Fresh Water contributor Nikki Delamotte offers up a perfect slice of Cleveland with an insider's tour of the Cedar-Lee neighborhood.

On an average day, Brian Gesler works as a computer programmer at a Cleveland insurance company. But for one weekend last month, he was busy creating jet packs that could one day be used by astronauts on Mars.
 
He crowded around tables in a conference room at NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center campus with a team he’d just met. Some sketched prototypes across sheets hung on the walls, others pecked away frantically on laptops. They called themselves Moon Tang Clan.
 
Gesler and his team were one of 17 groups in Cleveland that took part in the 2016 International Space Apps Challenge. Since 2012, the hackathon has brought together coders, artists, and general tinkerers to use open data provided by NASA to spark solutions to many of the aeronautics and space agency’s most pressing hurdles. The event now spreads across 161 locations around the globe.

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Fresh Water takes a closer look at CIFF's local offerings and finds a field of sunflowers, two opposite sisters and the man behind Melt's flying grilled cheese sammie.

The non-profit ioby will open offices in Cleveland this March to help grassroots community improvement efforts get off the ground.

Lindsay Marissa Osborne traveled the world to find the good in other people and cultures for her Small World Project.

For small business owners reclaiming historic space, the path is different but the goal is the same: to use the foundation of antiquity as building blocks for modern ventures.

For the first time in four decades, CIA is united under one roof, opening a whole new set of possibilities for the innovative art school.

Parks and other play spaces are designed for young people, yet youth are seldom asked for their input. A new initiative engages Cleveland kids in design and encourages them to consider careers in this area.

A group of civic hackers explored how transparency can be used to monitor the new consent decree and address disparity.

Each year, CIA's annual Spring Design Show showcases up-and-coming ingenuity in our own backyard. Outside of these four walls, CIA students are helping to transform Cleveland through their creative products and innovations.

The new George Gund Building at the Cleveland Institute of Art is the perfect complement to the Uptown district, and a place where students can collaborate and create.

Entrepreneurial growth in Cleveland has drawn aspiring business owners to the city. Hispanic business owners face added challenges, yet efforts are underway to bolster their success.

Our city seems to be constantly in the spotlight these days, for our innovations as well as our challenges. Meet a group of leaders who are redefining the narrative of our city and pushing us to collectively move forward.

Using the local food scene as a launch pad, craft food startups are growing quickly. We caught up with a fresh batch to learn the recipes behind their success.

For every well-regarded artifact on display in Cleveland’s world-class museums there are countless more that fly under the radar. Fresh Water tagged along with curators from area museums as they showed off their favorite hidden gems, sharing often untold stories and behind-the-scenes peeks at choice treasures. 

Based on the dinner-party model, Cleveland SOUP provides financial support for innovative, locally based initiatives that touch on sustainability, public art and diversity. As garnering funds can often be one of the tallest hurdles for independent upstarts, SOUP has helped offset those costs in more than 60 cities.

In Cleveland’s ever-evolving social media community, there is a wide variety of contributors to the civic dialogue. We've complied a list of some of our favorite voices -- a mix of up-and-comers and seasoned vets from different corners of the web who are using their blogs, podcasts and Twitter feeds to give the city a voice.