Brewed Fresh Daily

From the Lincoln Land Institute via Otis White:

One of the longest standing debates in community economic development is between “place-based” and “peoplebased” approaches to combating poverty, housing affordability, chronic unemployment, and community decline. Should help go to distressed places or distressed people?

People or Place?

Finally. A PD editorial I can get behind:

Ohio should find new, creative ways to funnel more money to public transit. Adding a few dollars to vehicle registration fees or levying a small tax on tire purchases and directing that to public transit have helped elsewhere.

Commuters, especially on Park-and-Ride routes, which now cost just 25 cents more than others, should prepare to pay more. Round trip, these routes cost just $4 a day. A dollar more would still be a bargain for commuters who would otherwise pay for gas, downtown parking and wear and tear on their cars.

Public transit supports economic development and creates and sustains jobs. The RTA can’t sacrifice any more without sacrificing that role.

They should add more then a few dollars…

Raising fares is better than cutting RTA service – Post and Riposte with The Plain Dealer – Cleveland.com

Urban farmers growing profit in Cleveland

NE Ohio reaps Third Frontier grants

NEOUCOM, KSU get bioterrorism grant

YSU endorsed to get $2.1 million for new center

Innovation is about leveraging assets to seize adjacent opportunities. The NYT carries a story of innovation in milk containers, launched by a company in North Canton. As more NEO companies follow this path, regional employment and incomes will grow.

Here’s a video briefing. You can read more on the story here.

Educational attainment is the single most important driver of regional economic development.

So, it’s no surprise that leading communities are starting to explore how to boost educational opportunities, as an economic development strategy. Last week, two important events took place. Both involve new types of scholarship programs.

PromiseNet 2008

Since its launch a couple of years ago, the Kalamazoo Promise has focused civic leaders on new approaches to create incentives for education. The initiative provides college scholarships to children in the Kalamazoo City Schools.

Watch a video briefing of the Kalamazoo Promise.

Educational incentives — directed toward people — have a direct impact on economic outcomes (higher incomes over a lifetime). Economic incentives directed toward companies generally do not work and are largely a waste of money.

PromiseNet 2008 brought together representatives from 75 communities across the country to explore college scholarships for city school children. The event marks the beginning of a national movement toward community scholarships. Read more: Kalamazoo PromiseNet conference to share programs’ expertise.

Early chlid education scholarships

In another event last week, I attended a conference at the Federal Reserve in Minneapolis for the Big Ten schools and the University of Chicago. We focused on the importance of education (human capital, as the economists would have it) to economic outcomes in the Great Lakes. Our major research universities are exploring new avenues of collaboration.

At lunch yesterday, Art Rolnick, an economist with the FRB in Minneapolis, briefed us on a new scholarship pilot that foucses on early child care. The scholarship program is remarkably simple: it awards parents of young children with a scholarship for early education.

This focus on early education as an economic development strategy has a strong foundation of evidence to support it. Read more. The prestigious Committee for Economic Development in Washington DC strongly supports this strategy.

The focus on early childhood development is closely connected to new learning in brain development. Here’s an excellent overview by Joan Stiles, a cognitive scientist at UCSD.

The situation in Cuyahoga County

The irony, of course, in Cuyahoga County is that the County has a leading edge early child care program (Invest in Children), but it is underfunded, needs to be expanded, and operates without significant support from the business community. Cleveland’s business leadership does not yet see investments in early child education as a core economic development strategy.

Now here’s the really sad part: Cleveland’s civic leadership is prepared to invest $400 million in public funds for a convention center — a strategy that does not work to create higher incomes. (Worse still, operating costs will drain County resources for decades. Convention centers compete in a very soft market with utilization rates under 20%.)

Cuyahoga County would be far better off if the County Commission took those public funds and created an endowment to support new scholarship programs for the county’s low income parents and children.

My guess: Few of the 20,000 people participating in Voices and Choices mentioned a convention center in Cleveland as a priority concern. They, instead, I think, talked a lot about education.

People are often frustrated about what to do with K-12 school systems that do not work very well.

The solution, of course, is to innovate.

One important innovation in high schools is career academies. Ft. Wayne is one city that has committed itself to this strategy, and it will pay off in the long run, as employers continue to look for talent. 

In Washington yesterday, the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation released an important study on the impact of career academies. The report represents the first rigorous evaluation of career academies. The NYT summarizes the report here.

After evaluating graduates from nine career academies, the authors found that eight years after graduation, the career academy graduates had significantly higher employment and earnings than a control group.

The report also dispels one of the more dangerous myths we share today: that career and technical education in high school limits post secondary options.

