About The
Generation Foundation
How
We Work | Mission Statement
| Initial Grants
Technology Transfer |
New Focus on Sustainability
Since its founding in 1997, the
Foundation has collaborated with private foundations,
individuals and corporate foundations to identify and fund the
economic drivers — often grass-roots organizations — that can
help restore the economic vitality of Northeast Ohio. Working
with the Foundation's advisory board and professional resources,
our venture-philanthropist trustees undertake cooperative
research on these initiatives, join in grantmaking and follow up
with careful evaluation.
Ohio's loss of 235,000
manufacturing jobs since 2000 hit our region particularly hard,
since only the government employs more people than
manufacturing. The business community, nonprofits,
foundations and universities have been
working on strategies to stimulate entrepreneurship, attract and
retain companies, encourage technology transfer and restore the
area to its former world competitiveness.
While such private involvement in
technology-based economic development is relatively new in
philanthropy, the experience of the last ten years demonstrates
that donors working together can achieve a
synergy that can help return the Greater Cleveland economy to
world-class competitiveness.
Since only a robust economy can
produce the wealth that supports education, museums, hospitals,
the arts and social services, more foundations are recognizing
the importance of supporting economic development. As the only
foundation in Northeast Ohio with this single focus, we have
collaborated with private and community foundations in making 68
grants, frequently in cooperation with other donors. In all but
a few cases, this money went as seed money for start-up
nonprofits like an early-stage venture capital funder might
make. Our grantees are usually flying beneath the radar of the
big foundations and find it difficult to get initial funding.
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New Focus on Sustainability
After a year’s study of regional
economic development needs, Trustees of The Generation
Foundation added the field of sustainability, environmental
restoration and alternative energy to their grant-making
priorities.
While it will continue to support
start-up economic development initiatives, the Foundation
recognizes the immediate need to develop consensus on a
sustainability and energy strategy so that Northeast Ohio does
not suffer from further environmental degradation and rising
energy costs.
As a first step in this area,
Trustees began dialogues with the region’s largest foundation
funders of economic development initiatives. They found a
commonality of interest and concern around these issues, and
several large foundations have already made substantial
investments in the development of alternative energy,
environmental remediation and advanced energy development in the
region. There is yet, however, no regional strategy or
organization that connects and coordinates these efforts in
order to gain additional leverage and minimize redundancy of
effort.
Accordingly, Trustees made
$263,000 in grants to the City of Cleveland and area nonprofits
to begin work on building consensus for a regional environmental
strategy which would put in place action plans for what
Northeast Ohio could achieve in sustainable redevelopment by
2019 — the 50th anniversary of the notorious Cuyahoga River
fire.
Basic to this vision is the belief
that environmental restoration should take place in the context
of economic development. This would work on two levels:
-
It will create a more
attractive physical space that people will want to come to
and be part of, elevating optimism, pride and commitment to
the area, and
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It will enable businesses in
the region to meet a growing global market demand for
technologies, products, and services that address issues
related to brownfield reclamation, water use and quality,
air quality, and industrial practices that are more people-
and environmentally-friendly.
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How the Foundation Works
Following its founding in 1997,
the Foundation Board developed a structure that allows other
foundations and individuals to join in funding programs that
would be difficult to do alone. The resulting pool of donors can
then achieve the needed critical mass needed for success. The
model that has emerged for doing this is simple:
-
Recruit the most qualified area
experts in management, academia, technology, venture capital and
economic development to serve on the Foundation’s Advisory
Board;
-
Use this group to identify and evaluate
new ventures based on sustainable environmental principles
and offering the best opportunities for technology transfer and the creation of new high-paying jobs;
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Work with like-minded
philanthropists to make cooperative “catalytic grants” to
support these initiatives; and
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Follow up so that collaborating
donors can assess their return on investment for grants.
In a crowded field of 1,710
foundations in Northeast Ohio with assets of $8.65 billion, any
newcomer like The Generation Foundation must first answer the
question, Why do you deserve financial support and what do you
do that is not already being done?
There are three answers:
-
The Generation Foundation
creates value. The Board has developed a new model of
collaborative philanthropy focused on a relatively narrow
niche – sustainable regional economic development based largely on
advanced technology and entrepreneurism. Its Advisory Board
of scientific, technological and business leaders works to
identify, research, monitor and evaluate potential grant
initiatives. Few, if any, of even the area’s largest
foundations have this depth of talent.
