Foundation Blog

Cleveland Foundation Blog
Planters at Playhouse Square

Blooming Euclid

I have had occasion, these warm summer days, to walk outside for lunch. In addition to being able to get out of the frigid office air conditioning, my great delight has been walking up Euclid Avenue toward Public Square. Yes, you heard me – a delight to...

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Serpil Sevgen

Painting On Water

Serpil Sevgen is a Turkish school counselor and artist who uses the arts as a tool in her counseling work with youth in Istanbul. Serpil is another of the foundation’s Creative Fusion artists and she has brought both her counseling and her artistic skills...

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Evaluation is Not a Thing: It is a Way

I just returned from a very meaty and reflective meeting on the role of evaluation in philanthropy (NOT as dry a subject as it may sound!). It was organized by the Evaluation Roundtable, a program of the Foundation Center to improve philanthropy. The...

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Afraid To Become A Coward

That’s what Lily Yeh said about fighting her fears and taking on the challenge of transforming a distressed Philadelphia neighborhood – and the lives of the distressed and forgotten people who lived there.  Lily Yeh is an artist who has worked most of...

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The Transparent Foundation

An oxymoron? Maybe. Maybe not.  So much of what foundations do may seem obscure, even secret, to those outside what admittedly is often a complex bureaucracy. But the philanthropic field itself is trying hard to shine light and create greater transparency...

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MorrisonDance Company and Sevi Bayraktar

“We Thought We Knew How To Dance!”

So said Sarah Morrison of MorrisonDance, a local modern dance company, about her dancers’ first rehearsals with Sevi Bayraktar, a Turkish “Roma,” or gypsy dancer, and choreographer. Sevi is in residence with Young Audiences and MorrisonDance for five...

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Demonstrating proper form

A Universal Language

Two dozen students in various combinations of tights, leotards, sweats and T-shirts surrounded renowned Cuban prima ballerina Laura Alonso following the rigorous master class she had just offered them in the main studio of the Mather Dance Center at CWRU...

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Rehearsal

From The Garden To The Camps

What do Adam and Eve, Jews, Japanese Americans, Armenians and Native Americans have in common? These and other peoples have all experienced exile from their homeland and the hardship and conflict of being displaced. Some, like Japanese Americans during WWII...

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Reverie Sans Madeleines*

I attended the Cuyahoga Arts & Culture (CAC) board meeting this week (why does no one from the arts community except a representative from our commercial classical radio station ever show up to these open, public meetings?) and suddenly was caught by...

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