Cleveland City Council has changed who can serve on the city's Commission on Black Women and Girls, broadening community representation on the 15-member panel that researches and reports on conditions facing Black women and girls across the city. The commission, created by council in 2022, is charged with advising the mayor, holding public hearings, issuing reports to City Council and recommending policies and legislation meant to give Black women and girls a voice in decisions that affect their lives.
As reported by Cleveland.com, council passed an ordinance on October 19, 2026 eliminating seats that had been reserved for a business representative, a college or university representative, a union representative and a grassroots organization representative. In their place, the commission now includes four community members simply interested in its work, along with resident representatives tied to the faith community, schools, health care and social services. A seat once set aside specifically for a hospital doctor has also been opened to any health care professional.
Who Sits on the Panel Now
The commission's overall size has not changed. It still includes 12 Cleveland residents alongside the mayor, one City Council member and a city employee appointed by the mayor, per Cleveland.com's reporting. Two seats remain reserved for college students, but those slots are now limited to students attending a community college, technical school or four-year university located in Cleveland. Two more seats are set aside for students ages 11 to 17, and those seats have been opened up to students from any school rather than being tied to a specific institution.
Term lengths were not altered by the new ordinance. Adult public members and the city employee serve three-year terms, while the younger student commissioners serve one-year terms. The underlying structure traces back to the Cleveland Codified Ordinances establishing the commission, which took effect October 25, 2023 and laid out seats for representatives from faith, business, schools, higher education, grassroots organizations, unions, hospitals and social services alongside the college and Cleveland Metropolitan School District students, according to the Cleveland Codified Ordinances.
A Commission Years in the Making
Council first created the commission in the summer of 2022, but it took nearly two years for the body to actually be seated and sworn in, according to ideastream.org. The commission's work is organized around four focus areas: education, economic development, health care, and justice and civil rights, the station reported. Its stated mission is to give Black women and girls a voice in shaping city policies and programs, and it is also charged with helping connect Black women and girls with existing services and resources.
The commission's creation followed a 2020 Bloomberg CityLab report that ranked Cleveland last among studied cities for overall outcomes for Black women, last for educational outcomes and second-to-last for health outcomes. That dismal ranking, along with research from the consulting firm Enlightened Solutions, helped build the case for a dedicated city body. Enlightened Solutions had been tapped by the city in 2022 to serve as a consultant to the commission, after the firm's own research — published as Project Noir: “Cleveland is Failing Black Women” — documented accounts of discrimination, harassment and abuse that Black women reported in health care, education and the workplace, drawing on stories collected from 450 Black women across Northeast Ohio.
Research Still Points to Little Progress
That research effort has continued well beyond its initial findings. Project Noir's 2024 round sought close to 1,000 responses from Black women across Northeast Ohio, nearly triple the survey responses gathered in 2020, according to Signal Cleveland. Despite the expanded sample, the 2024 results found that conditions for Black women in the region had not changed much, per reporting from Spectrum News 1. In that latest data, 79% of respondents said they were paid less than others in similar positions, 63% said they felt they needed to work harder than classmates to earn the same grades, and 56% said they had been spoken down to about health-related symptoms.
Those findings are feeding directly into the commission's current project: a planned report titled The State of Black Women and Girls in Cleveland, which is intended to provide updated health statistics, highlight priority concerns identified through efforts like Project Noir, and catalog existing initiatives and resources, per the same Signal Cleveland account. The commission's Healthcare Committee has asked other committees to review and contribute to sections tied to their areas of expertise, and the broader group has discussed whether to fund one full-time staff position or several part-time staffers to support the work. Members have also talked about reopening applications for youth commissioners to expand younger residents' representation on the body.
Cleveland.com's Hannah Drown, the outlet's city hall reporter who joined the publication in 2014, authored the original report on the council's ordinance. Cleveland.com noted that its article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by its staff before publication.
