On July 23rd and 24th over 40 of our leaders gathered at the Western Reserve Historical Society for our annual GCC leaders retreat.
We started the first morning by visiting the Cleveland Art Museum to meditate on a painting by John Rogers Cox called Grey and Gold.
Source: https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1943.60
Storm clouds gathering over sunlit fields of wheat. Desolate dirt roads rutted with wear leading in four directions.
Painted shortly after the United States entered World War II, we believe it captures the moment we are in.
We find ourselves at a crossroads as an organization, a city, a nation.
The energy in the room was palpable and enthusiastic as GCC leaders got an overview of GCC commitments and work for the rest of 2024. We reflected on lessons learned and the impact made from our youth bindover campaign. We brainstormed about how we could continue to push for change with the Juvenile Judges and County Prosecutor.
Our time together gave people a sense of hope as change makers in our community. We reaffirmed that GCC will continue to lead with moral clarity and moral courage to act on injustice in our region in a powerful way.
GCC leaders also discussed our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and we discussed ways to improve our communication strategies.
GCC’s website redesign will be an important tool to keep our members updated on all of our happenings, from meeting locations to key assemblies and actions.
We also shared GCC’s focus for the next 6 months:
Battle for Democracy
We will make a major push to recruit 100 neighborhood captains to engage committed nonvoters in our 10 communities in Cuyahoga County — Lee-Harvard, Slavic Village, Mt Pleasant, Fairfax, Central, Euclid, South Euclid, Parma Heights, Cleveland Heights and Warrensville Heights.
Youth Bindover
We will continue to keep pushing Cuyahoga County Juvenile judges to make meaningful change in their courts.
Pretrial justice
We will focus our time on identifying a specific and concrete issue by spring 2025.
Healthy Blocks
We will continue to listen to neighbors about their health needs and begin to identify nurse practitioners who would want to run our primary care clinic.
PowerUP
We are partnering with NOPEC, Cleveland Owns, PowerUP and Ohio Policy Matters to apply for an EPA community change grant. We plan to submit the grant by mid-September 2024.
EngageGCC
We will continue to build on the momentum we have created.
GCC Impact fund
We have raised over $35K as of June 2024, and we will make a major push to raise $110K by June of 2025.
We ended our meeting with GCC leaders committing to the work they want to focus on in the next 6 months.
In our work, relationships are the glue that bind us together, especially when the work gets difficult.
One of the main goals of the retreat was to build and deepen relationships with each other, so we can face the difficult work ahead with joy, purpose and community.