-
It is efficient and leverages
its grants. The operating costs of The Generation Foundation
are modest, relative to its programs. It does not aspire to
being a large grant-making entity, but sees itself as a
catalyst, able to enroll like-minded partners in working
together. By working cooperatively, it creates a synergy and
economy of scale seldom seen in the grant-making world.
-
It has a tightly defined and
measurable focus. While it is by no means the only
legitimate way to help our region regain its
international competitiveness, investing in technology
transfer, the formation and retention of high-technology
companies, alternative energy, environmental cleanup, sustainability and support
for innovation in existing business are probably the best
chance we have to exploit our regional strengths, create new
clusters and enlarge current ones. The resulting corporate
formation and related employment growth in the development
of alternative energy, the life
sciences, MEMS, fuel cells, nanotechnology, polymers,
environmental integrity and advanced manufacturing, together
with the revitalization of existing manufacturing, will be
an important step in restoring the region's economic
vitality.
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Our Mission Statement
The Generation Foundation supports
entrepreneurial, non-profit start-ups and initiatives that
contribute to the long-term economic prosperity and quality of
life in Northeast Ohio. These grants are usually
venture-philanthropic, catalytic and collaborative. The
Foundation is also dedicated to teaching Cleveland’s great
philanthropic tradition to younger generations by leveraging a
cross-generational Board of Trustees.
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Initial Grants
After early meetings with
business, academic and political leaders, the Foundation Board
determined to focus initially on technology-based programs in
the life sciences. All available evidence suggests that the area's
strongest economic asset is the potential commercialization of
the enormous amounts of research being done by its leading
institutions. According to Business Week, this will be the
source of the majority of our future economic growth. This
sector now employs
200,000 workers in Northeast Ohio – our largest employment
category.
To gain community input for
supporting life sciences grant making, and to urge the major
institutions to work together, The Generation Foundation held a
conference at Severance Hall called Building a New Life
Sciences Cluster in Greater Cleveland. This was the first event
where leaders from major research hospitals and universities
spoke on the same platform. The results were impressive: 20 new
research or clinical programs have been formed since 2002.
The Board's first grants funded
two studies at Omeris and Case Western Reserve University that
were critical to fostering high-technology entrepreneurism. This
research laid the groundwork for BioEnterprise, a collaboration
between The Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals Health
System, Summa Health System and Case Western Reserve University.
Since its founding in 2002, BioEnterprise has created, recruited
and accelerated 90 companies, attracting more than $975 million
in new funding.
These initial grants proved that
Northeast Ohio can leverage its existing world-class strength in
life sciences research to create a new cluster of bioscience
companies and their related jobs. The tremendous economic
synergy clusters create often starts from strategic investments
by public entities, universities, area development organizations
and foundations. As momentum grows, market forces take over to
propel these clusters and their surrounding communities to a new
prosperity
In a later grant, the Foundation
joined the Codrington Foundation in a $200,000 grant helping to
create Cleveland Clinic Innovations, an organization that
commercializes research from the Cleveland Clinic to form spin-off companies in
Northeast Ohio. With a subsequent $1.08 million Technology
Action Fund grant, the project has formed 33 spin-offs
generating $8 million in annual licensing revenues.
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Technology Transfer
Northeast Ohio is America’s 16th
largest region in terms of population and employment. It ranks
19th in terms of generation of patents. However, in terms of
licensing those patents – what is called commercialization or
technology transfer – it drops to 40th. If only one area
organization - NASA Glenn - were able to double its current rate
of licensing its technology to local firms, the region would
jump from 40th to 23rd.
Recognizing this immense
potential, the Generation Foundation Board in 2002 initiated a
project with 19 other foundation and corporate funders to
commission a strategy by Battelle to produce A Strategic
Roadmap: Analysis of NASA Glenn's Potential as a Strong Economic
Engine for Northeast Ohio’s Economic Development. The
Foundation’s grant ($75,000 out of a total project cost of
$250,000) helped develop ways to commercialize the immense
amount of research originating at NASA Glenn.
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