's usually not about taking credit, and sometimes we're more effectively when we're working steadily and slowly.

We can stand to be patient, and we know that incremental change is still progress.

You may not know our name, but you probably know our work and you've likely encountered some of our findings.

Just one example.

My analysis, first published by the Center for Community Solutions, showed that Cleveland is the second poorest large city in the country, and I updated every year when new data is released and every year we stay in that second spot.

My expertize straddles public policy and applied research, and a focus has been poverty and related issues.

I'm particularly interested in finding sustainable solutions to address the needs of Ohioans in the moment while seeking approaches to put struggling families on a new trajectory.

The recent experience of COVID 19 pandemic illuminated some of the deepest vulnerabilities and the largest disparities.

But we also saw the implementation of novel and innovative approaches to helping those in need.

How we apply the lessons of this tumultuous time could mean the difference between thriving and just surviving for our neighbors and for our region.

At Community Solutions, we're a little bit obsessed with the number five.

We happen to have five policy priorities, and every Monday we send out the five things you need to know email to thousands of people across Ohio.

And today, I want to talk about five things we all need to understand about poverty in Cleveland.

First, let's take a look at the past to understand where we are today.

The total number of people living in poverty in Cleveland has stayed relatively steady for the past 70 years.

It's even fallen a little bit when the modern method of measuring poverty was introduced in the mid 1960s and as our country embarked on President Johnson's war on poverty, there were just shy of 140,000 people living in poverty in Cleveland.

Today, we're at about 112,000 people in poverty and population statistics.

That's not much movement over seven decades.

But what has changed in Cleveland is total population.

In 1965, Cleveland was a city of just over 800,000 people.

Today, Cleveland's population is below 360,000.

We have lost more than half of our population over these decades, although the pace of decline has slowed.

And Cleveland may be done shrinking.

With total population falling and people in poverty staying about the same.

The result is that poverty has become concentrated the distance between all people and the people below.

Poverty is getting smaller and smaller.

We are being squeezed.

And because total population fell by half, it's no surprise that the share of Clevelanders living in poverty, the poverty rate has nearly doubled, going from 17% in 1965 to 32% in 2022.

The 112,000 people living in poverty in Cleveland include around 35,000 children, 93,000 younger adults, ages 18 to 34 and 13,000 older adults.

That means that one third of the population overall, one out of every three residents of Cleveland, is living in poverty.

This is a high poverty city, and for the most part, we've gotten used to it.

Now there are two ways to reverse these trends and improve the poverty rate.

Either we add people to the total population diluting poverty, or we work to lift current residents out of poverty.

And we can and should do both simultaneously.

But it's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, for us to grow the population out of poverty.

There are certainly parts of the city that are growing.

Many more people are moving downtown.

But we're talking about maybe thousands of new residents, not several hundred thousand new residents.

So it's imperative that we work to improve conditions for the people who are here now.

You cannot have a thriving community if the people within that community are not thriving.

All of the world class assets in Cleveland and there are many won't change the fact that far too many Clevelanders are being forced to choose between food and housing, or are stuck in a so-called dead end job because they don't have reliable transportation, or they have to choose between fixing their roof and paying their heating bill.

In a recent study we conducted, commissioned by Cuyahoga Division of Seniors and Adult Services, we found that 46% of older Cuyahoga residents reported having to make choices between necessities in the past year because of money.

The most common thing they're giving up is food.

Every single issue that Community Solutions works on and in fact, nearly all of Cleveland's most pressing problems are a cause or consequence of poverty.

Which brings us to the second thing we need to realize.

The system is not designed to uplift.

Take how we measure poverty.

Official poverty statistics only count pretax cash income.

They don't take into account the public benefits, which help struggling families get by.

Social Security is counted because it's cash to people in need.

That's why older adults consistently have the lowest poverty rates of any age group.

The things that help families and children get by SNAP, Medicaid, housing vouchers.

They don't count in these statistics.

It's also widely accepted that the bar that we use, the poverty threshold, doesn't reflect the income needed to get by.

The Census Bureau puts it this way although the thresholds in some sense reflect a family's needs, they are intended for use as a statistical yardstick, not as a complete description of what people and families need to live.