To quote from the summary (in language that is a bit stilted, but you’ll get the idea):

The findings demonstrate the feasibility of improving labor market preparation and successful school-to-work transitions without compromising academic goals and preparation for college. Investments in career-related experiences during high school can produce substantial and sustained improvements in the labor market prospects and transitions to adulthood of youth. In fact, Career Academies are one of the few youth-focused interventions that have been found to improve the labor market prospects of young men.

There are about 2,500 career academies across the U.S.

You can can read more about the report here.

You can download a copy of the report here.

Connect with the Career Academy Support Network at UC Berkeley and the National Career Academy Coalition to learn more.

Another innovation: New Tech High. We are working in Indiana to become a national center for this whole school reform model. New Tech High emphasizes project-based learning, and it is another evidence-based model of school reform that works. We should have an announcement on this initiative September.

Four or five years ago, when I was at Case, Holly Harlan suggested REI help develop some promising opportunities for NEO: regional food systems and regional energy systems. She also started exploring the idea of using the Cuyahoga Valley as a platform to develop integrated systems of clean tech (which she referred to as “regeneration strategies”).

Well, regional food systems are taking off across the country. Here’s an example from Iowa.

Regional energy systems are starting to do the same, as energy supplies develop around more distributed, renewable sources. Example: The growth of wind power. (Read the Cuyahoga wind power here.)

Now I read that Singapore has launched a major clean tech initiative that includes developing a park that will be “a sizeable parcel of land dedicated to creating a clean tech community over the next two decades…A set of ’smart regulations’ governing the distribution of energy, waste and water would also be experimented with at the park….The park will put notions of “industrial ecology” into practice, where one company’s waste stream becomes another company’s input…”

As one member of the Singapore International Advisory Panel on Clean Energy noted: ““There are lots of places in the world that want to be hubs or clusters of clean tech. The race is on.”
Read more: Clean tech park to be set up here, to test such an ecosystem.

You can read more about the Advisory panel’s recommendations here. You can get more quotes from the Advisory Panel here.

(If you do not think this is significant, think again. The Xinhua news agency in China picked up the story. Read more.)

This strategy is exactly what Holly was working on with the Rocky Mountain Institute in the Cuyahoga Valley. (BTW, RMI is working on new energy systems as part of the Indiana Energy Systems Network.)

You can download the Cuyahoga Valley report here.

If you want to be on the leading edge of regional economic development (not just here in NEO), E4S is the place to be.

In my travels across the U.S., I’ve not seen any organization quite like it. My advice to funders: Place some significant bets on E4S.

From John Carey, chair of the Senate Finance and Financial Institutions Committee: “In addition, to address concerns from some local and state officials about inefficiency in Cuyahoga County government, the conference committee adopted an amendment to establish a nine-member commission charged with developing recommendations for how the county can better organize its government structure to improve effectiveness and reduce waste. The group’s findings, which would be put before the county’s voters for approval, are due to the General Assembly by November.”

Important legislation moves ahead

From Norm Roulet:

The question I want to explore is how an East Cleveland full of farms and farmers would differ from today, in East Cleveland and anywhere else in the world. Through urban farming, the most destroyed, demolished, abandoned neighborhoods would become the most green, healthy and prosperous, and would generate significant property and income taxes for the city. Consider if 100 “lots” in East Cleveland that are currently in their landbank, and 100 other city, county and other government owned lots, and 100 lots to be cleared through foreclosures, and 200 home lots of current East Cleveland residents (like my lot), are optimized for farming and placed in the hands of trained urban farmers. If all farmers are required to live in East Cleveland, 500 lots=500 tax-paying local farmers, where there are now none… creating $15,000,000 per year in new taxable income for 500 households in East Cleveland… making prosperous 5% of the households of East Cleveland. And, East Cleveland will be filled with fresh local food and people who know how to produce and appreciate that for themselves and their community, which is as valuable a life skill as I may imagine…

NEO Excellence Roundtable: Urban Farming with Maurice Small | REALNEO for all

Prosperity demands rapid adaptation or, if you prefer, resilience. Here’s an article out of Akron about the adaptation of manufacturing firms to new opportunities in health care markets. The trend revealed itself recently in a forum supported by Bio-E and MAGNET. Read more: Healthy Innovation.
As Doug Hall, former P&G exec and founder of Eureka Ranch notes, innovation opportunities can emerge anywhere. The process, however, requires discipline, and Doug has been introducing this discipline to smaller manufacturers nationwide though the same nationwide network in which MAGNET participates.
Here’s an example of an opportunity: Replacing vinyl shower curtains with less toxic materials. Folks in Massachusetts are looking at that one: “New shower curtain smell’ dangerous to health, environment“.
The opportunities will multiply as our universities and businesses learn to collaborate. Read this opinion piece out of Seattle: Educating a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs