A Gift Built for Generations: Warren E. Anderson and the Place Where Opportunity Meets Community

On a chilly morning this fall, about 60 first-graders walked into a building on East 66th Street, pulled on white coats and treated their first patients: teddy bears. The “Junior Doctor for a Day” event, hosted by Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) and the Cleveland Browns Foundation, was designed to help young children imagine themselves in medicine someday.

The building that welcomed them now carries the name of a man who has spent his career investing in people. On October 7, the Cleveland Foundation celebrated the naming of the Warren E. Anderson MidTown Collaboration Center, recognizing a transformative philanthropic investment from Warren Anderson, CEO of The Anderson-DuBose Company.

“Warren, your gift to our community is a beacon of hope,” Lillian Kuri, president and CEO of the Cleveland Foundation, said at the celebration.

Generosity rooted in people

Those who know Anderson describe his giving the same way they describe his leadership.

“If you ask people what Warren is known for, it’s how much he values people,” Kuri said. “He has made it a point throughout his career to invest in people and to ensure that both he and his company are giving back to the communities they serve.”

For decades, Anderson has mentored and opened doors for people who might not otherwise have had them opened. At Anderson-DuBose, which he has led for more than three decades, the company emphasizes that giving back is something employees can do together.

“When you genuinely try to help the people and the places around you, your employees are happier, and your business is stronger,” Anderson said. “It comes back to you.”

From industrial site to community crossroads

The place Anderson chose to invest in has its own story of renewal. For decades, the two-block site at East 66th Street and Euclid Avenue held a plating company whose operations polluted the community’s air and made the land nearly unusable. Cleanup began just three years ago, as residents and partners of the Cleveland Foundation came together around a different future.

Today the corner connects Downtown to University Circle. Kuri calls it “the new corner of Main and Main — not simply where two streets meet, but where opportunity meets community.”

The Warren E. Anderson MidTown Collaboration Center, known as the MCC, was designed as civic infrastructure: a place to bring nonprofit, civic, philanthropic and community partners together, open and visible to the neighborhood around it.

“A throughline of Warren’s life is an understanding that lasting impact is only possible when you invest in the people and places who make it happen,” said Kuri. “It is incredibly fitting that his name will now welcome Clevelanders into a space built around those same values; bringing people together, building connections and creating new possibilities for the entire community.”

The Sixty6: the neighborhood’s living room

For many neighbors, the MCC’s front door is the Sixty6 Music Lounge & Studio, giving residents, workers and visitors a reason to come in and stay awhile.

The music lounge hosts free concerts and DJ sets several nights a week, including Sunday concerts and line dancing on the first Friday of each month. In its first year, the Sixty6 hosted more than 90 free concerts.

Pearl’s Kitchen & Taproom, led by chef Tiwanna Scott-Williams, serves elevated Southern comfort food. Over lunch there, researchers, entrepreneurs and neighbors share tables, and some of the building’s best ideas start as hallway and lunch-counter conversations.

The rest of the building opens up to the community, too. A Winter Wonderland celebration drew 450 attendees, and the building’s spaces host art exhibitions, neighborhood meetings and youth events like Junior Doctor for a Day.

What Anderson’s gift makes possible

After its first year, the MCC is fully leased. NEOMED opened its Cleveland Health Innovation Center in the building this fall, and the proximity is already producing new work. Dr. Bernhard Fassl and his team at NEOMED connected with University Hospitals Rainbow Center for Women & Children and Birthing Beautiful Communities to launch a maternal and infant health research program for Cleveland’s East Side.

“This model for community collaboration and innovation is working,” Kuri said. “The MidTown Collaboration Center was built to bring people together across sectors and around shared goals, and it continues to show what’s possible when place-based investment is aligned with purpose.”

Even the gift presented to Anderson at the celebration came from the building. Cleveland Institute of Art students used technology inside the MCC to 3D-print a replica of the Warren E. Anderson MidTown Collaboration Center for him to keep.

Kuri described what the building offers its neighbors simply: a place where residents can feel “they matter. Their neighborhood matters. Their future matters.”

Just the beginning

For Anderson, the building’s promise lies in what it brings together. “It can create entrepreneurs,” he said. “It can give new musical talent a breakout stage. It can inspire state-of-the-art medical research.”

And he does not see it as the last word. “There will be other buildings,” Anderson said. “This is just the beginning.”

For 60 first-graders in white coats, it already is.