That's from the people who are putting out these statistics.

In fact, Mickey's living wage calculator puts the income needed to sustain a family of an adult and two children in our region upwards at $80,000 per year.

That's if they're paying for everything by themselves, including the full cost of full time child care for their two children.

In contrast, the federal poverty level that is used to calculate eligibility for a wide variety of programs is just $25,820 for a family of three in 2024.

Eligibility for programs is set so low that people earn too much to qualify well before they're able to afford their basic needs.

And there are points on the path from poverty to self-sufficiency where earning just $1 more means the loss of a public benefit worth hundreds of dollars to a family.

It causes a benefit, Cliff, and it creates a disincentive to work.

There are design flaws in the programs and they are not an accident.

But there are many policy solutions that we can use to improve programs.

Community solutions will continue to advocate to strengthen the Health and Human Services safety net so that the people most in need and the people who qualify for benefits are able to access them, and so that those programs do what we want them to do.

Poverty costs us all in lost tax revenue, reduced resources for infrastructure investments, increased health care costs, and much more.

Closing gaps and reducing disparities is another way to propel economic progress in a high poverty city.

Health Policy Institute of Ohio released a report last year calculating that if we just eliminated racial disparities, Ohio stands to gain $79 billion each year in economic output by 2050.

A few years ago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that the racial income gap, the gap between what people of color earn and what white workers earn is the primary driver between the wealth gap and that it is large enough to explain the persistent difference in wealth accumulation between black residents and white residents.

And so we moved to the third thing we need to acknowledge.

Cleveland has a lot of gaps to close the county or regional level.

Statistics mask an enormous amount of variety within communities.

Women, people with disabilities and children are overrepresented in the population living in poverty and non-Hispanic white residents of Cleveland are about half as likely to live in poverty as their neighbors who are people of color.

It's not this way everywhere.

According to a 2021 Brookings report, black residents are extremely segregated from the rest of the population.

In four cities, Detroit, Baltimore, Atlanta and Cleveland.

The legacy of redlining and historic disinvestment stays with us and these overtly racist policies are still casting a long shadow.

When you look at the legacy of redlining and at the historic redlining maps from the Homeowners Loan Corporation, the areas that are classified as hazardous or declining in the 1930s and forties, those areas that were designated that way in part because people of color were living there.

Those parts of our community are concentrated on the east side of Cleveland, and it almost looks like a sea.

And unfortunately, when we map negative health and economic conditions today, we see the same geographic patterns.

The maps look eerily, strikingly similar, whether it's parts of the city that still aren't connected with broadband.

Places where unemployment is high, where people are living with diabetes.

Where they report for mental health.

Poor physical health.

Where poverty is concentrated.

The list goes on and on and on.

The maps look the same.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Other cities have been able to move on from these patterns compared to the rest of the country's 100 largest metro areas.

Cleveland ranks 98th in racial inclusion, with massive gaps in earnings, poverty and employment, according to Brookings.

This is unusual among large U.S. cities, and it is unacceptable.

We see the civic sector working tirelessly to reverse these trends and move on from this legacy of racism, discrimination and disinvestment.

But we need to accelerate progress, and we need to be doing lots of things simultaneously, focused on both place based and people based strategies.

Which brings me to the fourth thing that we need to understand.

Cleveland is a generous and resource rich community.

I wasn't surprised by the recent report that Clevelanders are the best tippers in the country because we donate, we contribute, and we support KENYON Community Initiatives, and we've been doing it for a century.

My organization was founded by people putting their own personal resources to work for the community.

We are blessed with a large and vibrant philanthropic community that is the envy of cities across the country, and these resources are deployed to change communities trajectories.

We also vote to make investments to address poverty.

Cuyahoga County has a Health and Human Services levy on the primary ballot on March 19th, Issue 26.

If passed, we'll collect $137 million annually in local flexible dollars, which can be used to meet needs, fill gaps and implement innovative solutions.

It's a renewal, not a tax increase.

I'll be voting for it, and I hope you do too.

If you look at the.

