About the Project | Credits

Project Background
The North Collinwood Summer Guide began with a small group of residents in 2007, brought together by and spurred on through the commitment to improving communication within our neighborhood at a meeting held January 30, 2007. Dennis Dooley, Beverly Franczyk, Sarah Gyorki, Meredith Pangrace, and Erin Randel steered the project to a run of 12,500 two-color copies. They were published by Orange Blossom Press of Ohio City, which generously donated the high-quality paper stock. (OBP specializes in two-color marketing material production for nonprofits and good causes, and are a member shop of the Graphic Communications International Union.) It was an all-volunteer effort, and printing costs were underwritten by generous local business owners, institutions, and resident associations, as well as Ward 11 Councilman Mike Polensek, in amounts from $25 to $200.
Feedback was mostly positive. Specifics included:

• Cleveland Lakefront State Park Naturalist Carol Ward, who reported an uptick in program participants who credited the summer guide with their knowing about the programs.
• One person said the guide was too big and took up the whole refrigerator.
• A number of people reported feeling alienated by the apparent title of "North Collinwood".
• It should be done again.

Summer Guide, Take 2
With more lead time, the committee, now lead by Meredith Pangrace and Erin Randel, submitted a comprehensive grant proposal to Neighborhood Connections, www.neighborhoodgrants.org., a program of The Cleveland Foundation which offers maximum $5,000 grants to community-based nonprofit endeavors. The grant was submitted in the August 2007 grant cycle, and was approved in October. With that news, the committee knew they'd for sure be able to print at least 10,000 guides.

The schedule went like this:

A note from the project organizer:

This year the summer guide really seems to have come into its own. It was produced by residents, for residents--a diverse cross-section of community residents worked together to glean, pick and shake information from the more than 125 assets we mapped around North Collinwood. We raised grant funds to ensure production, and were graced by the generous Wavemakers, Captains and Commodores among our local businesses and institutions to to cover small stipends to staff and to bump production to 15,000 copies of a FULL COLOR publication—a huge improvement. The summer guide even got a name this year, "The Scoop on Summer," along with a June 1st celebration to kick-off the summer and a new era for the project.

Looking to the future:
We've talked about some things for the future, such as:

• Offering artist awards/stipends for photographs or other illustrations to enhance the layout.
• Massaging the schedule for outreach/submissions--too early, no one has any information. Too late and we run up against the print cut-off.
• The extent to which the guide could/should reflect assets throughout Collinwood, vs. focusing on Ward 11 north of I-90.
• Building the summer guide release party/kick-off summer celebration to bring together the best of the neighborhood for 3 hours of shameless self-promotion, mad on-site sign-ups connection-making and revelry.
• Developing and online submission form that would a) prompt the user for key pieces of information, and b) streamline the task of sorting and proofreading submissions. Also scaling-up other tech-related issues.

If you think you could make time to help these or other communications-in-Collinwood dreams come true, click here, then relax! Forget about it—we'll come find you in the dark of next winter to start planning for yet another excellent summer in the neighborhood!

Thanks for your support and enjoy your summer!

Erin Randel
17914 Rosecliff Road 
Cleveland, OH 44119