Ronald B. Richard’s first day of work at the Cleveland Foundation on July 1, 2003, represented a sort of homecoming. As a child, Ronn had enjoyed spending several summers in Cleveland, visiting with his cousins in suburban Beachwood. Deepening his sentimental attachment to the city, his parents had met as teenagers in the 1940s at Bellefaire, an orphanage operated by Cleveland’s oldest Jewish social service agency. While Ronn’s connection to the community was a bonus, it was the unusual breadth of his professional experiences that figured prominently in his appointment as the foundation’s ninth chief executive.
Ronn’s first career was with the U.S. Foreign Service, which he joined in 1983. Because he had spent a year abroad in Japan during college and spoke fair Japanese, he was assigned to Japanese-language school in Yokohama and then to his first posting in Tokyo. He later worked in the American Consulate General in Osaka-Kobe and went on to serve as a desk officer for North Korean, Greek and Turkish affairs, respectively, at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C.
In 1988, Ronn accepted an invitation to join the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company (Panasonic), the 13th largest corporation in the world at that time. During his 13 years with Panasonic, he filled a variety of senior executive management roles. Prior to joining the foundation, Ronn had directed a venture capital fund established by the CIA to ensure that America’s intelligence community had access to the latest information technologies.
The Cleveland Foundation’s board of directors recognized that Ronn was an unorthodox candidate. Although he had knowledge of the nonprofit sector from his service on the board of trustees of Spelman College and on the board of advisors of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, his previous experience with philanthropy was limited to oversight of Panasonic’s corporate donations program and leadership of a United Way campaign. The Cleveland Foundation board valued the fact that Ronn, with his wealth of expertise in global affairs, business management, sales and marketing, R&D and technology transfer, would bring “fresh eyes” to the challenge of helping Greater Clevelanders test new solutions to enduring urban problems. He also had a proven ability to identify and seize new opportunities. (See a full description of Ronald B. Richard’s credentials.)
Entering his 11th year as the foundation’s president and CEO in the summer of 2003, Ronn Richard had indeed enhanced the institution’s reputation as one of the most daringly innovative community foundations in the U.S. field. During his tenure, the Cleveland Foundation has broken new ground in making an all-in commitment to fixing Cleveland’s public education system, with the goal of eliminating all failing schools within a six-year time span … marshaling federal, state and local resources for a visionary plan to build a high-growth industrial cluster centering on wind energy … and devising a poverty-reduction program with the potential to create hundreds, perhaps someday even thousands of wealth-building jobs for city residents by tapping into the procurement streams of major nonprofit organizations.
Under Ronn’s leadership, the Cleveland Foundation has supported international business attraction efforts, aggressive recruitment of highly skilled immigrants and residencies by artists presenting the best of world culture—all in an effort to inspire Cleveland, whose economy has been battered by global competition, to reinvent itself as a truly global city. In its annual reports and other public forums over the past decade, the foundation has also exerted its moral authority more forthrightly than ever before, taking impassioned stands in support of the right of every child to attend an excellent school, environmental protectionism and equality for the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community. “If we can’t be bold,” Ronn asks rhetorically, “who can?”
If Ronn’s years as a business executive have contributed to his understanding that one of a community foundation’s fundamental roles is to provide high-risk social venture capital, his deep commitment to social justice derives from searing childhood experiences. Born in 1956 in Rockville, Maryland, Ronald Richard grew up “below the Mason-Dixon line,” the fourth of five children in a household headed by secular Jewish liberals.
His father, Daniel, a former Marine with a strong entrepreneurial streak that prompted him to start a series of increasingly significant businesses, instilled in his son an iron-rod sense of right and wrong. His mother, Annette, who while rearing five children earned a bachelor’s degree in history by attending school at night, went on to obtain a master’s degree in international relations and teach Advanced Placement history courses at highly regarded high schools. Ronald inherited her love of reading and learning and her intense interest in history and diplomacy.
Moving up the economic ladder to Potomac, Maryland, the Richards wanted their youngest three children to attend an integrated school. Nearby Travilah Elementary had a student body comprised largely of extremely poor children, black and white, many of whom became Ronald’s good friends. Some of his pals were clearly talented kids, denied a shot at success by America’s inequitable system of public education, which far too often consigned poor and minority students to inferior schools. Later Ronald attended a predominately white junior high, where he had to fight back against anti-Semitic bullying and taunting about his attendance at Travilah. He never forgot his early encounters with racial and ethnic discrimination.
