Better Together: How Public-Private Partnerships Help Columbus Tackle Tough Problems

Central Ohio’s public-private partnerships are having a moment.

On a visit to Columbus in April, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said the region’s public-private ventures could be a model for the rest of the country. “There’s a culture here of intentional collaboration and a shared goal—I can feel it,” he said, according to a story in The Columbus Dispatch.

Then in May, the Biden administration tapped Columbus as one of five model workforce hubs—due in part to the efforts of public-private partnerships to help develop a trained workforce for multibillion-dollar manufacturing projects slated for the area.

That recognition is satisfying for Kenny McDonald, who’s been nurturing these types of regional projects for more than a decade—first as the leader of economic incubator One Columbus and more recently as president and CEO of The Columbus Partnership, a group of more than 80 leaders from the business, government, nonprofit and education sectors that dates back to 2002.

“It’s sort of a nonending dance that we do our best to orchestrate and facilitate,” McDonald says. When those efforts succeed—which is more often than not, he notes—they pay dividends for cities and functioning economies, he says.

Transformational projects require investment, energy and leadership from a range of public, private, academic and nonprofit sources, he says, which are all represented in the Partnership. “Nothing really large happens with only one piece of that,” McDonald says.

“It’s validating that someone would visit, like the secretary of education and others that come to our community, and say, ‘Wow, this really is more than the norm, and you’re doing some pretty interesting things.’ ”

Still, McDonald knows there’s much more work ahead.

“If you take issues like housing, transit, education, public safety—every one of them will require public-private partnerships; every one of them will require regional solutions,” he says. “Ultimately, it forces us to intellectually challenge ourselves to look for best practices in every part of the globe so we can bring them back here and put them to use in the Columbus way.

“Our biggest opportunities, as well as our biggest challenges, lie ahead of us, not behind us.”

Here are just a few examples of how such partnerships are already enacting change across Central Ohio.

Accelerate Her

One of the newer public-private partnerships launched in February when JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced a $3 million, three-year commitment to the Columbus Urban League’s Accelerate Her program.

The Columbus Urban League has a long history of providing economic, educational and social programs to empower underserved communities. When funding ran its course for an earlier program—Incubate Her, which helped Black women develop businesses during the pandemic—Stephanie Hightower, the urban league’s president and CEO, began talking to Chase about the next step.

Accelerate Her is intended to help develop the next million-dollar Black female-owned business in Columbus by providing access to resources and education, Hightower says.

“We at JPMorgan Chase are thrilled to partner with the Columbus Urban League in their ongoing work to lift up Black female entrepreneurs and their businesses here in Columbus,” Corinne Burger, the bank’s managing director and Columbus market leader, said in a press release.

The funds come from Chase’s AdvancingCities initiative, a $500 million, five-year program whose goal is to “bolster the long-term vitality of the world’s cities and the communities within them that have not benefitted from economic growth.”

“They’re putting their money where their mouth is, and they’re making sure their philanthropic dollars are having real impact,” Hightower says.

“That kind of investment is enormously beneficial to the community and, hopefully, all of those that participate,” McDonald says.

“We know that systemic racism is one of those barriers over time that has not allowed Black women and their businesses to thrive and to really contribute to the economy,” Hightower says, mainly because they didn’t have access to capital or technical support to grow. “The beauty about this public-private partnership is we have the private sector—Chase in particular—that is willing to make the investment to help create this program. But we also have other community partners, as well, and a research partner in place.”

Hightower says the first group of Accelerate Her participants has been selected. “A lot of people applied to get in the program; more than what we’d expected,” she says. “That just validated that there’s a need there.

“We’re going to be able to watch them grow and thrive.”

Data collected from the program will help even more entrepreneurs in the future, she adds.

Columbus Promise

In the second year of a three-year pilot program, Columbus Promise has already changed hundreds of young lives.

A partnership between the city of Columbus, Columbus City Schools, Columbus State Community College and college access program I Know I Can, the program provides eligible CCS graduates with access to six semesters of tuition-free classes at Columbus State, as well as a $500 stipend each semester for books and transportation, says Jen Gilbride-Brown, CSCC’s associate vice president.

Columbus Promise also offers a suite of services including academic advising, career counseling, internship opportunities and mentoring programs to “help get the students the resources that they need, as well as get them prepared for the workforce,” says Gilbride-Brown.

