Making Change: Main Blog

What is Making Change?

Making Change represents a new approach to economic development in Northeast Ohio. We are building an "open source" model for economic development that combines both public participation and leadership direction.

We need to develop this appproach because the old "top down" formulas no longer work very well.

Figuring out how to build a new, more collaborative approach to economic transformation is not easy, but we have a number of civic entrepreneurs engaged in the design process. We are building "communities of practice" around specific initiatives: creating a more dynamic "creative industries" cluster, for example.

We are conducting meetings and forums to engage different communities around specific actions that we can take to accelerate economic transforamtion in our region.

We are designing open source, collaborative tools, so that people can work on civic projects between meetings and get stuff done.

We are publishing weblogs, so that people can keep up to date in their particular area of interest. (You can see a current list of weblogs in the left margin.)

And we are defining important "pilot projects" that can lead our regional economic transformation.

What's the region?

Good question.

People define the Northeast Ohio region depending on where they sit. For example, demographers tend to focus their attention on metropolitan areas and communiting patterns. Metropolitan planners -- the people who plan infrastructure projects -- focus on groups of counties. (For example, Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency is the Metropolitan Planning Organization for Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain and Medina counties.)

There's another twist. People are using the term "regionalism" in different ways. For example, in Cuyahoga county, regionalism to many people means reforming county governance. This issue entails government reforms, such as those taken in Louisville, Indianapolis or Nashville.

From an economic development perspective, we need to think in global terms. We should consider Northeast Ohio as just that: the northeast quadrant of Ohio. That means 19 counties stretching from Sandusky to Mansfield to the Pennsylvania state line.

NEO-19 is a region of 4.3 million people. The region acounts for 40% of the state's population. It's bigger than the state of Kentucky or the economy of Finland. In short, we are big enough to be a global player.

Equally important, the citizens of NEO-19 understand the importance of investing in our economic transformation. Last fall, NEO-19 voters supported the Third Frontier initiative, Issue 1, by 55% to 45%.