His determination to be a force for social progress and harmony also developed precociously. Spying a magazine cover graphically depicting racial violence in the former Belgian Congo when he was five or six, Ronald told his mother that it wasn’t right for people to hurt one another and informed her that he wanted to do something about it. Annette Richard replied that peacemaking was the responsibility of diplomats. “That’s what I want to be,” Ronald replied.
Lacking sophisticated career counseling, he decided the study of history would be excellent preparation. After graduating from high school, he majored in U.S. history at Washington University in St. Louis. A college romance with a Japanese-American woman led him to spend his senior year studying at the Center for Japanese Studies in Nagoya. By now Ronn appreciated that his chosen career path required a master’s degree in international relations, which he earned from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
Ronn passed the extremely competitive foreign service entry exam and a yearlong security clearance check, during which time he worked at the Japan Society in New York. During his Foreign Service introductory course, he met his future wife, Elizabeth (Bess) Rodriguez. They are the parents of two children.
After completing nine months of intensive Japanese-language training, Ronn was assigned to the American embassy in Tokyo as an economic officer. His work to facilitate bilateral trade agreements introduced him to the head of R&D at Matsushita Electric, who many years later persuaded Ronn to leave the diplomatic corps and help the corporation internationalize its top management.
Panasonic paid more than lip service to its motto, “Technology for the Benefit of Mankind.” During his tenures as president of Panasonic’s R&D operations, its home and commercial products sales division, and its mergers and acquisitions arm, Ronn does not recall having many discussions about how to build shareholder value. Strategic planning focused on how to develop or acquire new technologies with the potential to meet emerging societal needs and turn those technologies into products that could be successfully sold in a competitive global marketplace.
Ronn brought well-honed skills at identifying and actualizing beneficial new ideas to his leadership of the Cleveland Foundation. A year before his arrival, the foundation had completed a governance reorganization in which the size of the board of directors was expanded in order to gain a broader base of community perspectives. The board’s role was also restructured. Less board time was to be devoted to reviewing and approving grant requests, and more time was to be spent determining programmatic priorities. Ronn soon perceived that the program staff structure also required revamping if the foundation was to take full advantage of the board’s input.
Ronn collaborated with Robert E. Eckardt, soon to be appointed the foundation’s executive vice president, on the formation of a responsive grantmaking team comprised of the foundation’s program officers and associates. The team would henceforth assume responsibility for evaluating the 3,000-plus grant requests received annually. The reorganization eliminated specific assignments for mid-level program staff so that they could gain experience in multiple fields and replaced quarterly grant awards with rolling approvals. These changes enabled the foundation to carry out its traditional role of supporting community aspirations even more effectively. Meanwhile, the senior program officers were liberated. Now, as Ronn had envisioned, they could focus their time, energies and intellects exclusively on finding creative new solutions to the region’s most intractable problems.
In keeping with their redefined role, the senior program officers were given a new title: program director. Not only were program directors responsible for the design of board-directed strategic initiatives, Ronn expected them to roll up their sleeves and do whatever was necessary to ensure the initiative’s success. Over time, he filled these proactive positions with individuals who had hands-on experience effecting positive change in the priority areas selected by the board: youth development, successful aging, public school improvement, neighborhood and housing revitalization, and economic development.
The Cleveland Foundation had a long record of productive engagement with these pressing issues. In harnessing the undivided attention of senior staff with demonstrable skills as program managers and change-agents, the Richard administration added new muscle to the foundation’s ability to formulate and implement fresh approaches to enduring challenges. Ronn’s receptivity to innovative or novel ideas and high degree of comfort with calculated risk taking empowered the program directors to think big and aim high.
Drawing on his background in international relations and the foundation’s clout as an anchor institution, Ronn personally rallied the government, nonprofit and for-profit leaders whose active involvement was essential to an initiative’s success. He often remained engaged in important new undertakings as a volunteer chairperson. Upon Ronn’s recommendation, the foundation’s board proved willing to step up significantly the provision of start-up and sustaining funds. Once considered historic, multimillion-dollar grants in support of board-directed initiatives or critical demonstration projects became common, and the traditional three- to five-year time frame for special initiatives was extended as long as progress warranted.
With foundation-inspired public-private partnerships achieving measurable progress on a number of important fronts—ranging from the creation of high-performing schools to the acceleration of high-potential business start-ups—Ronn Richard’s leadership and judgment began to attract local and national recognition. Ohio governor Ted Strickland tapped Ronn to oversee the expenditure of federal stimulus funds as the state’s infrastructure czar, a volunteer position he held from January 2009 to November 2010. Earlier in 2010, the bimonthly Nonprofit Times, one of the sector’s leading magazines, included Ronn in its annual list of America’s most influential nonprofit executives.