Welcome to the Kent State University ToddCast, where President Todd Diacon speaks with people from across Northeast Ohio, many of whom are Kent State graduates or friends of the university. For the inaugural episode, President Diacon meets with Lillian Kuri, BS ’93, BArch ’94, a graduate of the Kent State architecture program. She is the president and CEO of the Cleveland Foundation, where she focuses on design and community and how to lift the individuals and neighborhoods in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County.
Kuri was integral to the opening of the very visible and impressive new home for the Cleveland Foundation on Euclid Avenue at East 66th Street in Cleveland’s Midtown. Below is an abridged version of their conversation. For the full interview or to download the podcast, click on the player below.
President Diacon caught up with Kuri from her office at the new headquarters, first talking about this historic project.
Lillian Kuri:
The role I wanted to play was one of shaping the transformation of the organization through the move. I was kind of the keeper of “Who do we want to be? What’s the community foundation of the future? How do we want to turn an institution that was really like on the 12th and 13th floor and felt behind the curtain to one that was open to the community?” It was about the organizational change and understanding that I can see how that would connect to the physical but then working with the most exceptional design firm. The relationship I ended up building with Pascale Sablan, who did all the programming and community engagement, was one of the best, most rewarding things I’ve ever done in my life.
We had this community meeting one day where we invited residents and asked for input about how they wanted this foundation to be in the Hough and Midtown community. We already had some plans about the basic programming of the building, and she came to me the next day and said, “Lillian, we need to radically rethink the program.” And she was right. And then, she and I got to work together. The process of that made the Cleveland Foundation you see today, not the Cleveland Foundation that was founded. It’s because of that journey.
And I think I look at it this way, “Who gets the opportunity to be in the seat at the moment that we were making this generational change, huge thing and have the background I have and to look at it from a neighborhood transformation point of view and then to hold that vision which is going to last over a 10 or 15 year period. It’s not about a building. It’s about the whole neighborhood and transforming the whole East side of Cleveland.” That’s how big it is. So it was just amazing. Like who gets that?
President Diacon: In 1914, Cleveland was the sixth largest city in the United States. That’s the year the Cleveland Foundation was chartered, the first of its kind in America. Born during the same era of innovation and preparation as Kent State – which began life as a normal school for teachers in 1910 – the foundation was established, as Lillian explains, as a new way to address community challenges with forward-thinking solutions.
Lillian Kuri:
Fred Goff, who's our founder, created the idea of a community foundation out of real frustration. He was a lawyer and a banker and a professional advisor to some of the most wealthy entrepreneurs and business people in Cleveland, the Rockefellers, and others.
We were founded in 1914 and he saw that the mechanism of wills and trusts that a lot of his clients were using, [which] to him, were not able to make a collective impact. So, he was one person, one idea, looking at the times and could not look out to future generations for what a community could need. So it was born out of an idea that we needed to do better. So he created what was the world’s first collective savings account. Imagine that. The foundation really having this, the endowments that we have, the permanent endowment, the idea was that he could create something that future generations would have needs that we couldn’t see today, that those folks couldn’t see today. And he also saw that one donor and giving to one particular idea wasn’t going to solve the complex issues of our time.
The first studies that the foundation did once founded were really powerful. I’ll give you an example. When they just started, they had a little bit of endowment and they funded important studies about education, one about criminal justice and then one about parks and open space. And that early study about parks and open space resulted in the creation of the Metro Parks. Now imagine how powerful the collective idea for the region that built that incredible network, the Emerald Necklace, which is one of our biggest assets and one of our most powerful things that came from this idea of collective savings.
We’re the first community foundation still. We’re not the largest anymore. There are 2,000 community foundations in the country, but we are the foundation that has the most unrestricted assets or assets that our board can direct of any in the country.
President Diacon: Changing gears a little bit, you're a great graduate of Kent State University, a big public access-oriented university. I always say Kent State is a university not just for the fortunate few, but the meritorious many. Then you earned a master’s degree from Harvard. What was it like at Kent State and Harvard? How are they similar? How are they different?
