WEEK OF MARCH 18, 2019
Levin News, produced by the Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs,
is designed to share information on programs and activities, grants, publications, and other news of interest about Levin College faculty, staff, students, and alumni.
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FACULTY, STAFF, AND STUDENT NEWS
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>>Latest Focus on Facts Article Examines Irish Heritage on St. Patrick's Day
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 A new Focus on Facts, A Bit of Craic ("having some fun") and a Few Facts About the Irish on Saint Patrick's Day, authored by Dr. Mark J. Salling, Senior Fellow and Research Associate of the Levin College, discusses the history of the holiday while presenting findings on Irish heritage in the US. The article gives a nod to the playful notion that on St. Patrick's Day, everyone is Irish. And according to the data, in one sense, the US is more Irish than Ireland, "having an estimated 32.5 million persons who reported some Irish ancestry in 2017, compared to only 6.7 million in Ireland itself." |
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In 2017, there were an estimated 1.5 million persons in Ohio reporting some Irish ancestry, with a concentration of Irish population in Ohio's largest cities in particular. Columbus leads with 88,480, followed by Cleveland (34,011), Toledo (30,375), Cincinnati (28,977, Akron (21,358), and Dayton (12,735). Dr. Salling concludes the article noting, "with an estimated 50 percent of its population claiming some Irish ancestry, the city of Kettering can probably claim to have seen the most leprechauns."
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>>Levin Staff Member Makes Historic Preservation a Priority in her Neighborhood
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 Suzanne Sharpe, Administrative Operations Manager in the Department of Urban Studies, is making efforts to halt the demolition of a historic house in Medina that dates back to the 1830s. Sharpe, who is also part of the Bankers Row Historic Neighborhood Association, says the house is "one of the oldest pioneer homes in Medina city. The value of this house was $250 in 1840."
A book written by Gloria Brown, Medina: Images of America, notes the house was once occupied by Sophia Huntington Parker. In her will, she stipulated that the 86-acre farm should go to any group that would build a home for aged women. In the early 1900s, a portion of the property became the Pythian Sisters Home, but that building was torn down to make way for senior citizens apartments in 2017.
Sharpe said she wants to explore options to preserve the remaining historic farmhouse. "Moving the house could be a possibility. If you think about it, we could move the house to a different location in the park. Why couldn't we think of using it for the community?" she asked.
The earliest the house could be torn down would be 2020. Both the City of Medina and the Medina School District are willing to give Sharpe more time to look for ways to save the house, and she intends to keep searching for a solution.
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>>Levin Alum Organizes Civic Leadership to Spur Pedestrian Trail Developments in Cleveland
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Levin alum Conor Coakley (MSUS '06), who is also First Vice President of Advisory & Transaction Services at CBRE, Inc. and an avid runner, has made it his mission to help create a formal, high quality recreational loop trail over the Cuyahoga River, connecting downtown and Ohio City via the Detroit-Superior and the Lorain-Carnegie bridges. While the trail is envisioned to help boost tourism and make the city a greener, healthier, more beautiful, equitable and economically vibrant place to live, the conditions for a trail along the roads in question are currently not ideal for pedestrians.
To come up with a solution, Coakley recruited alumni of Leadership Cleveland, a nonprofit civic empowerment organization that connects and educates leaders in business and the nonprofit sector about community issues. The Leadership Cleveland group tapped volunteer labor from contractors and architects and created a $590,000 bare-bones proposal for improvements along the worst parts of the loop. Those improvements could include using paint and markers or barriers to turn the outermost lane on Huron and Ontario into space for runners and cyclists. A $1 million alternative would provide a somewhat higher level of finish.
Coakley reasons that if a relatively cheap version of the loop could be created sooner, rather than later, it could attract many more users and build public support for bringing the formal trail to fruition.
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>>Levin Alum Tackles Waste Management Challenges with Innovative Solutions
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Stephen Love (MPA'11), Levin alum and Program Officer at the Cleveland Foundation, was featured in a recent Freshwater Cleveland article, Cleveland has a litter problem. Can plogging be the solution? Plogging, which is an idea that originated in Sweden in 2016, is the act of picking up trash while jogging. Stephen Love and his wife Allison Lukacsy-Love want to bring plogging to their Collinwood neighborhood-and eventually all of Cleveland. To that end, they've started Cleveland Plogs, a new monthly jogging meetup and street cleanup. To further their waste management innovations, they've also convened a group of volunteers to build a decorative rolling trashcan with a basketball hoop attached, which they believe will help raise awareness of their trash collection efforts.
"We want to seed this idea across the city," says Love. "Whether you're on your own or part of a group of folks that do a weekly run, you can work this into your routine. Plogging becomes an ethos, a culture shift-where [picking up trash] is just something you do when you run."
