Cleveland

The 4th Annual Cleveland Mini Maker Faire took place on Saturday, November 5, 2016, and we have attended three out of the four. It was a day for creative people to share their passion with others. 

Again this year, the Cleveland Mini Maker Faire was located in the Cleveland Public Library Main Library complex, and was presented by Cleveland Public Library and Ingenuity Cleveland.

We felt honored that the Executive Director/CEO of the Cleveland Public Library, Felton Thomas, Jr., greeted us by name as we entered the library, and invited us to explore this special Maker event.

A year ago, we were invited via Twitter to go on the final CircleTrek Walking Tour of University Circle for 2015. We really wanted to go, but unfortunately we had a conflict.

We have been very busy in 2016, and it feels like suddenly it is one year later. Luckily, we saw a tweet announcing the "...final FREE #CircleTrek guided walking tour of the season," and Julie signed us up to attend!

It was a brisk morning on Saturday, October 22, 2016, when we found ourselves with a group of other people interested in learning about our city's University Circle. As we were on the tour, we kept finding personal and family connections. This made the tour more interesting to us, as we personally related to the history and current developments of Cleveland's University Circle.

We had a great time at the Wednesday, October 19, 2016, Cleveland Museum of Natural History's Think & Drink with the Extinct, so we wanted to share our photos and tweets from the evening. The theme for the night was "Wildlife," which Stuart knew would be of special interest to Julie. It is always fun to be able to get close to the animals at the museum.

I want to begin with a BIG thank-you to BVU Director of Communications and Technology Melanie Meyer for inviting me to attend the inaugural BVU Ohio Nonprofit Technology & Communications Summit on Friday, September 30, 2016, as their guest representing the good work of Cleveland GiveCamp.

The mission of BVU: The Center for Nonprofit Excellence "is to promote business volunteerism and foster excellence in nonprofit organizations." This has led Melanie and me to explore how Cleveland GiveCamp can reach out to the nonprofits served by BVU. As a provider of free tech solutions to Cleveland and Akron area nonprofits, it seemed logical that Cleveland GiveCamp be present at BVU's first tech summit. Cleveland GiveCamp has the largest number of tech volunteers of any of the nation's other GiveCamps. 

Thank you to the Cleveland Young Professional Senate, the Cleveland Foundation, and The City Club of Cleveland for the Greater Cleveland Caucus events that took place in 2016. I think this type of activity is very important to our community as a starting point for making positive change and plans for the future.

After attending the final Greater Cleveland Caucus event for 2016, I decided to write this blog post to:

• Thank the organizers
• Capture some of the information shared about this final event
• Encourage people to learn about the Greater Cleveland Caucus by reading my past blog posts and related materials

The 2016 IngenuityFest weekend took place on Friday, September 23rd, through Sunday, September 25th. This is the fifth annual blog post I have written about IngenuityFest, plus I have written about other Ingenuity Cleveland-sponsored events.

Every year, I try to live the full IngenuityFest experience by attending all three days and talking to as many exhibitors as possible. It was really great this year to reconnect with some of the artists and techies I met in previous years, and get to know some tech people that I had read about online, but had not met in person. IngenuityFest is like an annual reunion of creative people in Cleveland! 

Every year, we visit and write a blog post about the Cleveland Museum of Art's Chalk Festival. It is one of our favorite events in our community. This year, we also visited other art events on the same weekend, so we included our @sos_jr tweets with photos of these events as well. Enjoy!

We think that the Historic Gateway Neighborhood Corporation "Take a Hike" Cleveland tours are the greatest! We recently went on the Warehouse District Tour, in 2015 attended the Gateway District Tour, and have written blog posts in 2014 about the Playhouse Square Tour and Canal Basin Park in the Flats Tour.

Since we did not have time to write a blog post about the tour we did last year, we decided to include our @sos_jr tweets about @GatewayCLE tours from both 2015 and 2016 in this blog post. It is our way to share the experience, and more importantly, to thank the sponsors and partners for these great tours.

At the start of the week of August 15, 2016, we were prepared to write a blog post about how lucky we are in Cleveland to have PechaKucha Night Cleveland (@PKNCLE), which was coming up on Friday, August 19th. As the week progressed, we realized that, starting on Wednesday, we were going to have the opportunity to attend five consecutive free creative arts events! All of these events deserved at least a special mention and a thank-you, while some even warranted a full blog post.

Thus, this blog post has morphed into something different. While focused on PechaKucha Night Cleveland, it will also include mention of the other free creative events, and an additional inaugural arts event. This is our way to publicly thank the following organizations for their work to provide these free arts events:

• Wednesday: WOW! Wade Oval Wednesdays - University Circle (@InTheCircle)

• Thursday: Edgewater LIVE 2016 - Cleveland Metroparks (@CleveMetroparks)

• Friday: PechaKucha Night Cleveland (@PKNCLE)

• Saturday: Arts In August - Tremont West Development Corporation (@TremontWest - @ArtsInAugust),
  plus the inaugural Flats Festival of the Arts (@FlatsForward) which cost $10.

• Sunday: Celebrate100! Party in Your National Park - Cuyahoga Valley National Park (@CVNPNPS - @forcvnp)

The Mission of Cleveland GiveCamp is to pair creative and technology talent with nonprofits in need.

Cleveland GiveCamp Weekend on July 29-31, 2016, marked the seventh year of serving nonprofits from the Cleveland and Akron areas. I am fortunate to to be part of Cleveland GiveCamp every year.

Cleveland continues to have many creative people volunteering (over 225 registered for 2016). It is believed that Cleveland has the largest GiveCamp in the nation. It is exciting that again this year there were so many volunteers that the tech volunteer tickets sold out, and a waiting list had to be started.