NONPROFIT THURSDAY REPORT: Black Males, "the Negro Woman", Christians and Democrats

This is the first of what may turn out to be three Nonprofit Thursday posts today. Here we want to call attention to several events taking place this evening, any of which you might want to take in on your way home from work, or to make the subject of an evening excursion in celebration of the impending heat wave.

Post two will offer some observations on the intriguing Hank Willis Thomas exhibit that closes this weekend at the Cleveland Museum of Art after a near five-month run.

And then, assuming there is time, we will offer more timely notes on some upcoming events.

For now, we just learned today of the third and final discussion in the Blueprint Roundtable discussion, a series of events thematically related to the Hank Willis Thomas exhibit. Tonight’s program will be at Friendly Inn Settlement House, 2386 Unwin Road.

The event flier describes this evening’s event as a panel discussion of established and emerging black male leaders from the Central neighborhood and the Cleveland community about what it means to be an African American male today. One goal of the conversation is to break down boundaries between generations.

A special guest panelist on tonight’s program is star actor Bill Cobb, a Central native and Karamu alumnus.

Tonight’s panelists also include Cordell Arellano, Central resident and Promise Ambassador; Jerome Baker, founder, Men of Central; East Tech student Edgar Hoyle; Tri-C student and Promise Ambassador Nathaniel Johnson; Donald Jolly, academic superintendent, Cleveland public schools; Gerald Leslie, principal of Marion-Sterling School; Prester Pickett, coordinator of the Howard A. Mims African American Student Center at Cleveland State University; Amir El Hajj Khalid Samad, CEO of Peace in the Hood; Michael L. Walker, executive director of Partnership for A Safer Cleveland; and Peter Whitt, president of Enlightenment Consulting Group.

Call the panel moderator, Neal Hodges at 216.774.9570 and let him know you are coming.

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Moving east to University Circle, a talk will be starting soon with the captivating title, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman”: Black Women Communists of the Old Left and Critical Perspectives on Global Capitalism.

This event starts at 4:30PM on the campus of Case Western Reserve University in Clark Hall, Room 309, 11130 Bellflower Rd.

Erik S. McDuffie, Ph.D., associate professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, will be speaking about how the experiences of black women in the US Communist Party during the first half of the 20^th century can provide important lessons for diagnosing current social injustices. The event is co-sponsored by Case’s Social Justice Institute.

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Still in University Circle, and probably a less intense experience, is tonight’s Network Night, a monthly gathering where seemingly whatever interests you will find an audience. This event takes place from 6-8PM on the first Thursday of the month at University Circle Methodist Church, 1919 East 107 St. on the corner of Chester Ave.

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You can also head uphill from the Circle to Shaker Square where the Cleveland Realtists Association is hosting Real Estate Night at the new Zanzibar location, 13225 Shaker Square. This event, from 6:30PM until nine, will showcase the real estate mogul, Jay “Mr. Real Estate” Morrison.

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We hate to put the Christians last, but hopefully they will forgive us, especially as they have two events. The Christian Business League is hosting a business networking reception from 6:30-8PM tonight at JumpStart, 6701 Carnegie Ave.

The League will also host its quarterly Faith and Finance breakfast tomorrow at 7:30AM at Manor Party Center, 24111 Rockwell Dr., Euclid. The speaker will be Dr. Derrick Harkins, director of outreach for the Democratic National Committee.

This is the only event with a charge: $15. All are open to the public. If you attend any of these events, tell them you read about it in The Real Deal.

MBE/Finance/Career Nuggets

MBE/Finance/Career Nuggets

• Julius Cartwright’s Dream Team Realty Inc. is having an open house today in celebration of the relocation of its offices to Solon. The event runs from 2-9PM at 6001 Cochran Road, Suite 301, Solon OH 44139.

Cartwright served this past year as the president of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers [NAREB]. That group held its annual convention in Cleveland in August.

Also of note: NAREB’s local affiliate, the Cleveland Realtist Association, will host its Annual Scholarship and Installation Luncheon on Sunday, January 20, from 4-6PM at the Macklin Party Center in Solon, 6200 Enterprise Parkway. Lionel Lewis, vice president of A. J. Lewis Realty will be installed as the new president.

