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I love the idea of this site. We should all be learning best practices from each other. It’s such simple common sense, I’m surprised something like this hasn’t come around sooner.

Anyway, I in the attitude of sharing, I wanted to share with you an innovative grants program in Northeast Ohio (a 16 county region that includes the cities of Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown, and Canton) called EfficientGovNow.

EfficientGovNow is a competitive awards program that encourages greater government collaboration, cooperation and efficiency to strengthen the economic competitiveness of Northeast Ohio, and engages the public to advance and direct change. Launched by the Fund for Our Economic Future in 2009, EfficientGovNow aims to secure strong proposals for collaborative projects among 2 or more government entities, and then empowers the public to spur greater action for regional collaboration and efficiency by allowing them to comment on the proposed ideas, and vote on which projects should receive funding.

After a successful first held in August of 2009, EfficientGovNow has begun a second round of funding. More than 50 government collaboration projects have been submitted. After a vetting proce10 finalists will be selected & brought to a public vote during the month of May 2010. Up to four projects will be awarded up to $330,000 to implement their projects.

This is an exciting project because not only does it encourage local government to work together, but it also engages the public to reward and think about how their government can be more efficient. More details can be found at http://efficientgovnow.org