For the ninth year, Tommy's will be serving up all you can eat pancakes from 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. on Thursday, January 1st.  This is a perfect event for families and friends with out of town guests.

$7 adults

$5 children 12 and under

For a bit more fun, bring an unwanted but greatly appreciated gift for the raffle.

Dine in or order to go: 216.321.7757.  All proceeds benefit Heights Arts.

Tommy's is located in Coventry Village at 1824 Coventry Road.  Phone: 216.321.7757

FutureHeights, the civic engagement organization that produces the Heights Observer community news, is sponsoring an online fundraiser.

The online auction of over 190 goods and services, most donated by local independent merchants in the Heights area, will end its four week run Sunday, November 9, at 10:00 pm.

Wondering why your neighbor was hanging purple lights so far in advance of Halloween? They were part of the Domestic Violence Center’s Purple Light Nights campaign in October, coinciding with Domestic Violence Awareness month. Domestic violence is often associated with silence and shame. The purple lights were meant to raise awareness of the issue, build support for victims and encourage open discussion.

"Victory… Honor…Pride: All these mean nothing if you don’t have balls!" - Patches O’Houlihan.

Remember your middle school years in the '80s? Converse shoes, friendship bracelets, french cuffed jeans, and overalls with one strap left hanging free! The middle school dance where you showed off your moves to Poison, Naughty by Nature, and slow danced to Boys II Men (that is if you were brave enough to cross the gym line). Do you remember all the words to "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air"? Were you the king/queen of kickball in your school? The infamous dodge-ball champion? Or did you dodge the balls in fear of getting hit? Would you relive it all in a "Bringin' it Back to the Playground" Kickball/ Dodge-ball Tournament?

Heights Community Congress (HCC) is moving into the fall season with lots of exciting events. We hope to see you at the following activities:

After months of preparation, training and fundraising, a team from Sanctuary by joyce embarked on what would be an incredible journey. The issue of breast cancer was taken to the streets of Cleveland one step at a time.  Customers and employees of local business owner Joyce Fennell, walked 60 miles in 3-days for one cause, The CURE of breast cancer, and they did not walk alone.

You may be aware that only 65 percent of seventh graders in the Cleveland Heights/University Heights City School District scored at or above the proficient level in reading on the Ohio Achievement Test during the 2006-2007 school year.

However, did you know that 49 percent of adults in Cuyahoga County read below a functional level? This means that an estimated 486,847 individuals are at Level 1 or Level 2 literacy, which is below the Level 3 minimum necessary to function in today's society and are likely to be excluded from all but minimum wage work.

The elegant Tudor architecture of the Cedar-Fairmount retail neighborhood is a welcoming sign-post into Cleveland Heights. It is also among the most recognizable aspects of the unique and vibrant collection of stores, restaurants, galleries, and offices. To further enhance and celebrate this one-of-a-kind neighborhood, Friends of Cedar-Fairmount, the Cedar-Fairmount Special Improvement District (SID), and Heights Arts have combined forces to create elegant new street sign that celebrate the area's distinct beauty and more clearly designate to visitors their arrival in the neighborhood.

It’s early fall and time for a celebration of culture and color! Ten Thousand Villages Cleveland (TTVC) is celebrating its five-year anniversary by throwing “One Fabulous Fiesta,” a birthday party at Trinity Cathedral in downtown Cleveland from 6 to 10 p.m. on Friday September 19. TTVC is an independently operated nonprofit organization and a member of the oldest and largest fair trade organization in the world, located in the beautiful Trinity Commons. The nonprofit store features unique handicrafts from 36 different developing countries, including jewelry, home décor, stationery, musical instruments, toys, garden accessories and more. It also offers stories of the artisans’ lives and the hidden spirit with which they manifest their hardships into something that vivifies our lives.