This will be Lewis’ second stint as president, a post he held in the early nineties. His installation this year will be an especially poignant moment as his daughter, Amber Lewis, also of A.J. Lewis Realty, will be installed as the president of the Cleveland Women’s Council of NAREB. This is believed to be the first such instance in the country of father and daughter holding simultaneous presidencies of local NAREB organizations.

How to Sell: Your Ideas and Yourself as a Trusted Advisor

Master sales trainer Marvin Montgomery will be offering insight into how professionals in any field can effectively sell themselves and their ideas at a Thursday, January 17 luncheon sponsored by the Cleveland chapter of International Associationof Business Communicators.

Marvin Montgomery

Montgomery is an author, trainer, and motivational speaker who has more than 30 years of sales training experience and is author of Practice Makes Perfect: The Professional’s Guide to Sales Success.

Early bird pricing of $20 is available through January 7 here.

The lunch presentation will be at the Sarah Benedict House, 3751 Prospect Avenue Cleveland, OH 44115. This historic mansion houses the Cleveland Restoration Society and offers free parking on either side of the building.

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

Lincoln Electric has the following openings: Director of Corporate Development, Head of Investor Relations, and Investor Relations Specialist. Interested parties should send inquiries and/or letters of interest with resume to Dalithia_Smith@LincolnElectric.com.

Black Culture is Alive and Well in Cleveland

Black Culture is Alive and Well in Cleveland

The concept of black culture can be an elusive one. Exactly what is it?

For some people, it is dismissed by reference to song and dance, or young black males with sagging pants, oversized shirts and hoodies. This portrait is used to justify black underachievement, unemployment, crime statistics, incarceration, and just about any societal pathology commonly projected as black-related through the daily newspaper, or nightly news, or right-wing cable shows.

But of course, these images are far from encapsulating the African American community, or even the dominant portion of it. Cleveland this week is phenomenally alive with expressions of what black culture is about. Consider what’s happening around town just this evening:

Starting at 5PM, Successnet and 100 Black Men are presenting a program at Cleveland State University’s Drinko Hall on “Who’s Mentoring Black Children?” The program will honor four active Clevelanders as 2012 Mentors: Ted Ginn, Kwa David Whitaker, Yvonne Pointer, Ilinda Reese.

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A quick ride away on the Healthline, at Case Western Reserve University, Karamu Theater will be presenting a play April 19 about foster care experience in Strosacker Auditorium. The free, public performance of Michael Oatman’s “Sometimes Hope is Enough” will be followed by a discussion about foster care. The event is a collaboration among Karamu,  Case’s Schubert Center for Child Studies, and the Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services.

The program aims to bring to light the situations of the more than 2,000 foster children in Cuyahoga County without permanent homes. Each year, roughly 200 youth turn 18 and “age out” of the foster care system, many with few connections or resources to begin living on their own.

The panelists — Gregory Ashe, executive director, Karamu House; David Crampton, associate professor, CWRU Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences; Jessica Horne, executive director, Cleveland Urban Minority Alcoholism Drug Abuse Outreach Project (UMADOP); Gregory Kapcar, legislative director, Public Children Services Association of Ohio (PCSAO); Jacqueline McCray, deputy director, Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services, Resources and Placement; and Melinda Sykes, director of children’s initiatives, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine — will discuss the research and policy implications of the realities portrayed in the play.

For information, visit Schubert.case.edu/SometimesHopeIsEnough2012.aspx or call Kate Lodge at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services at 216.881.4343 or Gabriella Celeste at the Schubert Center at 216.368.5314.

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Also on Case’s campus this afternoon will be Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, courtesy of the Case’s active Social Justice Institute, which is led by Professor Rhonda Williams. Coleman, a M.I.T.-trained social scientist and Ph.D., is the author of No Fear: A Whistleblower’s Triumph Over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA.

The program, which will include a book signing, starts at 6:15 PM in the University’s Biomedical Research Building [Biomedical Research Building • BRB 105 • http://www.case.edu/maps/]

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Meanwhile, starting at 6PM in at North Broadway Methodist Church in Slavic Village, the second of a of the 4 part series of 2012 Voter Education Forums will be offering important information on voter education. A panel of prominent Greater Clevelanders, including Dennis Anderson of the Cuyahoga Board of Elections, Shakyra Diaz of the Cleveland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Hiram College political science professor Jason Johnson, and Will Tarter III, president of the Cleveland Young Professional Senate, will address important issues as voter disenfranchisement, how to be a more informed voter, and the voting rights of formerly incarcerated persons.