Total pie of spending on health and human service issues, the considerable investments by philanthropy and United Way each year are dwarfed by the spending by government.

In fact, 75% of that total pie in Cuyahoga County every year comes from public sources.

These include state and federal spending allocated by the state of Ohio and local dollars generated by property tax levies.

And this doesn't even count resources flowing directly to families.

Take hunger assistance.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, provided about $270 million every month last year in direct benefits for Cuyahoga County residents.

The USDA reported that every $1 of hunger benefits generates up to $1.79 in economic activity.

So over the course of a year, snap alone could mean as much as $5.8 billion in economic activity in Cuyahoga County and in our neighborhoods.

As we've seen.

Government is part of the problem, but they also have an outsized role to play in the solutions to poverty.

And that's the final thing you need to know about poverty in Cleveland.

There are two times in the last decade or so when you can clearly and immediately see the impact of a policy change in population level data.

The first was when the Affordable Care Act was fully implemented and Medicaid expanded.

In Ohio, the number and share of Ohioans who were uninsured fell almost overnight.

Today, there are 575,000 fewer Ohioans who are uninsured than there were on the cusp of Medicaid expansion.

The second time it happened was very recently.

The COVID 19 pandemic was rough.

However, one thing that came out of the pandemic is that society and government and all of us tried a lot of new things.

We tried to to innovate, to meet unexpected challenges.

There's a saying in some policy circles that you should never let a good crisis pass you by.

And Ohio used just about every tool in its toolbox to meet the rising demand.

Among the innovation was a temporary change to the tax code, which did more to lift children out of poverty than any other single program.

And it's not even a program.

It was improvements to the child tax credit for one year.

In 2021, the federal government implemented enhancements to the child tax Credit or CTC to expand it to more children, make it more available for low income families.

And crucially, for six months, the U.S. Treasury was making monthly deposits of up to $300 per child in the bank accounts of millions of American families.

About 95% of Ohio's children benefited.

These weren't a handout.

These were advances or prepayments on the child tax credit that was expected to be claimed by the family when they eventually filed their taxes.

The Census Bureau's Household Pulse survey in 2021 showed that people use those dollars exactly how we would want them to.

Among those who spent most of their child tax credit prepayment in August 2021, 77% by food, 61% bought clothing, and 41% paid for utilities.

Now, clothing was particularly high that month.

And what happens in August in Ohio, back to school, people were using the money for their immediate needs and they were also using it to pay for education, to pay down debt, and to save for the future.

National studies show that families who received the child tax credit prepayments did not reduce their employment.

They kept working.

This means that the extra resources were enough to cover some expenses, pay down debt or save for education, but not enough to convince working parents to stay home.

This is the only direct anti-poverty program for families that wasn't tied at all to what the parents were doing.

No work requirements, no compliance or redeterminations, no limitations on the use of funds.

And that meant the child tax credit was very inexpensive to administer.

And, you know what happened?

This child poverty in the United States was effectively cut in half, but it didn't last.

When Congress allowed these child tax credit enhancements to expire and other pandemic assistance ended, child poverty went right back to where it was when it ended.

18 million children were no longer eligible for the full child tax credit because their family's income was too low.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 90% of children in poverty are in families, which cannot claim the full credit today.

There's a more modest proposal in front of Congress that has bipartisan support to bring back some of the child tax credit enhancements and community solutions will be talking to state policymakers to see if Ohio can do what 15 states have already done, which is enact a state child tax credit in addition to the federal tax credit.

And we're going to see if we can improve Ohio's earned income tax credit to reach more very low income families.

So what does this all mean?

At its core, poverty is about a lack of resources.

It's about money.

It's about people in families not having afford the money to afford the basics.

It's about being forced to make difficult choices that you know you're going to have to pay for down the line.

It's simple economics.

Just having a job is not enough to be above poverty.

In fact, there are still 6000 adults living in Cleveland last year who worked full time for the full year but still didn't earn enough for their households to be above poverty.

Working for 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, making Ohio's minimum wage of $10.45 an hour, someone would still not earn enough to be above the poverty level for a family of three, and they are nowhere near that self-sufficiency standard.

