The Cleveland Foundation broke ground Thursday on its MidTown Collaboration Center, which will serve as an innovation-focused community center and potentially a boost of economic development in the city’s predominately-Black Hough neighborhood.
The 95,000-square-foot building will sit across the street from the foundation’s new offices on E. 66th St. and Euclid Ave. Completion is expected in late 2024.
It will feature office space, research centers, training centers, a media lab and an innovation hall that will host public community programming. The foundation said the space will house organizations that will launch job creation programs.
Connie Hill-Johnson, the chair of the Cleveland Foundation’s board of directors, said she expects it to be a place where small business-owners can get help in growing their businesses.
"For the long-term residents — who've been in this MidTown and Hough area for 30, 40, 50 years — they're going to wake up one day and think, 'Oh my God. This is my neighborhood and this is what I always envisioned it to be,’” Hill-Johnson said.
The foundation’s goal for the space is to connect Clevelanders to resources. The new building aligns with the foundation's thinking that moving to Hough will make it more accessible to residents, which Cleveland Ward 7 Councilmember Stephanie Howse said she appreciates.
“To have entities, partnerships that you can touch, feel, grow with, fall forward with, “ Howse said. “This investment can hopefully plant seeds to other people about what real connection needs to look like.”
The collaboration center will also feature a music venue and Black-owned beer and food vendors.
“I wanted to be a light to say, ‘Ok, if he could do it, I can do it’ because there’s not really that many Black-owned breweries,” said Christopher Harris, the owner of Black Frog Brewery, a Northwest Ohio-based brewery that will open a location in the collaboration center.
Cleveland City Council President Blaine Griffin said the project jumpstarts economic and community development in the rest of the neighborhood.
Griffin paid homage to the late Mansfield Frazier, a longtime Hough resident and founder of Chateau Hough, a winery that doubled as a re-entry program. Griffin said Frazier for many years imagined E. 66th Street as a business and entertainment district.
“All of that I really think really emanated from Mansfield Frazier’s vision," Griffin said. “I’m just so happy to see it come to fruition.”
