Urban Green Entrepreneurship Program

Goal: Support a community-driven economic development initiative that integrates environmental restoration with local entrepreneurship in Cleveland’s Upper East Side neighborhoods.

For decades, Cleveland’s Upper East Side neighborhoods experienced chronic underinvestment despite being home to nearly 100,000 residents. Compared with the broader region, these communities faced significantly higher poverty and unemployment rates and substantially lower per capita incomes, limiting opportunities for economic growth, neighborhood revitalization, and environmental improvement.

To address these challenges, the Urban Ecological Entrepreneur Program was developed through a partnership among Shorebank Enterprise Group (now Rockland Trust), the City of Cleveland, local community development corporations, and TerrAqua. The program introduced a community-based approach to economic development that linked environmental stewardship with entrepreneurship, empowering residents to help shape the future of their neighborhoods while reconnecting redevelopment efforts with local environmental and land-use assets.

The initiative promoted environmentally sustainable business development as a pathway to job creation, new commercial activity, and long-term community capacity building. Program activities included providing environmental and site-specific information, identifying neighborhood priorities, reclaiming vacant and abandoned land, promoting pollution prevention practices, and improving neighborhood safety and livability.

The program’s goals were to: (1) identify and evaluate environmentally sustainable business and entrepreneurial opportunities; (2) develop business plans for the most promising ventures; and (3) build lasting local capacity to support environmentally and economically sustainable development.

Founded in 1994 as the community development arm of Shorebank Corporation, Shorebank Enterprise Group invested hundreds of millions of dollars in underserved urban and rural communities, including more than $55 million in Cleveland’s Upper East Side. Through its Enterprise Centers, it supported small business development and affordable housing initiatives. Today, Rockland Trust continues this mission by financing brownfield redevelopment and adaptive reuse projects in partnership with municipalities, community development corporations, and regional agencies, helping transform contaminated and underutilized properties into commercial, mixed-use, and affordable housing developments.

Client: Shorebank Enterprise Group