The first graduate of the program received an associate degree this spring, says Megan Noble, the school district’s executive director of career-technical education and workforce. About 600 graduates from CCS classes of 2022 enrolled in the program, and roughly the same number could join this year, she says. “That’s the power of programs like this,” Noble says. “This allows flexibility for our students who want a tuition-free option without taking loans, and they’re able to stay close to home.”

Promise programs were operating in other places when Columbus City Council President Shannon G. Hardin (a CCS grad himself) brought the idea to Columbus State President David Harrison, then-Superintendent Talisa Dixon and I Know I Can Executive Director Katina Fullen.

The area of the most interest for current students has been health care, says Gilbride-Brown, but “as we think about our needs in electrical and mechanical engineering, particularly as it relates to semiconductor work, we’re exposing them to some of those opportunities, as well.”

Project funding has come from “a broad, broad range” of organizations throughout the community, says Gilbride-Brown. “It’s very much a grassroots-funded initiative.”

Angela Chapman, CCS’ new superintendent and CEO, says that’s the commitment that made an impression on Cardona. “He was really impressed with the power of partnerships here in Columbus, and he named Columbus Promise as a perfect example of the ways that higher ed, K-12, the city and nonprofits are coming together to support our students,” she says. “He said he was going to take it back as a model” and help secure future funding.

“We would not be able to stand up this type of program” without public-private support, says Chapman. “It just wouldn’t happen.”

Franklin County Digital Equity Coalition

The term “digital divide” has been around for more than two decades, but the issue came into stark relief when the pandemic closed Central Ohio schools and libraries in the spring of 2020, cutting tens of thousands off from public access to computers and internet service they couldn’t afford in their homes.

“We are the biggest public computing hub in Central Ohio,” says Patrick Losinski, CEO of the Columbus Metropolitan Library, which gets more than 1 million reservations annually for computer time at its 23 locations.

The sudden loss of those services led to meetings with Columbus City Schools, the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, Jewish Family Services and others, who formed the Franklin County Digital Equity Coalition.

“I think getting everyone together really laid bare what public libraries have known for years,” says Losinski, “that there’s a real chasm between the [digital] haves and have-nots.”

The latter group includes 80,000 homes in Central Ohio that don’t have access to or can’t afford internet service, as well as thousands that lack a computing device other than a smartphone, says Jordan Davis, executive director of SmartColumbus.

Davis says SmartColumbus has been thinking about the digital divide since it won a $40 million federal grant in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s 2016 Smart City Challenge. Many of the resulting demonstration projects relied heavily on access to technology. “If you didn’t have the digital device, or the basic skills, or the data plan, or internet access, those were not accessible to you,” she says. “We acknowledged those issues early on but just didn’t have the resources from the grant to specifically solve that problem.”

SmartColumbus, which also participates in other private-public partnerships, is now leading planning and coordination of local programs to tackle the problem. “We’re in a transition phase from understanding and organizing to laying the foundation of what it would mean to scale efforts for deployment” of solutions, Davis says. “Every aspect of this has public-private partnership opportunities,” she says, including for telehealth, online banking and e-commerce.

Finding ways to deliver devices and provide internet access are obvious elements of the program, but training people to use the technology is another key to solving the problem.

The library system is adding “digital navigator” positions to work on inclusion for patrons, says Benjamin Reid, CML’s public services director. It’s also partnering with the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority to have a digital navigator focused on residents of public and subsidized housing. CML will also develop training for library staff, as well as staff from CMHA and National Church Residences, on digital inclusion topics, providing touchpoints in more communities.

Davis notes that the digital divide is also a workforce issue. “You need tech skills in almost any trade now, and that expectation is only going to continue to advance,” she says. “Having employees involved in workforce training programs, in digital education, digital skills building, is really, really important.”

Davis expects more federal and philanthropic funding for these programs in the coming year. She sees the situation as a historic moment.

“You have the resources that you never had before to really get after this problem,” she says. “Our challenge will be how you make it sustainable: Build an ecosystem of public-private partnerships that continue to invest in this work long after this moment.”

Chuck Nelson is a freelance writer.

This story is part of the Columbus Partnership feature package in the Summer 2023 issue of Columbus CEO.