We must find ways to bring more resources for families.

Get a good job with benefits that pays a family.

Sustaining wage is the fastest way for a household and all of its members to get out of poverty.

Steve Jobs said When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex and most people stop there.

But if you keep going and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.

When I first started traveling the state talking about poverty, I used to say that poverty is a complex problem, which requires multifaceted solutions.

But what I've come to realize is that poverty is actually a very simple problem.

It's about resources.

We still need multifaceted solutions because the things that hold people back and families back are so varied.

It could be simple, but it's also difficult because of the changes needed to address poverty in Cleveland were easy or affordable or politically palpable.

We would have already done them.

There is a different way.

In order to propel our region and its people forward, we must take a good look at current conditions, make a clear eyed assessment of where things stand today, and identify the avenues for progress in the future.

We have to ask questions about how we got where we are today and remove our preconceived notions to think creatively and expansively about possible solutions.

Trying to hide our problems do not make them go away and difficult does not mean impossible.

Cleveland.

Cleveland needs to continue to try things, to innovate, to do more of what works, and to stop doing what doesn't.

Community Solutions looks at the data, and we use analysis to identify the barriers that are holding us back.

We can do anything, but we don't have the money, the time, the energy or the will to do everything.

We are looking at where public policy just isn't working to find the levers that can be used to propel positive change in policy practices and perspectives.

I ask each of you to do the same.

So when, like the groundhog, we stop being afraid of what's behind us and we don't allow the shadows of the past to determine our future.

We can ignite growth.

And I promise spring will come.

Thank you.

You'll recall what I said earlier about superpower.

We're about to begin the audience Q&A.

My name is Dan Northrup.

I'm the chief executive here.

And Emily Campbell, president and CEO of the Center for Community Solutions, is our speaker.

We welcome questions from everyone city club members, guests, students and those of you joining us via a live stream or a live radio broadcast on 89.7 WKSU.

If you'd like to text a question, you can text it to 3305415794.

The number again is 3305415794.

And our team will work it into the program.

May we have our first question, please?

What role should the local hospitals like the Cleveland Clinic play in improving local health metrics?

So, you know, the Center for Community Solutions has had the opportunity to work with a number of health systems around the state on their community health needs assessments to try and figure out what are those things that can improve the social determinants of health and what are the things that can work outside the hospital walls in order to improve the health and well-being of communities?

Because some about 80%, I think the statistic is of our health is determined outside the health care system.

So places like the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, Metro Health, they do have a responsibility to try and do the things that are the best to improve the health of communities.

But they can't do everything, just like none of us can do everything, just like school systems can't do everything.

And so where I would ask health systems to really focus is in patient care, is in reducing the disparities in the diagnosis of people from different backgrounds and people from different ethnicities to try and work to have their workforce better reflect the communities they're serving.

And if they're able to do that and do that well, so many other important things will flow from it.

All right.

I'm going to do a text question.

It's just to save someone else.

With the city of Cleveland absorbing as struggling municipalities such as East Cleveland help or hurt the C shaped issues in the county?

Oh, good question.

The city of the East, Cleveland, actually has a lower poverty rate than the city of Cleveland as a whole.

So if you're thinking about the information, about the concentration of poverty, absorbing a place like like East Cleveland, that that has high and higher poverty will make Cleveland's statistics look worse.

Now, that doesn't mean that it won't help people in those communities have more resources to address their needs.

So it's not going to make the data look any better, but it may make the conditions so much better.

And sometimes we need to move beyond what the statistics show and think about what's right for people living in communities.

Emily So there has been a lot of media and across the country and locally here about the broken child care market.

And so I'm curious what you think some palatable policy solutions might be for the state of Ohio or here locally to solving the child care crisis?

Yes, we when when we at Community Solutions go into communities because we have the opportunity to talk to people from the deepest grassroots up to the highest echelons of power and everything in between.

And when we go into communities and we ask people, what are their biggest stressors, we hear child care and we hear mental health.

And for working moms, me being one of them, child care and mental health go right together.

It's stressful.

It's stressful to navigate.

There aren't good options.