This is not Love's first take on mobilizing the community around cleanup efforts, as he also started the Euclid Beach Adopt-a-Beach campaign, a program affiliated with the Alliance for the Great Lakes. "Back when the state park managed the park, there was a significant need in terms of cleanup and maintenance, but when the Metroparks took over, the narrative and need shifted a bit," says Love. "It became apparent that the volunteer impact could be even greater if we took that work into the streets, where trash is accumulating. Plus, we're still essentially doing beach cleanups-because we're cutting off the trash before it gets into our waterways."
Along with the first Cleveland Plogs meetup, the Loves are helping to spearhead the third annual Big Clean event on April 6-which pits residents of Euclid and Collinwood against each other in an effort to see which community can collect the most trash. Last year, more than 200 people participated to pick up over 300 bags of trash.
Looking ahead, Love hopes that the practice of finding creative ways to combat litter will spread across various Cleveland neighborhoods. "There are so many communities in the city-imagine if each one of them wanted to take this idea on," says Love, adding that they're working on enlisting everyone from Collinwood school track teams to senior walking groups. "We're trying to bring as many audiences as possible into the cleanup space."
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>>Center for Public and Nonprofit Management Receives National Certified Public Manager® Designation for the State of Ohio
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As of 2019, the Levin College now houses the official Certified Public Manager (CPM) program in the state of Ohio. The CPM program is a comprehensive and nationally certified development program for state and local government leaders.
This program supports Levin's longstanding commitment to upholding ethics, integrity, lawfulness, professionalism, transparency, accountability, leadership, and other public service values, as well as the College's desire to foster the next generation of leaders.
Levin's Center for Public and Nonprofit Management has offered a wide range of custom-designed credit and non-credit courses for over twenty-five years. The Center's dedication to providing top-notch public management training throughout the state of Ohio has merited the partnership and support from city and county executives, creating a sustainable and highly recognized training platform.
To receive the CPM credential, participants must enroll in and successfully complete the Public Management Academy (PMA) and Leadership Academy. The Center's academies not only develop leadership and management skills, but also provide the necessary tools to affect positive organizational change.
Online enrollment for the Public Management Academy is now open, and the 2019-2020 PMA program kicks off on May 15, 2019.
Enrollment for the next Leadership Academy cohort will open this summer, and the program will launch in October.
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>> Interested in making maps with ArcGIS software? We'd like to know your opinion about future ArcGIS workshops. Please complete this survey by Friday, March 22, 2019.
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>>Refugee Services Collaborative Discusses Refugee Experience and Resettlement Process
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On February 21, the Refugee Services Collaborative joined the Levin College for a Dean's Forum on the topic of refugees and resettlement. Lydia Baguma and Khoon Thomas Kate, two Cleveland residents, shared their compelling and personal stories about their experience as refugees, and two documentaries, Alida and The Interpreter, from the RSC's series, "Refugees as Your Neighbor" were aired. Attendees also participated in a "Refugee 101", a session that outlined the path to resettlement, the resettlement process, and the refugee experience. The forum concluded with a panel in which participants discussed present-day challenges in the context of the current political climate.
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>>Ingenuity Cleveland Shares Innovations on Building Community Through the Arts
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On March 18, Hannah R. Maier, Marketing & Development Manager, and Emily Appelbaum, Artistic Director, shared how Ingenuity Cleveland is working not only to create arts experiences for the people of Cleveland to see and participate in, but also to create a community and an economic hub that allows artists and creatives to work collaboratively and go beyond what they could achieve alone.
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UPCOMING EVENTS SPOTLIGHT
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>>Tuesday 4/2 @ 9am: Smart Water Management: Workforce, Technology, and Economic Development
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Our next Levin Morning Briefing shares how public utilities for water and wastewater face two major trends: retirement of managers from the "baby boomer" generation and the need to bring in workers and train mid-level managers; and "smart" technology innovation that is changing data and operations framework for water utilities. At the same time, Northeast Ohio is home to a growing water technology sector; combined with our location on the Great Lakes, this can stimulate new economic value and jobs.
What knowledge and skills will next generation water and wastewater managers need in the future to manage "smart" water systems in a "smart" way? What are the water cluster jobs of the future? How can the presence of a robust water cluster in the region add value to water utilities? Our panel of regional water and wastewater, workforce, and economic development experts will provide their views and discuss the strategies they are using to answer these questions and transition into the next generation of best practices and management.
Levin Morning Briefings are open to the public and free to attend. Coffee and pastries are provided.