It has become an annual tradition for the alumni of Open Doors Academy to leave behind their televisions, cell phones, and video games and give up a week of their summer and venture down into the heart of the Appalachian Mountains to Harlan, Kentucky. There they spend a week working long hours in the hot sun, helping people less fortunate than they are.

The Cleveland-based Summer Santa project concluded on July 15. The toys were sorted and packaged on July 16, and the truck filled with all the toys the people of Cleveland contributed, along with over 100 Classy Cruisers, tricycles, and wagons donated by Step 2, pulled out of Beachwood Place on Thursday, July 17.

The show of support from Clevelanders was tremendous. One woman donated three boxes full of Matchbox cars in their original packaging that her brother had collected for years. After her brother died, she wasn’t sure what to do with the cars, but when she heard about the toy drive, she decided to share them with the kids in Iowa.

My name is Patti. I moved to Cleveland Heights in 1997, and was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis a few months later. In the Heights it seems like most everyone knows someone with MS, and many of these friends and family of MS sufferers have banded together to raise money to fight the disease and to fund programs in our area.

Disciples Christian Church (formerly Euclid Avenue Christian Church) will offer a free community meal on Thursday, August 28, from 5-6:30 p.m. The church is located at 3663 Mayfield Road, at the corner of Mayfield and Yellowstone roads, in Cleveland Heights.

You can help kids devastated by the recent floods in Iowa enjoy their summer.

Summer vacation is well underway for your children, but for many kids in Iowa, life is hardly idyllic.  Two Cleveland Heights moms are raising donations to ease the trauma for these children.

Hillstone Road residents might be forgiven a stare or two the weekend of June 7, as they watched a garage being re-roofed by an all-woman crew.

Participants in Home Repair Resource Center’s women’s repair program, under the direction of Repair Instructor Jim Kunselman, did the entire job -removing the old roof covering, replacing water-damaged portions of the wood deck beneath it, and installing new modified bitumen roofing.

Heights Parent Center has received a $20,000 grant to promote family literacy in Cuyahoga County. The grant, the maximum available from the Dollar General Literacy Foundation, was one of three given within the state of Ohio, and one of 93 awarded to organizations in 32 states. The grant supports “Families Learning Together,” a pilot family literacy program offered by the center during 2007-08. The program's first year was funded by the Literacy Cooperative of Greater Cleveland, through a grant from Cuyahoga County, and a grant from the Deaconess Community Foundation.

Families with children of all ages can now enjoy The Nature Center at Shaker Lakes’ (NCSL) highly anticipated family-centered fundraising event this summer on Sunday, June 22, 2008, located at 2600 South Park Blvd. The traditional “Bug Bash,” geared toward children up to age 8 takes place from 3 to 6 p.m. Then it undergoes a metamorphosis to become “Chrysalis” from 6 to 9 p.m., ideal for youth ages 9 to 14.

Home Repair Resource Center recently benefited from the efforts of a group of University School students. Approximately forty students, grade nine through twelve, spent several hours mulching, pruning, weeding, and otherwise beautifying the landscape around HRRC’s office/teaching center on Noble Road. According to Andrew Swank, Senior Prefect for Hawley House (one of ten organizational divisions among the student body at the school), each house takes on a number of volunteer activities each year. The students of Hawley House previously assembled and distributed food baskets at Thanksgiving and worked with Habitat for Humanity.

Many readers of this inaugural edition of the Heights Observer may not know about its sponsoring organization, FutureHeights. FutureHeights is an eight-year old non-profit that evolved from a gathering of residents who successfully fought an ill-advised local redevelopment project. As a result of that experience, several far-sighted founding members recognized that Cleveland Heights would benefit from an organization dedicated to promoting good development, community amenities, and opportunities for citizen involvement. The group incorporated and set to work.

FutureHeights will distribute the first print version of the Heights Observer at its annual meeting at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 10th at the Heights Rockefeller Building.

The Eugene M. Adler Foundation has renewed its $25,000.00 annual operating support for Kulture Kids, a non-profit organization based in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.