And in some ways, people with children, their career prospects can be constrained by the child care they're able to find.

They're able to afford the hours of that child care and some of these other problems.

Now, we know that child care, high quality early care and education programs are one of the most effective long term ways to break cycles of generational poverty.

They have an incredible return on investment.

The problem is that we have to wait to be able to see that return on investment.

We have to wait until the children, the young children of today become the adults of tomorrow, enter our workforce, have their own families, have their own jobs before we get to see that return on investment.

But it doesn't mean that we shouldn't do it.

But your question was about palatable solutions to child care issues.

There are a lot of things that government can do.

We do have a publicly funded child care system in Ohio.

It actually is one of the programs that creates the largest benefit cliff for people when it ends because it ends before you can afford child care.

The child there is sometimes a mismatch between where those subsidized child care slots are available and where people are living and working and so that causes some dissonance in the system.

It just isn't working the way that we want it to work.

So certainly strengthening the public child care system is is an important thing to do.

And notably, quite a bit of the money for the publicly funded child care system comes from the federal government.

So it's coming through our state, into our communities.

It's not money we have to generate here.

There's a lot that employers can do to try and have some interesting partnerships to help help people kind of navigate some of these and also things that employers can do to make it a little less stressful on parents and families.

You know, you got to pick up your kid by a certain time.

You have to stop emailing and getting the card to do that and having flexible jobs that understand that is is really important.

And there's also a workforce shortage, as you well know, in the child care system.

And so we need to figure out how to solve the workforce shortage.

I think some of it has to do with those place based strategies because there are a lot of people in Cleveland's neighborhoods that are living right next door to families that need childcare, that are looking for employment.

And if we can marry those two things, imagine what we may be able to achieve.

Learning about how little money it takes to lift people out of poverty.

How do you feel about continually spending millions of public dollars improving professional sporting arenas that most residents can't afford to enjoy?

Yeah.

So this is where government can do anything, but it can't do everything right.

Public budgets are public budgets that the state that the county that the city that the federal government put together their moral document.

It's where government is making choices about where limited resources will be deployed.

And they're using our money, taxpayer money in order to do that.

So, you know, I like to look at things that work.

I focus I don't focus on sports stadiums or on economic development or other things.

So I can't speak to the merits of that.

But what I can say is that the pie, the overall pie is probably big enough if we slice it differently.

And so thinking about things like where are we investing our resources and what are we really getting from that money and having these conversations with policymakers and voting for people who reflect our values is the way to see changes in this arena.

The history and legacy of redlin Are there any and the policies?

General policies, of course, help everyone across Cleveland.

I mean, the child care tax credit helps everyone.

But are there any particular policies that can target and give solutions?

So that map no longer looks like that anymore in Cleveland?

Mm hmm.

I would say that we need both place based strategies on people based strategies.

So there is an element in those neighborhoods of Cleveland that is about the physical environment, that is about how it looks, how it feels to live there, the levels of crime there, very place based.

One of the problems that we've had in Cleveland is that the goal is to move out.

You move up, you move out.

And so what happens is that we have poverty concentrated and as soon as people have the ability to leave, they often do.

Now we're seeing this reverse we're seeing this reverse in certain parts of the city.

You know I think about Tremont, I think about Ohio City.

I think about some of the changes that I've seen in this community in the about two decades that I've lived here.

And we see we see how it can work and how some of the investments in physical infrastructure can can start to have changes in the whole way that a community or a neighborhood feels.

But at the same time, we have to be investing in the people redlining.

You know, those red line maps are just one way that we have historically disinvest started in places where people of color live and work and in their lives.

You can look through the history of public policy and see time after time the choices were made that excluded certain people within our society.

And so our responsibility, I believe, as people that work in policy and advocacy, is to take the same things from that playbook and reverse it.

Any improvement that we make in social service programs disproportionately benefits people of color, because people of color disproportionately need and take advantage and use and are eligible for and deserve those public benefit programs.

And so I'll say when I'm in Columbus, I always talk about it this way.

This isn't the way I'm going to talk about it, but the reality is that any improvements we make to public benefits have a disproportionate positive impact on those same communities and those same people that have borne the brunt of that disinvestment.

So congratulations.

And I love what you're saying and I appreciate everything.

I work for the Hebrew Freelance Association and we provide interest free loans to those who would not otherwise have access to traditional capital.

This is not just a plug.

There's relevancy here.

One of the things that we saw, our lending went down 50% during the pandemic because as you outlined, people were getting the money that they need and they know how to use it and they they did what they had to do.

However, apparently the pandemic was over on May 11th, 2023.

So hooray for us that I just had COVID to.

It's like the groundhog, right?

Right.

But what we're seeing now in 2023 and 2024 is a huge increase in our lending because people are coming to us for debt consolidation loans because even though they were getting support, they were still taking on high interest debt to get themselves through the income loss they experienced during the pandemic.

Part of what we do is we provide access to capital that they can't get through traditional financial sources and institutions.

How does your advocacy engage the private sector to help make some of those changes?

Because the public benefits you outlined can't do it.

All right.

The public benefits can't do it all.

Yeah.

You know, that's where the sort of third pea in my little triptych of piece, The Changing Perspectives, comes in, comes into play, because for the Center for Community Solutions, you know, we're directly advocating with policymakers and we're directly working with service providers and with government agencies.

We're not really working with the private sector with the exception of the nonprofit sector in that way.

And so, you know, it's it's our responsibility to try and put the information out there and we look to all of you to figure out how to use it in your own work and to figure out how to illuminate important things about communities.

But you know, this the pieces of how you cobble things together, especially when we're thinking about housing affordability and affordable housing, it's public, it's private, it's personal.

It's all these things put together.

It's tax credits, it's direct benefits, it's subsidies, it's it's tax deductions.

And so, you know, it's a very complex system and a lot of things have to be built together and done right in order for housing to be something that's stable for folks and affordable for folks.

And I think we're still learning some of the lessons of the Great Recession.

You know, this idea that your your house will automatically be a driver of your future wealth, it's been shown to not be true at all.

And I don't think we've quite figured out yet what that really means.

I mean, we're seeing an increase in younger people who are renting for longer.

Some of that likely has to do with choice.

Some of it has to do with their they don't want to have that responsibility.

They watched their families and their loved ones and their friends.

Parents lose their homes and they don't want to be in the same situation.

And they don't feel like they know that in ten years they'll still have a stable job.

And so all that.

To say that these are like large economic forces, that we could have a whole conference and I'm sure there's many to talk about how to do it.

But in order to really have sustainable solutions, we need to try and get all those pieces of the puzzle working in concert.

Good afternoon, Emily.

You know, Dan alluded to the changes in leadership and various organizations, and that includes like city councils and county councils and state legislatures.

And you have a mix of viewpoints.

Some people are new to those organizations because of term limits or whatever, and they just want to come in and make changes quickly.

Or maybe there are a new elected official and you might have others who have been there for decades and have seen the historical things up close and might be reluctant to a simple or quick changes.

So I'm wondering, to the advocates in the room and who are watching, how would you engage with the diversity of viewpoints represented in positions of power that can impact these policies?

Yeah, that's a great question.

You know, one of the things that I've sort of noticed as I look across the the community at some of the people that have stepped into leadership, is that a lot of them are like me, where they've been doing this work for a long time.

It just wasn't at the very front.

Right.

I was sitting in the seats.

I was thinking about community issues.

I wasn't standing on the stage.

And so we have an enormous amount of homegrown talent that is taking their moment and stepping in into this.

And so have this this history.

It may not be decades long, but they understand the problems and they understand what some possible solutions could be.

So the exciting thing about leadership change, especially in policy and advocacy, is that you get to have conversations that were maybe a closed door in the past.

And so having the opportunity to go talk to new leaders, to find out where their priorities are, to put forth some solutions that maybe the past leaders weren't interested in doing, to think about things a little bit differently.

You know, fresh perspectives always, always provide opportunity.

And what may have been a know in the past might be a yes today.

Just because there's a different person sitting in that seat.

And so, you know, thinking about things differently, gathering a diverse number of perspectives, looking at what all the layers could be of solutions.

