It’s possible that Tomas Schorgl has saved the arts in Cuyahoga County, or at least many of the region’s arts organizations. When the Cleveland Foundation and The George Gund Foundation formed the Community Partnership for Arts & Culture (CPAC) in 1997 – having recognized the need to create a single agency to work the area’s public, private and arts and cultural sectors to develop and implement a regional arts and cultural strategy – they hired Schorgl as the organization’s president and CEO. He left another successful job in the arts in Dayton and moved to Cleveland to take on this challenge, not knowing for certain if this job was going to be permanent or even long-term.

Schorgl worked tirelessly – attending hundreds of meetings of all kinds, as well as studio visits and other forms of research and outreach – to build invaluable, and previously nonexistent, bridges, first between the arts groups themselves, and then between arts, civic, business and political leaders. And then he set about to try to make everyone – from the business community and city and county government to the public – understand how important the arts are to a region. He conducted massive amounts of research on the arts scene that provided much new information for the community education effort that changed the public’s perception of the arts and their value. And almost as a by-product, along the way, he has also become an invaluable advisor and consultant to many arts organizations, large and small, throughout the region.

Among Schorgl’s many achievements here have been working with Cleveland City Council to change zoning laws and enable the creation of downtown spaces in which artists can live and work; influencing the Cuyahoga County Commissioners to implement the Arts & Culture as Economic Development (ACE) grants; creating CPAC’s Artist as Entrepreneur Institute to provide business training to artists; and his advocacy of programs like Sparx in the City, which has created more than $200,000 worth of work for more than 700 artists. 

But his greatest accomplishment so far has been his efforts in an undertaking that culminated in the November 2006 passage of Issue 18, a countywide tobacco tax that will produce approximately $20 million in support for arts and cultural organizations. Not only did he work on and with City and County officials, business and civic leaders, and State lawmakers (laws needed to be changed to allow for public support of the arts here), but he even drafted the legislation.

In the process, he convinced people from an array of sectors of the many ways arts can positively affect a region, from the importance of the arts in the development of children to the economic impact the arts can have on the region. But nearly as difficult and significant was pulling together the disparate parts that had comprised the area’s arts community into a cohesive political force. As part of that process, he helped educate the media and, by extension, the public, about the real meaning and value of the arts. And he did that, as he has done everything, with visionary and passionate leadership.