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On the entertainment tip, non-procrastinators will be attending yet another campus event, as part of the 2012 Tri-C Jazz Fest, where Esperanza Spalding will be performing before a sold-out crowd at Metro Auditorium.

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But lovers of culture need not go starving tonight. They merely have to head to Shaker Square, for the opening night of Cleveland’s first-ever Greater Cleveland Urban Film Festival. Tonight’s schedule will feature “The Contradictions of Fair Hope” starting at 7:15PM, followed by a post-film reception next door at Zanzibar Restaurant. More details on the Festival, which runs through Sunday, can be found here: http://www.gcuff.org/

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Either the film or the reception is likely to attract early attendees from the Cleveland Realtists Association’s monthly business networking event, which takes place down the street and around the corner at Jezebel’s Café on Larchmere Blvd.

Consider this is just one day in the life of Cleveland’s African Community. There is positive activity everywhere for those who care to look. We will do a better job going forward in bringing timely information concerning these kinds of activities. 

Tomorrow we will tell you about this weekend’s events, including Friday’s wine-tasting hosted by The President’s Council, a session of African American philanthropy offered by The Cleveland Foundation Saturday, the annual luncheon of the Top Ladies of Distinction, and an all day Saturday student leadership conference at Case Western Reserve.

A Different Kind of "Giant Sucking Sound"

Note: Nonprofit Thursdays will resume in January.

I attended the Cleveland Realtists Association’s holiday party this past Tuesday at The Opus, an MBE restaurant on Chagrin Boulevard. Spirits were high and the place was packed.

The Realtists’ history date to a time when black real estate agents and brokers were barred from membership in the larger professional organization now known as the Cleveland Area Board of Realtors. If memory serves, the segregation was once so thorough that blacks in real estate couldn’t even call themselves realtors because the dominant group copyrighted the term.

This kind of history rests at the bottom of so much of what we see today in our non-post-racial society. The black community is full of organizations that shadow those larger professional organizations that excluded black members as a matter of course. The use of “American” in the titles of these majority organizations as a matter of course is why so many black organizations chose “National” as part of their identity: National Bar Association, National Medical Association, National Association of Real Estate Brokers, etc.

While this kind of in-your-face exclusion is no longer the norm, many African Americans still support these mirror groups. When I asked my agent friend “J” if she were a dues-paying Realtist member, she stressed that while she belonged to all the major agent groups, her Realtist ties “keep me grounded”.

J is an agent at one of the area’s major brokerages but I knew exactly what she meant. One of the key ingredients in Cleveland’s historic standing as one of the country’s most-segregated cities has been the structure, operation and practice of real estate professionals. The patterns and practices of the big firms have both contributed to and reflected the wealth disparity between the races in our community.

My key takeaway from my conversation with J was only indirectly related to race, however. It was her intriguing response to my asking how business was going.

J said that 2011 had been much better than 2010 [“Thank Goodness!”] and that one of the best aspects of that improvement was how sales had improved in the inner city. She believes that a strong central city real estate market is critical to the recovery and health of county property values in general. She cited San Francisco and New York as examples.

Of course, those areas are net attractors of people, something that hasn’t been true in decades around these parts. Still, it makes sense that inner city reinvestment is essential to Cuyahoga revival.

It is unarguable is that the meltdown of property values in areas targeted by subprime vultures — Slavic Village, East Cleveland, Maple Heights to name a few — harmed the entire county at least twofold: not only did pretty much everybody’s property values decrease, but lost revenues from abandoned homes has caused city and county revenues to decline even as demand for public services has increased.

As conservatives continue to espouse discredited ‘trickle-down” theories, perhaps they ought to school themselves on the effects of “economic contagion” that are a predictable result of robber baron economics.

If a rising tide lifts all boats, doesn’t a fierce undertow jeopardize at least 99% of them?

As one of my Asian correspondents asked me this morning in a phone conversation: why isn’t Jon Corzine in jail related to his inability to account for $1.2 billion in missing client funds [video]? And if you think that's where the former Governor-Senator-Wall Street funds trader should be, then why shouldn't the principals of the giant financial institutions who stole far more from the rest of us?