The Power 100: Ronn Richard

Ronn Richard
President and CEO, The Cleveland Foundation

The Cleveland Foundation could’ve hired an achiever from traditional nonprofit circles when it needed a new president and CEO in 2003. But Northeast Ohio needed new thinking, needed its leading nonprofit grant-maker to do what foundations rarely do: help an entire region find new ways back to prosperity.

So the foundation board chose Ronn Richard, a former electronics executive, State Department diplomat and venture capitalist for the CIA, to lead the nation’s third-largest community foundation into initiatives meant to change Northeast Ohio’s economic agenda. In addition to conventional nonprofit causes, Richard has used much of the foundation’s massive $80 million-plus in annual grants to get new-economy engines turning. One symbol of that effort now twirls on Cleveland’s skyline: The wind turbine by the Shoreway that helps power the Great Lakes Science Center is a brainchild of Richard and his Leadership Cleveland class.

“I thought, My God, what are you, Don Quixote?” recalls David Goldberg, chairman of the Cleveland Foundation’s board. “This is not an area of the country where we do wind. [But] Ronn wanted to raise the bar on risk taking.”

Today, the Cleveland Foundation is ahead of the national renewable-energy trend. It’s given $3.6 million to Case Western Reserve University to launch the Great Lakes Institute of Energy Innovation. Its Greater University Circle Initiative, a plan to link University Circle and surrounding neighborhoods, includes support for new eco-friendly businesses.

Even the foundation’s controversial December decision to drastically reduce grants for the Fund For Our Economic Future, which complicates Richard’s standing as a new-economy guru, highlights his power. With one decision, he can rearrange the hierarchy of Northeast Ohio’s nonprofit landscape.

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