A year ago I, along with about 100 other people, sat in a room in a church in Cleveland Heights and listened to John Zitzner, the founder and head of E CITY in Cleveland, describe his dream for building a school that would expand on the E CITY concept to create an Entrepreneurship Academy for inner city kids in grades 6-12.

Some time ago we posted a brief, one page outline about John’s then nascent plans in the Action Plans section of TechFutures. If you go there now you’ll see it’s been replaced by something else: The website that outlines not just the progress Zitzner and team have made to date, but their action plan for the next year, which includes officially launching the school–now called Entrepreneurship Preparatory School–this coming school year.

Want to see what a difference a year can really make? Check the site out for yourself: the dream is now a rapidly developing reality. And as John said in his recent talk at The City Club, “The next thing we have to do is figure out how to scale this, how to build 12 more of these in our region so that we can serve thousands of kids, not just a hundred or two.”

John has done an amazing thing in driving Entrepreneurship Prep into reality. But he readily admits he can’t achieve region-wide scale by himself. He wants and needs your help.

A year ago during the workshop to develop the region’s technology strategy (which led to the creation of this site and the report, “Navigating the New Realities of the North Shore“), education was identified as the single biggest concern weighing on the participant’s minds.

John, who was one of those workshop participants, has done something about it. Now, what will you do to build on the solid foundation John has created?