®press release - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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Over the past 20 years, I've spent most of my "professional" time as an entrepreneur, with world-class expertise conducting multi-dimensional, multi-client relational comparative data and best practice analyses of any aspects of the world's largest and best global enterprises, environments and systems, and developing and consulting on innovations and total quality improvement. This work has generated a wealth of knowledge on large general systems, with a unique expertise in information systems and telecommunications. REALNEO is a product of this highest level expertise, drawn from the best practices of the best organizations on Earth. What REALNEO has developed for Cuyahoga County - what has been generated out of the REALNEO-generated Real Cooperative - takes general systems innovation to a whole new level of making us the brightest greenest place on Earth. So, we really do have a purpose to Cuyahoga County owning the Breuer, and the vision is beautifully expressed in this great rendering above, to be REAL COOP citizen headquarters of the open source capital of this brightest greenest state of Earth.

MAY 16 IS RIVER DAY - Friends of the Crooked River Celebrates its 19th Annual River Day and dedicates this year to the late Ed Hauser, passionate and tireless advocate for the river and lakefront, River Day Coordinator for five years, and the one who worked to make Whiskey Island publicly accessible...a significant feat.

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Are you concerned that your children's health is affected by pollution?
Do you want some answers about your industrial neighbors?
Do you want to build your environmental campaign skills?

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Materials and supplies collected from local architects and interior designers will be distributed to arts educators, art students, and artists at the ZeroLandfill Akron project site in downtown Akron.

Join in this resource harvest every Saturday in February from Noon to 4pm.

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Yes, Solar Erica aka Erika Weliczko of REpower Solutions will discuss renewable energy applications for homes and common questions. Learn some in's and out's about ways that you can make your house less dependent on outside energy sources at a nature center that has its own natural gas well! Ironic no?

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The Greater Cleveland Lead Advisory Council (GCLAC) will be holding a Press Conference in recognition of Ohio Lead Awareness Week, which will take place the week of July 20th – 26th, 2008.  Scheduled speakers will address the significant progress made in reducing the number of children affected by lead paint hazards, as well as the importance of continued vigilance and prevention in light of new evidence linking childhood lead exposure to crime, low school-performance, as well as numerous lifelong health problems.  Scheduled speakers, representing a City, County, and State unified effort to eliminate the dangers of childhood lead poisoning are:

• Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones, Cuyahoga County Board of Commissioners
• Mayor Frank Jackson, City of Cleveland
• Mayor Eric Brewer, City of East Cleveland
• State Representative Mike Foley, District 14
• Stuart Greenburg, Executive Director, Environmental Health Watch
• Nakiaa Robinson, Program Manager, Office of Early Childhood, Invest in Children

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If these are average Clevelanders, living in older urban neighborhoods like around University Circle their entire lives, they have been lead poisoned, perhaps severely. Thursday morning, May 22nd, join 100s of NEOs leaders concerned with our community's health, intelligence, safety and economy meeting at the Cleveland Natural History Museum for a free breakfast, keynote discussion and breakout sessions about lead poisoning and urban redevelopment. I guarantee you will leave this brief event with a completely realigned understanding of the core barriers to the success of our urban neighborhoods, leading to better planning for a healthy, effective region in the future.

Over the last few weeks I have had the opportunity to visit friends who live in the suburbs outside of Cleveland and I have visited neighborhoods inside of Cleveland. 

BREWED FRESH DAILY HAS A THREAD which carries  a discussion which I believe it is important for everyone in NEO to read.  The thread is especially important now that the City of Cleveland is looking desperately for immediate cash-back from the taxpayers’ UDAG loans. 

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   Riverview Baptist Church from Franklin, Ohio (south of Dayton, Oh.)  in cooperation with Fresh Coat Cleveland spent a week providing their earnest and good spirited (the job site near E55th and Superior was a upbeat place to be) volunteer labor in Cleveland painting houses. 

CLEVELAND, OH—Bruce Katz, vice president and director of Metropolitan Policy at The Brookings Institution, will present Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing America’s Older Industrial Cities, a comprehensive economic study of the 65 U.S. cities lagging behind their peers (scheduled for national release on May 20), at noon on Tuesday, May 29, 2007, at The City Club of Cleveland. He will be joined by Ohio Lt. Governor Lee Fisher, who will give a local response to the report.

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YES - this is a huge story... the State of Ohio is suing Sherwin Williams and other paint manufacturers over the public nuisance caused by lead paint they sold here over decades... the state is joining five Ohio cities in this battle for our citizens - this case could very well take over the battle for the cities - very exciting times for our down-trodden state.  It is exciting to see the new Ohio leadership in action, after so many years of poor performance by past administrations.

I received an informative email this afternoon from Richard McDougald Enty, Planning Team Leader, Programming & Planning Department, Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, about some of their Transit Oriented Development initiatives and vision. It is very exciting to see this as an active subject for discussion and planning here. I am a strong supporter of Transit Oriented Development and consider it the core foundation on which we should rebuild the City of Cleveland and surrounding suburbs.  Here is the vision from RTA:

It is a great pleasure to have our original Drupal developer Derek Arnold back in the server seat for REALNEO and all tech things 7gen (shown here at my favorite wifi and human friendly coffee house in town, Talkies). Besides already cleaning up months of tech messes, less than two weeks back on track, Derek is now in Sunnyvale, California, as probably the only NEO representative at the Yahoo sponsored OSCMS (Open Source Content Management System) conference, the Drupal Performance and Scalability Seminar and the Drupal Hackfest - March 22-25, 2007. We've been touching base while he is there and it is clear he is learning lots of great insight, spreading NEO love in the open source world, and showing all that we are serious about making this a real open source domain (and I mean realneo and this region, in that).

ROLDO    has been talking sense to power for years in NEO.  Here he is,  with his indefatigable energy,  keeping at it here, on CoolCleveland with his views  on tax abatements.  Roldo, I hear you!

This was tucked away in the Cleveland Plain Dealer Business section today, straight out of Associated Press, without any local perspective - yawn, how boring is this subject. Well, over the next few months expect to see it is not so boring!

Thanks to Susan Miller for pointing out an important article in the 02/03/07 Plain Dealer regarding the war to eliminate lead poisoning in our region by 2010 - an outlandishly aggressive objective, as Cleveland ranks among the top five cities nationally for lead poisoning. In 2004, St. Luke's Foundation funded what has been the most important collaboration ever for the future of Northeast Ohio: the Greater Cleveland Lead Advisory Council (GCLAC), aligning over 80 agencies and organizations at local, regional, state and federal levels toward the common objective of lead eradication in our region within the next three years. On February 1, 2007, St. Luke's brought together the leadership of many other foundations for the expressed purpose of convincing as many foundations as possible to join them in funding the next three years of GCLAC initiative. The article states the objective of raising $3 million from foundations to leverage for far greater support from government sources.

 About three weeks ago, I received the first "Letter to the Editor" in the history of REALNEO. Lots of people send me press releases and event info and tips on cool content, but never has someone sent an opinion editorial to be posted for them (probably because REALNEO is open for anyone to create an account and post content and comments themselves). The letter to the editor was titled "Lead Paint - You Are Idiots" and was received from someone named Kim Falk (he authorized publication of his name) and the email address was from Sherwin Williams. A little googling and I learned he is an employee there - a very enthusiastic and loyal one, to be sure... he was responsible for Sherwin-Williams donating paint to help in the repair of the Pentagon after 9/11. So I was not surprised to read he is protective of his company in defense of them being sued over lead. Still, I was intrigued by the language he uses in his editorial, published below.