A Foundation of Growth – The Dramatic Work of Steven A. Minter and the Cleveland Foundation

Strength In Cleveland) initiative, a five-year, $11 million program to provide mid-size local performing arts groups with operating support and technical assistance to strengthen their business administration, marketing practices and fund-raising prowess.

If taking action required more than analysis and perspective, if it demanded courage or moral fiber, under Minter, The Cleveland Foundation was often able to provide it. In the earliest days of his tenure, Minter brushed aside concern with public appearances and supported action to address AIDS, a disease many at the time dismissed as affecting only drug addicts and gays. Discovering that the city health department was too shorthanded to respond to the early signs of this epidemic, TCF organized a public awareness campaign (the first between New York and L.A.) to give the Cleveland public the facts about AIDS. The Foundation subsequently partnered with the Ford Foundation of New York and Cleveland’s George Gund Foundation to give community health providers the resources needed to plan a coordinated response.

In the late 1980s, a different sort of malaise threat­ ened Cleveland. If trends played out unabated, it appeared that poverty might overtake three-quarters of the city’s residents by the year 2000. Confronted with this evidence, Minter chose not to avert his eyes and hope for the best. Instead, he sized up the magnitude of the problem and, under the Foundation’s auspices and with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, convened a 30-member Commission on Persistent Poverty to plan a frontal assault. As a result, the Cleveland Community Building Initiative (CCBI) was launched in 1993 to coordinate existing social services in four demonstration “ villages” in order to address more comprehensively the interrelated causes of privation.

Though CCBI’s goal was too ambitious to be easily executed, Minter stood by his conviction that foundations should take the long-term view. Convinced that an interdisciplinary approach was “ the horse to ride” (as Senior Program Officer for Social Services Goldie Alvis termed it), TCF was patiently supporting a second generation of CCBI leadership as of 2003.

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