Economic Development

Cleveland LED manufacture-purchase
Mayor Frank Jackson has proposed a plan under which the City would have an exclusive contract with a light emitting diode (LED) manufacturer, potentially an agreement worth millions to a private company.  New streetlights, traffic lights, and building lighting would be provided by the company, which would be required to manufacture the LEDs in Cleveland providing up to 350 jobs and tax income.  This project could also provide millions in savings to Cleveland in lighting electric costs.

EfficientGovNow: Fund for Our Economic Future (The Future Fund)
http://www.futurefundneo.org/
The Fund has created programs like EfficientGovNow in which applicants encourage regional voters to vote for projects which have been submitted for funding.   In the most recent round, voters cast 17,400 votes.  To qualify for the money, each project had to involve at least two governmental partners and must produce a cost savings. Backers also had to show they could implement their programs and that their efforts could be copied by others..  This is the second round of awards from EfficientGovNow..  The Future Fund wanted to create something that would encourage local government collaboration. The program is supported by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a Miami-based foundation created by the Knight brothers who initially owned the Akron Beacon Journal.

Entrepreneurs for Sustainability (E4S)
http://www.e4s.org/content/about_us.asp
Northeast Ohio green-business group founded in 2000 for business people to come together to learn, share their knowledge, and turn it into action inside their companies.

Evergreen Cooperatives
http://www.evergreencoop.com/
he Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland are pioneering innovative models of job creation, wealth building, and sustainability.  Evergreen’s employee-owned, for-profit companies are based locally and hire locally. Meaningful green jobs are created, and workers earn a living wage and build equity in their firms as owners of the business. The first Evergreen Cooperative businesses – Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, Ohio Cooperative Solar, and Green City Growers Cooperative – are launching in 2009–2010.  Evergreen is a partnership between the residents of six of our city’s neighborhoods and some of Cleveland’s most important “anchor institutions” – the Cleveland Foundation, the City of Cleveland, Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, and many others.

NEOTEC
http://www.neotec.org/
The Northeast Ohio Trade and Economic Consortium is working to improve the region’s logistics infrastructure.  In 1995, six Northeast Ohio Counties came together, recognizing that certain economic issues can only be addressed as a region where competing interests are set aside.  These counties—Columbiana, Mahoning, Portage, Stark, Summit and Trumbull—entered into a agreement in 1996 which created the Northeast Ohio Joint Office of Economic Development (JOED).  To carry out the JOED’s economic development initiatives, the Northeast Ohio Trade & Economic Consortium (NEOTEC) was established.

Oberlin College Sustainability Portfolio
http://www.oberlin.edu/sustainability/portfolio/portfolio.html
http://new.oberlin.edu/home/news-media/press/detail.dot?id=1587518
Oberlin College has been awarded the highest grade given to any college or university, an A-, on the Sustainable Endowments Institute’s College Sustainability Report Card 2010. For the second consecutive year Oberlin has earned top honors on the Report Card.  Oberlin College is the only school in Ohio to achieve the report card’s top grade. In addition to Oberlin, other schools with top marks include Stanford University, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania,  Oberlin received top marks in a host of categories, including administration, climate change and energy, food and recycling, green building, student involvement, transportation, investment priorities, and shareholder engagement.

Offshore Wind in Lake Erie
http://www.nortechenergy.org/projects/offshore-wind-energy/
Northeast Ohio can claim a position of leadership in the emerging advanced energy industry, spurring the creation of thousands of jobs while also improving our local energy future.  Civic leaders in Northeast Ohio (Cuyahoga County, Lorain County, the City of Cleveland, the Cleveland Foundation, NorTech) formed the Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation (LEEDCo) to pursue the development of a regional offshore wind sector to support the emergence of a market for offshore wind projects in Lake Erie over the coming decade.  With a goal of 1000 megawatts (MW) installed by 2020, LEEDCo has partnered with General Electric and is partnering with a development team to install an initial project by the end of 2012.  LEEDCo’s efforts are important because they work to meet the NEO area’s energy needs on a sustainable basis, but also because they build a regional economic development effort for the manufacture, deployment and maintenance of offshore wind turbines.

Team NEO
http://www.clevelandplusbusiness.com/
Team NEO serves companies and site consultants by acting as the single point of entry into the 16-county Cleveland Plus region, and works with counties and communities to ensure seamless attraction into Northeast Ohio.  "Team NEO employs 15 professional staff members and operates with a $3 million annual budget. Based on historical results, Team NEO’s regional average annual economic impact is nearly $70 million, a 20:1 ROI on each dollar invested." 

WorkAdvance: Fund for Our Economic Future (The Future Fund)
http://www.futurefundneo.org/
Job-training efforts around Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown will get a $3.6 million boost from both the federal government and New York donors to test the success of a New York City pilot program.  It also will encourage social-service providers and existing job-training programs to collaborate and test their own ideas, with the Fund for Our Economic Future administering the grant.  Work Advance focuses on aligning training with growing job sectors, providing support so that trainees finish the programs and can travel to job sites, offering different paths to finding jobs and testing effects of financial counseling.

If you know of an initiative that should be listed on this page, please download the NEO Initiative Submission Form.doc located at the bottom of "Regional Initiatives" page.