Most notably, our Strategic Plan incorporates people-based strategies into our existing community development agenda, with a focus on educational attainment, civic leadership, asset building, and financial security.

Neighborhood Progress has already begun its work to bring people-based strategies into its programming. Neighborhood Progress recently hired Vice President of Economic Opportunity, Evelyn Burnett. Evelyn oversees and manages programming and services related to education, leadership building, community engagement, workforce development and wealth building.  

Prior to Evelyn's arrival at Neighborhood Progress she served as associate director of program strategies for the Admiral Center at Living Cities in New York City, where she worked on education reform, income and asset building, urban revitalization and policy research. Evelyn is a Northeast Ohio native and received both her masters and bachelor's degrees from the University of Akron.

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  CDC Support and Merger

Neighborhood Progress is dedicated to funding the best models of community development and be as strategic and impactful as possible. We make strides towards advancing work that deepens existing relationships and builds new ones in order to benefit all Cleveland residents. As an organization, we will maintain and model best practices and standards for which we hold the industry accountable.

As the Taskforce and Board recommended, Neighborhood Progress will focus on its role as a funding intermediary and continue its competitive grant making program. To ensure that our Strategic Investment Initiative continues to evolve, over the next year we will be creating and enforcing threshold operating and governance guidelines that must be met in order to receive funding from Neighborhood Progress.  We will be holding city-wide workshops to ensure that each CDC has clarity on the requirements and the pathway to reach each threshold.