Visiting the Greater Cleveland Partnership

This is a guest blog post by Intern Renee from Hiram College.  We were invited to the COSE Quarterly Meeting as chamber partners. I’m a college senior interning at the Eastern Lake County Chamber of Commerce. I attended the COSE Chamber Partners Quarterly Forum Meeting with Alice Cable, our manager of marketing and technology at the chamber.

Had you ever heard of GCP & COSE before?

Before attending this meeting I had heard of GCP and COSE but I wasn’t completely sure what they were. After attending this meeting I learned a lot more about how the businesses work together and a bit about what they do. The Greater Cleveland Partnership (GCP) is one of the largest metropolitan chambers of the commerce in the country and COSE is the small business division of the GCP. COSE provides programs for health insurance, workers’ compensation, freight and retirement plans.

Were you aware of the COSE & Chamber partnership & relationship?

I honestly wasn’t aware of the partnership/relationship between COSE & the Chambers. It was an awesome experience to see such a balance of great friendships yet professionalism when discussing business.

What are three things you learned about GCP’s activities downtown?

First of all, I learned that things are actually being done. People notice the progress of things but they fail to see that someone had to make these things happen and it was a great awakening to the fact that there are people working behind all of the great things happening in the Cleveland area. A few things I learned about were the benefits of the RNC. The estimated net benefit to the community from this convention is $200 million. This convention will bring about 50,000 visitors including media, business, and politics. Coordination of 50,000 visitors: delegates and families, candidate, media, general visitors, and local populous (15,000 credential media in Cleveland for RNC – 3x SuperBowl.)

What did you find the most exciting, or most discouraging?

The most exciting thing about all of this information, to summarize, is all of the possibility. To look back at all of the changes made makes you able to look forward and see how many more additions there can be. It’s also exciting to see so many people working towards the same thing and caring for the community and all that it means. Things have come a long way and as I mentioned before, these things didn’t just happen—people made them happen!

Would you recommend that your friends travel to Northeast Ohio?

I would definitely recommend that my friends travel to Northeast Ohio. Ohio gets the reputation of being such a dull and boring state, but the area is so great and has come so far and still has so much potential. Northeast Ohio has so much to offer that others overlook but we all greatly appreciate it.

Why do you think Eastern Lake County should care about what Cleveland does? Does it affect us?

There are a lot of reasons ELC should care about what Cleveland does, we are very much affected by it. It’s a huge part of where we live and unfortunately there are still a lot of people yet to get involved or to be appreciative, but it’s a work in progress that has been quite successful and will continue to grow for the better.