You can get it sometimes easier with new leadership, but you don't have to have new leadership to be able to do that.

My predecessor, John Corlett, always talked about how when a policy window opens, you want to shove as much stuff through it as you possibly can.

And being an organization, been doing this work for over a century, like we see windows open and closed and we wait patiently for the window to open and we're ready to shove as much through as we can.

The corollary to that, though, is that when a policy window is closed, we have enough problems and there are enough issues that maybe we don't want to be the bird smashing up against the window.

Let's go find another way in or an open door or a different window or fly in through the chimney.

And I think that's what new leadership gives us the opportunity to do.

A high as we're seeing a lot of federal investment into things like infrastructure or the Inflation Reduction Act chips, the Science Act.

How do you see things like the increase in domestic manufacturing or things like the energy transition transition helping uplift communities specifically in this region?

Yeah, so those things can certainly uplift communities, but it's like tangential benefits, not direct benefits.

So, you know, government policymakers have not really loved to make investments directly in people.

I think there's a trust issue there and it's a trust issue that goes back, I mean, centuries from the founding of our country.

It's sort of like in some of our our founding documents, this idea that you pull yourself up from the bootstraps and you do it by yourself.

I think some of that, though, is changing.

And the child tax credit evidence, we have the evidence that was collected when the program was happening that people actually do what policymakers, what we would all hope that someone who was struggling would do with the dollars.

And we need to trust people.

And so, you know, some of these large investments in infrastructure, I'm not saying they're not needed.

We need all of it, but we need other things, too.

You know, we need to be investing in things like lead free homes and education and high quality child care and work supports and some of these other things so that we have the workforce that's ready to take advantage of those opportunities when they come to our community.

And that's all health and human Services.

So from where I'm standing, the prosperity of a region and the success of a community are built on the people.

And we need to look after those people.

Can you share what CC.

S role is in helping.

Translate the policy issues that will be, you know.

Most prevalent.

In.

This upcoming election to kind of folks who maybe aren't as wonky as those in the.

Room today.

And can.

Then you also kind of flip out this speak to c c. S role in helping motivate folks to actually vote.

We know the voter turnout rate, especially in Cleveland, is pretty a small.

And often it's knowledge is power and helps get.

People to the polls.

So yeah, I'm so glad you asked that question.

And we actually have two different avenues that we're working on at Community Solutions.

So we're a nonprofit, we are a nonpartisan organization.

We don't get involved in telling people who to vote for, but we do get involved in telling people to vote.

The other thing that we get involved with is candidate education and we try and go talk to everybody.

We try to talk to all of the candidates who are running for governor.

We try to talk to people who are running for city council, who are running for mayor, who are running for county executive to share this information because we have information about the communities that they're hoping to serve that we believe they need in order to do their jobs really well.

So we we try to talk to everybody, and that process starts, you know, pretty early, very quiet.

We don't crow about it, but we we try to get in and talk to people when they are candidates.

And then, of course, again, once people are elected, we talk whoever is sitting in those seats, too, because those are the people who are in the positions of power right now to be able to make some of those changes.

The flip side of it is activating communities.

And this is an area where I'm really excited by some of the things that you'll see coming from community solutions over the course of the next year or the next few years.

Thanks to the work of my colleagues almost Abala, we are going to be launching a neighborhood program, a policy ambassadors program to try and translate this information, this wonky information, and get it into the hands of people in neighborhoods and in these communities that whose lives are impacted every day by some of these issues so that they can help us connect with other neighbors.

Because, you know, being a think tank, we can be wonky, we can be ivory tower.

We sometimes can lose our connection to community.

And it's something that we really need in order to know what the issues are with policy, what are the things that aren't working, and what are the things that we would be able to do to help them work better.

Emily, you talked about how Cleveland consistently is one of the poorest communities in the country, one of the most segregated communities in the country.

But I'm trying to understand what Cleveland has done badly or other cities have done well because redlining is not limited to Cleveland.

The benefit programs and the cliffs that you've discussed are not limited to Cleveland.

