Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C), Ohio’s first publicly supported two-year college offering associate degrees in the liberal arts and sciences as well as vocational training, has opened the doors of opportunity for more than 900,000 students since its establishment in 1963. The legislation that enabled the creation of state community colleges neglected to provide funding for predevelopment. The Cleveland Foundation and its affiliated Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation (GCAF) helped Tri-C’s founders bridge this otherwise impassable funding gap by providing grants for planning purposes.

The grants represented acts of courageous leadership, given that the new school had been viewed as competition by Cleveland’s private colleges and universities. After much lobbying by GCAF’s program staff, GCAF chairman Kent Smith, a Case Institute of Technology loyalist, had been convinced of the need to open up the possibility of advanced technical and vocational education for Cleveland’s working-class and minority students. Smith convened a meeting of his peers in the business world at which he solicited contributions to the college so fiercely, Ohio’s then governor, James A. Rhodes, would be prompted to call Smith a “one-man gang” on Tri-C’s behalf.

The pent-up desire for high-quality, low-cost higher education was so intense that the line of Clevelanders who wished to enroll in Tri-C stretched around the block on the first day applications were accepted. From that moment on, Cuyahoga Community College has been an indispensable part of the region’s workforce development infrastructure.