By the 1980s, Cleveland boasted a wealth of neighborhood development organizations (NDOs), but few of them had the staff or technical skills to rehab more than a handful of housing units per year, and most could only dream about tackling a commercial redevelopment project. Wishing to accelerate the notoriously slow process of neighborhood revitalization, local funders seized on the opportunity to include Cleveland in a national demonstration project undertaken by the Ford Foundation to increase the productivity of NDOs in selected test cities. With the Cleveland Foundation, the George Gund Foundation, the Standard Oil Company and the City of Cleveland joining forces to provide the required 2-to-1 match of Ford’s $300,000 grant, the $1 million Cleveland Neighborhood Partnership Program (CNPP) was launched here in late 1985.
By early 1987, CNPP had selected six NDOs from across the city through a competitive application process to receive two annual grants averaging $85,000 per year—the means that NDOs had long needed to plan and execute high-impact projects. With the six grantees expected to stimulate $13 million in new development, the Cleveland Foundation recognized the importance of finding a permanent way to coordinate public and private resources in order to turbocharge neighborhood redevelopment.
The foundation reconvened corporate, neighborhood and philanthropic leaders to discuss this issue, and these discussions led to the creation of Neighborhood Progress, Inc., an umbrella coordinating and planning organization that has (with the foundation’s steadfast support) provided Cleveland’s community development organizations with operating monies, technical assistance and working capital needed to build new homes, rehab commercial spaces and improve neighborhood amenities.
Established in 1988 with the foundation’s contribution of $500,000 to its first three years of operation, Neighborhood Progress, Inc. (recently renamed Cleveland Neighborhood Progress) has since mobilized $26 million from public and private sources to support community development organizations (CDOs) that have attracted residents, jobs and new retail, cultural and recreational amenities to the Buckeye-Woodland, Detroit Shoreway, Fairfax, Glenville, Hough, Ohio City, Slavic Village and Tremont neighborhoods (among others). Over the past 20 years, Cleveland’s CDOs have produced nearly 7,500 units of new and rehabilitated housing and developed 1.7 million square feet of new and rehabilitated commercial space.
In a 2003 evaluation commissioned by the Cleveland and Gund Foundations, national community development expert Tony Proscio praised Neighborhood Progress’s work, which demonstrates how sustained investment can pay real dividends for residents, their neighborhoods and the city as a whole. “Nowhere else in the United States,” Proscio stated, “is there a more extensive, carefully arranged, centrally coordinated and widely supported system of neighborhood investment than in Cleveland.”
Proscio’s observation that Cleveland’s CDOs needed to consolidate their disparate gains into a larger, more coherent redevelopment effort that could help to restore market forces in their neighborhoods led to a new Neighborhood Progress initiative begun in 2004 with the support of nearly $4 million in grants and program-related investments from the Cleveland Foundation. These monies, which enabled six CDOs chosen through a competitive application process to undertake large-scale redevelopments, have since leveraged more than $100 million in public and private investments.