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>>Wednesday 4/10 @ 4pm: Deliberative Democracy & Campus Free Speech
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Our next Levin College Dean's Forum invites CSU Presidents Emeriti Dr. Ronald M. Berkman and Dr. Michael Schwartz, as well as Susan J. Becker, Professor of Law Emerita, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and General Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, for an engaging discussion about free speech on college campuses. Moderators include Dr. Roland V. Anglin, Dean and Professor at the Levin College, and Dr. William M. Bowen, Professor at the Levin College.
Freedom of speech is a fundamental American freedom granted to citizens by the First Amendment to the US Constitution - and it is a human right. There is moreover no place that this right should be more valued and protected than on America's college and university campuses.
The core purposes of a university campus include creating, preserving, transmitting, and finding new applications for knowledge across the spectrum of disciplines and professions. These purposes cannot be fulfilled without a culture of intense inquiry and informed argument. A campus cannot sustain its intellectual vitality if its students or faculty members fear retribution for expressing views that might be unpopular with the public at large or disfavored by university administrators. Nor can a college or university fulfill its purpose and sustain its vitality if it represses vigorous dissent of such views. To participate in campus life is thus to accept the responsibility to freely express, listen to, and when need be, to challenge any part of the fullest possible range of ideas and thinkable thoughts. Thus, a strong and vibrant college or university campus embodies and epitomizes the very essence of the ideal of deliberative democracy - an ideal which cannot be realized without a full measure of free speech.
Yet over the past several years multiple events on university campuses, and especially political speakers and demonstrators have put freedom of speech under continuous threat. On some of them, the right of free speech has been sidelined in favor of ideological correctness and comfort, a desire to avoid controversy, or simply political expediency. Speech codes have been promulgated, dictating what may or may not be said, along with "free speech zones" that relegate free speech to tiny, delimited areas of campus. Administrative efforts to repress free speech through punishment have become all too common today on American college and university campuses. This turn away from free speech has raised widespread concern about the spirit and promise of academic freedom and the potential for colleges and universities to contribute to society beyond their role as centers for the vocational preparation of young adults.
This forum will openly consider freedom of speech on campus as well as the threats that its suppression brings to constitutional and human rights, the future of deliberative democracy in the United States, and realization of the core purpose of universities.
Levin College Dean's Forums are open to the public and free to attend. The program will conclude at 6:00 pm and is followed by a reception. Light refreshments will be provided.
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UPCOMING LEVIN COLLEGE EVENTS
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>>Receive updates exclusively about upcoming Levin College events by subscribing to LEVIN FORUM NEWS
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>>Stay up-to-date on all Levin College events by visiting our CALENDAR OF EVENTS
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MONDAY 3/25 - TUESDAY 3/26: RECEPTION & SPECIAL CONFERENCE | Managing the City: Honoring the Career of Professor Sylvester Murray | Roberta Steinbacher Atrium | Open to the public and free to attend. Learn More and Register.
THURSDAY 3/28/19: LEVIN COLLEGE FORUM | Equity Planning: What's Next for Cleveland? | Roberta Steinbacher Atrium | 4 - 6 p.m. | Open to the public and free to attend. Light refreshments provided. Learn More and Register.
TUESDAY 4/2/19: LEVIN MORNING BRIEFING | Smart Water Management: Workforce, Technology and Economic Development | Bonda Room, UR 254 | 9 - 11 a.m. | Open to the public and free to attend. Light refreshments provided. | Learn More and Register.
TUESDAY 4/9/19: LEVIN COLLEGE FORUM | Smoke on the Water: Five Decades of Progress Restoring Great Lakes Rivers | Roberta Steinbacher Atrium | 4 - 6 p.m. | Open to the public and free to attend. Light refreshments provided. Learn More and Register.
WEDNESDAY 4/10/19: DEAN'S FORUM WITH RECEPTION TO FOLLOW | Deliberative Democracy and Campus Free Speech | Roberta Steinbacher Atrium | 4 - 6 p.m. with reception to follow. | Open to the public and free to attend. Light refreshments provided. Learn More and Register.
THURSDAY 4/18/19: LEVIN COLLEGE FORUM | Trails and Greenways for our Metropolitan Future | Roberta Steinbacher Atrium | 4 - 6 p.m. | Open to the public and free to attend. Light refreshments provided. | Learn More and Register.
MONDAY 4/29/19: LEVIN MORNING BRIEFING | Advocacy for Children's Healthcare | Bonda Room, UR 254 | 9 - 11 a.m. | Open to the public and free to attend. Light refreshments provided. | Learn More and Register.
THURSDAY 5/16/19: DEAN'S FORUM | AsiaTown and the Asian American Experience | Roberta Steinbacher Atrium | 4 - 6 p.m. | Open to the public and free to attend. Light refreshments provided. | Learn More and Register.
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To submit information for inclusion in Levin News, please forward your content to levincomms@csuohio.edu.
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