About 30 miles east of Cleveland, in Painesville, the largest outdoor free music festival in Ohio runs on July 17-19.  Sponsored by the Great Lakes Brewing Company (maker of one of my favorite beers, the Burning River IPA, yum), the Painesville Party in the Park features a range of genres–from blues to indie to Afro-Carib-Americana Funk (which would probably be new for me)–in Veterans Park, is family friendly, and looks like a great couple of days.

The event is put on by a non-profit, the Painesville Community Improvement Corporation, and, beyond providing fun for residents of the region, showcases the downtown.

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Mandy at the Metropolitan Planning Council sent over news of this contest.  I love (1) all things participatory and (2) recognizing the assets the make our communities feel like communities.  So you can imagine how I feel about this contest.  (And can I get a “totally exportable idea alert”?)

Metropolitan regions are made up of thousands of great neighborhood places that define our lives by inspiring us, relaxing us, and encour

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The Center for Michigan has been hosting Community Conversations as part of its “Michigan Defining Moment” campaign to build a new agenda for Michigan.  Several conversations are coming to Metro Detroit this month:

The Detroit Orientation Institute is partnering with other organizations to offer an opport

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This week I am very pleased to announce that the GLUEster being featured in our weekly “Who’s GLUE?” feature is our new Policy Intern, Emily Knoll, a rising sophomore at the University of Michigan. Emily is going to be working primarily on the “Urban Innovations Guidebook” this summer, but, like any GLUEster–and any intern–is going to get her feet wet in all facets of GLUE’s activities (including a little blogging!). So look for her byline and please join me in welcoming Emily to the team…

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Our weekly update from the Rust Wire bloggers:

More beautiful and amazing pictures on our web site this week: a photo essay of the Cuyahoga River by contributor Greg Ruffing.

Why do so many of our cities seem to have problems with corruption and graft in city government?  This great post by Angie features two recent click here for complete post

ur cities are struggling to redefine their traditionally manufacturing-based, industrial economies, let alone at a pace that satisfies the needs of the community. Economic development strategies vary, but supporting new, and especially homegrown businesses who remain likely to stay home, is always a worthwhile goal. We start our July series on new business supports with a new, if self-described “traditional” business incubator, the Erie Technology Incubator. Russell Combs, the Executive Director and a long-time business incubation specialist, spoke with GLUE today about how business incubation works at ETI…

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I found this piece of happy little graffiti in a bathroom stall at the Corktown Tavern last year (a stop on the Detroit Synergy Corktown pubcrawl), and it’s serving as the inspiration for this week’s photo contest. What I’m expecting in return, though, is a range from similar city love notes to graffiti-as-art or protest. It’s often the only artistic expression you’ll see in certain communities in our cities. So please send along photos of graffiti that express hope, humor, anger, despair–or make demands for change…

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Faygo.  Better Made.  Vernors.  Sanders.  Detroit has a number of nostalgia-evoking food producers (though many of them no longer operate out of Southeast Michigan), but Dave Iannuzzi, the winner of the “windows” photo contest, loves one

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The Great Lakes are really the glue that tie us all together. And while at GLUE, we focus on the cities in this mega-region, there’s no doubt that many of us love living here because of the unparalleled access to the sands and waters of the Great Lakes (Michigan alone is second only to Alaska in length of coast). This week’s photo contest winner shared a photo from Weko Beach, on Lake Michigan and about equidistant from Chicago, IL, Grand Rapids, MI, and Fort Wayne, IN…

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In addition to logistical clean-up–bills to pay, reports to file–from the Great Lakes Metros and the New Opportunity Summit that took place in Buffalo on June 18-19, GLUE and our co-convening partners are currently working on a clean-up of the mind. We’re developing a way to share some outcomes of this meeting, starting simply by sharing powerpoint presentations given at the Summit. While there are only four presentations up so far, the page is already a wealth of information. You can check out the presentation page for the following (and more to come!): …

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