Case Study: TV20 Forty Forward Fellowship

TV20 Forty Forward Fellowship — City of Cleveland Youth Broadcast Training Program : Civic media station strategic partnerships

Role: Strategic Consultant, TV20 Cleveland — Executive-level strategy across Operations, Marketing, and Business Development Category: One initiative within TV20's broader Strategic Partnerships & Business Development strategy Status: In Development. Building the program design; actively sourcing BOCES partnerships, program sponsors, and underwriters.

The Origin I didn't arrive at TV20 looking for a media project. I arrived from a year inside Cleveland's Department of Community Development, where I'd written a stack of white papers on what actually moves the needle for residents versus what just looks like it does. One finding kept surfacing regardless of the topic: marketing and communication is not a support function in civic work, it is a pillar. A program can be well-designed and still fail if nobody hears about it in a form they trust.

The honest version of what happened next: Community Development wasn't structurally positioned to absorb the pace of innovation FUSE and I were bringing to the table. That's not a complaint, it's just how municipal timelines and pilot-stage strategy work sometimes meet. What it meant practically was that I had real bandwidth left over, and I used it to look sideways at what else the City of Cleveland was working through.

That's how I found TV20, in the middle of renovating what was, structurally, a 40-year-old division of city government, under new leadership actively rethinking what a municipal media operation could be. I saw a station with the exact infrastructure Cleveland needed to reach residents at scale, sitting one strategic layer away from using it. That gap is the entire reason I'm consulting here now.

Where This Fits This Fellowship is one build within TV20's larger Strategic Partnerships and Business Development strategy, the same work spanning CRA-aligned bank partnerships, the 40th anniversary repositioning, and the station's broader revenue and sponsorship architecture. It's the flagship of that strategy, not the whole of it, and the clearest single proof point for what the rest of the strategy is trying to prove.

The Brief Within that strategy, one initiative crystallized fastest: a youth media training program that will put Cleveland high schoolers inside a working broadcast studio and teach them to run it. My brief is to build the program design, the partnership case, the architecture, and the visual materials strong enough to bring lenders, foundations, and civic-minded corporate partners to the same table before a single fellow steps into the studio.

The Work

• Structured the program's core numbers into a case built to hold up under real scrutiny: six fellows per cohort, 144 broadcast training hours, eight Specialization Tracks, forty fellows at full scale

• Built a documentation framework aligned to CRA standards, so a bank's compliance desk can evaluate this as measurable, LMI-aligned community development, not a sponsorship with a photo op attached

• Built the Sponsor a Track model, letting a partner fund one of eight Specialization Tracks (Finance, Economic Empowerment, Homeownership & Housing, Civic & Community, Culture & Arts, Health & Wellness, Bridging Gaps, Career & Workforce Pathways) so support can meet a partner where their mission already lives

• Designed the Studio Learning Environment spread on real production-floor photography, not renderings, because the space a sponsor funds is the same one TV20 broadcasts from every day

• Directed the supporting photography for the program's materials, building the visual case ahead of the first cohort

• Advising station leadership on the program build-out structure and pillars

• Alongside the Fellowship, advising station leadership on the broader operations, marketing, and business development strategy tied to TV20's 40th anniversary repositioning, the Fellowship is the flagship, not the whole assignment

Why It Matters This program is being built now, structure, curriculum, partnership case, and studio design, ahead of the first fellow ever stepping into the studio. That sequencing is deliberate: a bank's compliance desk, a foundation program officer, and a corporate sponsor should all be able to say yes to a fully designed program before it launches, not after. The difference between a program that launches once and a program that reaches forty fellows a year at full CRA-aligned scale is the sponsors and underwriters willing to fund what's already built.

Where It Stands This is a live build, not a finished case study. The program design and CRA framework are ready for a bank's compliance desk today. What's still open: a BOCES-style educational partner to formalize the curriculum pipeline, and the sponsors and underwriters who take this program from fully designed to fully funded and launched. If that's you, or you know who that is, this is the moment to reach out. The second half of this case study gets written with your name in it. Case study prepared by Delanie West, MBA, Founding Principal, Be Super Creative.