Are there specific things that you see that Cleveland has done badly, even relative to other cities in the state that has that are governed by the same state policies, other things that Cleveland has done particularly badly or that cities across the country have done better in light of the problems you've you've mentioned.

Sure.

That's a great question.

You know, one thing we can't change about Cleveland is the weather.

And when we look at the growing cities and the growing metropolitan regions across the country, they tend to be places where the weather's better.

They tend to be warmer.

The thing that Cleveland does have going for it, though, is the Great Lake.

And as as resources become more stretched.

And as climate change starts to to impact communities, you know, that'll be a real asset in the way that we make use of that asset, I think will determine some of our future.

But I would say if Cleveland has made a mistake, it is this we didn't realize what was happening until it was too late.

You know, thinking about the fact that our population over the course of decades cut in half for too long, we hoped those people would all come back.

And so we need to take a clear eyed look and we need to look at the realities and we need to try and undo some of those things and in a lot of ways happen to us.

So there's nothing that Cleveland did wrong to have this happen.

These are these are large national and global forces.

When you think about, you know, what's driving some of that decline and the decline of manufacturing and some of the other things that are happening, but recognizing that we can't grow our way out of this problem in terms of growing our population out of this problem, we need to think about the people who are here now and what are the things that can help them thrive.

And I think that's where Cleveland has missed some opportunities, maybe not done something wrong, but missed some opportunities.

My question has to do with some of the why you were talking about.

It was as we discuss return on investment, I work at Legal Aid.

We cover a region of five counties.

We work really closely with all the other legal aides in Ohio.

And as we work on issues perhaps of policy and problems that are uniquely at a municipal level where change has to happen through city council, city administration, but then the return on investment is at the county or the state level.

So for a long term sustainability, it's hard then to convince city leaders when they're not seeing that in the pocketbook of the city.

So how do we break down those silos and create that collaboration between the levels of government like we've been able to do pretty easily with nonprofits?

Yeah, you're pointing to a problem.

That is something that happens across levels of government, and partly because the elected officials of today aren't going be around in office to be able to take credit for the good things that they activated.

You know, they're planting seeds for a tree that they're not going to see.

That's tough when you have to put your name on a ballot every couple of years or when you you know, you need to ask people to support you and to vote for you.

And so, you know, when I think about legal aid, we had the opportunity to work with Legal Aid of Cleveland a couple of years ago and take a look at the long term impacts and the tail of the work that you all do.

And one of the most impactful findings for me is that even decades later, the legal assistance that people received, they said it changed their lives and they said they saw improvements in areas that were completely unrelated to the legal problem that they had.

And it sort of shows how just one little improvement can can have all these other good things blossom if we're using that that spring metaphor.

But yeah, it's hard.

It's difficult.

Thanks so much, Jeff.

Thank you so much, Emily, for joining us at the City Club today.

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

You can learn more about becoming a guardian of free speech at City Club, Dawg.

Today's forum is part of our local hero series, which we produce in partnership with Citizens and Dominion Energy.

We also like to welcome students joining us from M.C.

Squared STEM High School.

And yes, indeed.

And we'd like to welcome guests at tables hosted by Citizens Bank, the Center for Community Solutions, the George Gund Foundation, the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland and the Literacy Cooperative.

Thank you all so much for being a part of our forum today.

Next week at the City Club.

And actually we'll be back not at the City Club, but at the Happy Dog on Detroit and Detroit.

Sure way.

Taking on education journalism with three local journalists from the Plain, from Cleveland.com Signal, Cleveland and Ideastream Public Media.

That's a free forum open to the public.

It's Wednesday evening.

On Thursday, February 8th, Jeff Sinclair at Ideastream Public Media will lead a conversation with three experts on the role of artificial intelligence in workforce development.

Finally February 9th, we'll hear from Dr. Erica Steed of Metro Health.

She'll talk about her goals and unique perspective on her new role, as in her new role as president and CEO of Metro Health.

That form is sold out.

We encourage you to, if you don't have a ticket, to tune in and join us on 89.7 WKSU or on our live stream.

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That brings us to the end of our program today.

Thank you once again, Emily.

Thank you.

Members and Friends of the City Club.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Our form is adjourned.

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