Lillian Kuri:
First of all, I have to say my experience at Kent State was extraordinary and I’m going to tell you why. The architecture program is world class. It’s rigorous. It’s also a powerful way to be at such a large institution because you have a cohort of people who are together in a way that is, you have your people right there.
It is a well-known program at a school that has a national reputation. I found that for me, the program also offered me so much. I was a TA. The faculty were really amazing. I felt prepared both for the field and for going on to graduate school in a way that when I got there, Kent State prepared me to be an exceptional graduate student. I was an exceptional student at Harvard because of the rigor and the exceptional program here at Kent.
How it relates to going to Harvard is what I just told you. First of all, I was super prepared. I went straight from Kent to the master’s program at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. I was one of only two people in my program who was ready to go right out of an undergraduate degree. So that says something about the school.
President Diacon: The others were practitioners that were going back.
Lillian Kuri:
Most people had to have three or four or five years of experience to even get into the program. I had amazing recommendations from faculty there who were known at the GSD who took them, right? Because I was coming right out of school. I was very prepared. I think that you guys do an extraordinary job of making sure that the students who come out of there are not just prepared for the field but prepared to be leaders in the field. I was ready to say, “I want to use this to also become a leader in this field.”
President Diacon: If you think back to your first day on the Kent Campus, did you say to yourself, “Okay, look, I’m going to get a degree in architecture and then an urban design degree. And then I’m eventually going to be a foundation CEO.” You probably thought that on day one, right?
Lillian Kuri:
No, I actually really thought I wanted to be a traditional architect. I came in super focused to learn everything about how to be both the best architect and the most creative designer you could find. This comes from my parents. I was raised to work really hard, do the best I could do at anything, whether it be academics or your job, and layer that onto something else. And so, around the third year, I had a sense that I might not be going down a traditional track of client-service architecture. I started to understand how I would take what I was learning and take it, layer it onto the next thing I was doing. The other thing that I started doing – and Kent provided me the opportunities was over the summers – I would try very different internships.
That also started to spark that, “What would I do next?” question, right? I think the school does a very good job of [providing] opportunities. I’m going to give you a couple of them. One summer I worked in an interior design firm. One summer I worked in an architecture firm that did healthcare. One summer I worked for an architecture magazine, a pretty famous one, which was called Progressive Architecture, which doesn’t exist anymore.
Actually, at that opportunity, which I got from being at Kent, the editor turned out to be a pretty famous editor who was the Dean at Rice later. He wrote one of my recommendations. So I think for me, at that early age, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I did know that I was doing the things that were required to kind of keep advancing.
President Diacon: What are the biggest challenges and opportunities you all face in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio?
Lillian Kuri:
We are embarking on starting to articulate how we’re going to work over the long period, the next three to five years in the community and what the community needs most. And the vision we have and our vision statement, which I think for me is simple and powerful is we want to build a vibrant Northeast Ohio. That’s a vibrant Northeast Ohio where no Clevelander is left behind.
And why that’s different than the past is our region has tended to have a group that’s thinking about economic growth and the vitality of the region and a group that’s over there and they’re disconnected thinking about helping people. Without a growing region, you can’t help people, and you can’t have a growing region where people aren’t connected to prosperity and some people are left out. And so, we’re the glue. I like to say the Cleveland Foundation has the ability to connect the dots and to say that both of those things have to happen and that we’re willing to put a stake in the ground.
Lillian KuriWe want to build a vibrant Northeast Ohio. That’s a vibrant Northeast Ohio where no Clevelander is left behind.
We will be always be open to grant-making requests that come to us from the community. The responsive side will always meet immediate needs, but we are going to place some big bets on half of our giving that we control every year into three major areas. And that will be growing the region, economic development and creating vibrant neighborhoods, especially those in Cleveland that have been left behind.
And then we’re also going to put a third of our investments proactively in connecting people to prosperity and that will be education. Really, also thinking about higher ed, Say Yes Cleveland, Cleveland Public Schools. And then also really, really making sure that we help people build wealth and find those pathways to it. And we feel like we should, even though we’re a Cleveland Foundation, work at the regional level and the neighborhood level and make sure that we’re focused on people’s access to both education and opportunities to build their family wealth. And so that’s where we’ll be focused. We’re really going to do it with others, not just do it alone.