Co-founded by two young women from Pittsburgh and Detroit, and responding to a young peoples’ idea-vacuum across similarly challenged older industrial cities, GLUE (the Great Lakes Urban Exchange), is a network of young urban leaders devoted to healthy, sustainable and equitable urban futures for the Great Lakes mega-region, stretching from Buffalo in the East to St. Louis in the West, and including cities large and small.

GLUE is premised on the belief that, in order to catalyze the kind of transformation and reinvestment necessary to alter the trajectory of so-called “declining” cities, new methods of sharing ideas across localities, and the elevation and replication of the most effective public policies, are urgently required.

Continued progress around the region demands that new people and ideas are brought into policy conversations long dominated by “the usual suspects.” To that end, GLUE has spent the last three years building a multi-sector network of civically engaged younger people who are committed to making their post-industrial city work.  GLUE has visited cities in eight states to build its membership. It launched the I Will Stay if… campaign, using images to animate the reasons why people choose GLUE cities, or why they may have to leave.  GLUE has voiced the priorities of younger leaders at conferences sponsored by the Brookings Institution, Next American City, and the Northeast Midwest Institute, among others. GLUE was invited to provide testimony about strategies for economic development at a 2008 Congressional Field Hearing sponsored by Rep. Brian Higgins (D-Buffalo). It has been featured on National Public Radio, in the New York Times, and across regional media outlets.

Whether online, at prior conferences, or at a variety of other GLUE-initiated virtual and in-person convenings over the years, GLUE members have repeatedly urged their cities to take advantage of the region’s unique opportunities—their location, infrastructure, and natural resources to name a few—in the interests of a shared and mutually beneficial future for their home city and its peers.   They have consistently revisited a vision of future prosperity that is emblematic of the very entrepreneurism that catapulted this constellation of cities to become a global economic superpower at the peak of the industrial revolution.