When 76-year-old Fairfax resident Walter Stanley attends a community meeting with a packed room, he sits close to the presenters so he doesn’t miss a thing. And at a recent Cleveland Municipal School District (CMSD) meeting this spring, there was plenty to take in as residents and stakeholders provided input on the Cleveland Board of Education’s budgetary decisions concerning the fate of Fairfax’s Bolton Elementary School.
 

Third Space co-founder Evelyn Burnett says the point of the workshops is simple: to build awareness around racial equity and inequity. More than 3,000 people from 700 organizations have attended the trainings, which are now offered monthly.

From a dynamic duo bringing back Glenville to a Sudanese designer working on a welcome center for Irishtown Bend, these artists are changing the city's creative landscape.

For the last two decades, Cleveland’s Fairfax neighborhood has been master planning for a renaissance—and now its golden age is in sight. With an ideal location on the $331 million Opportunity Corridor and an array of developments and initiatives coming to fruition, the area is preparing to round the bend on a four-pronged Strategic Investment Plan that began in 2008.

Since its opening on July 1, the Rock Hall's new Garage exhibit has attracted MLB all-stars like Mike Trout and Francisco Lindor, along with members of Blue Oyster Cult and the Alice Cooper Band. But the interactive Garage exhibit isn’t just for celebrities. It’s for everyone—and that’s kind of the point.

Samuel Paredes was 16 years old when he secretly applied for a U.S. visa. His parents had just gotten divorced, and he was still living in Ipiales, a city of 160,000 on the southern border of Colombia. Shortly after the death of his grandmother, he expressed to his mother and father his desire to study cybersecurity—born from witnessing political upheaval—at an American college.

The women come from a variety of backgrounds. Some work in factories or grocery chains, others as school lunch ladies, making $8 to $9 an hour. Others are Hurricane Maria refugees who work for Burlington, some for U.S. Cotton, supporting families as they tilt on the poverty line.

All have one thing in common: the dream to one day be registered nurses.

You likely know the unelected, unsung leaders in your community. They’re the ones volunteering at local events, spreading the word in online neighborhood groups, leading grassroots initiatives, and giving voice to residents who might not otherwise have one. But what you—and they—might not know is that there’s a free program dedicated to helping them harness their superpowers and make even more of an impact.

It’s 20 minutes before showtime, in a small banquet room at the Julia de Burgos Cultural Center, and Yasin Cuevas is glowingly ecstatic. For one, her first-ever Miss Latina Image fashion show—expanded from “Miss Puerto Rican Image” of years past—has attracted a packed house, more than any other program in the past few years. It’s also a signal of much more: a newer, more diverse Clark-Fulton community, one more gung-ho on the self-education of its youth, as La Villa Hispana grows gradually into the fore.

For more than 50 years, the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes has stood as both an environmental haven and educational resource on 20 acres that were once proposed as highways to connect Cleveland’s eastern suburbs to downtown. Now, the Nature Center is about to undergo a $2.5 capital improvement project to renovate the All People’s Trail (APT)—built in 1983 and perhaps the focal point of the preserve.

The "People's University" will enter its next era with an ambitious, library-wide revitalization project and a yearlong CPL150 celebration, along with the announcement that it will now be fine-free.

Anyone who has read the works of Elie Weisel or Anne Frank knows that the most powerful way to learn about the horrors of the Holocaust is to hear about it firsthand from a survivor. Visitors to the Illinois Holocaust Museum get an unprecedented chance to do just that, thanks to the work of Cleveland-based company EventWorks 4D.

With 20 cities in the running, Cleveland’s chances of becoming the next Say Yes to Education chapter—and only the fourth in the country to receive the distinction—were just a paltry five percent. Yet according to Say Yes founder George Weiss, it was no contest.