Flourish
verb - to grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly favorable environment
About the flourish award
The Flourish Award directly supports leaders who invest their time, resources, and often their own well-being to serve women in Cleveland. This work often goes unrecognized, undervalued, and overlooked even though it is critical to our individual and collective well-being. Our hope is that the Flourish Award will help to replenish and refuel local changemakers, sustaining their invaluable contributions to our whole Cleveland community
Read more here about Collaborate Cleveland's perspective on women and gender justice.
The Flourish Award is a pivotal step toward our vision of a Cleveland that supports, amplifies, and celebrates women.
Who are “Changemakers”?
Flourish Award Changemakers are individuals who have done one or more of the following in the past two years:
Heal, serve, and partner with communities to make them safer, more accepting, and more supportive of women, nonbinary individuals, and all negatively impacted by gender injustice.
Organize action around gender justice and individuals negatively impacted by gender injustice.
Advocate for individuals negatively impacted by gender injustice.
Champion, sponsor, and/or mentor women, nonbinary individuals, and all negatively impacted by gender injustice on their path to becoming changemakers of their own.
How You Can Support Flourish Award Recipients
Learn
Begin by learning about each award recipient, their work, and their aspirations to serve women in Cleveland. After better understanding their goals and the challenges they face, determine how best to support their efforts.
Contribute
Consider ways you might contribute: can you offer financial support, volunteer your time, help with organizing initiatives, or spread awareness of their mission within your networks?
Engage
Stay informed about the broader work of Collaborate Cleveland—including our advocacy work around Paid Family Leave and Paid Equity—and remain engaged with our activities to foster a stronger, more connected community working toward gender justice.
Process and Recipient Selection
Collaborate Cleveland’s Inaugural Advisory Committee helped to develop our strategic framework, including the Flourish Award. Committee members stressed the need to recognize and celebrate local changemakers—specifically unsung heroes—who serve and partner with women and further gender justice in Cleveland. Honoring the committee members’ deep hope and sense of purpose for the award, they are acting as nominators for the award’s inaugural year.
As the Flourish Award matures, we will continue to explore how to adapt and evolve the nomination and selection process.
The Flourish Award: The Journey
The journey of The Flourish Award began with a simple but powerful question: How can we better support the changemakers who dedicate their lives to uplifting women and advancing gender justice in Cleveland? Recognizing the emotional, physical, and financial toll of this work, we set out to create something that not only honors these leaders but also provides meaningful, restorative support.
2023
In 2023, Collaborate Cleveland formed our inaugural Advisory Committee, a group of 15 local women leaders. The committee pinpointed the need for organizations in Cleveland to increase their support of local changemakers whose work centers around serving women, addressing gender inequities, and fighting for gender justice—essential work that takes a toll and too often goes overlooked. The group identified the need for Collaborate Cleveland to support these changemakers with nontraditional funding used in ways they identified as replenishing.
2024
In 2024, Collaborate Cleveland convened a smaller steering committee, including members of the Inaugural Advisory Committee, to think through how to create a fund that met these goals. The committee began with an analysis of the 2023 research done by Rosa Consulting, LLC, which was drawn from a combination of feedback from our Advisory Committee, other nonprofits, and conversations with individual community members.
As the committee developed the fund’s blueprint, it also consulted with the nonprofit law firm Adler & Colvin. With the firm’s guidance, we identified that honoring local changemakers with awards as the best way to accomplish the fund’s goals, directly supporting local changemakers’ wellbeing, and sustaining them in their work.
2025
In 2025, the Flourish Award was launched.
