“IS CLEVELAND DYING? Sure it's dying,” my breakfast appointment says casually, as if tossing aside unwanted crusts from his wheat toast.

WE'RE SITTING at bustling Corky & Lenny's deli in Woodmere, where this whip-smart CEO, barely 40 and holder of a degree from a brand-name American business school, doesn't stand out for his unusual style or palpable energy.

With a black dress shirt, closely cropped hair and designer glasses, he looks more like the hipster Dutch architect who's designing the new World Trade Center than anyone you'd encounter amid the brocade-curtained formality of Cleveland's Union Club. A native of the Middle East by way of a tour of corporate duty in Europe, he's gotten to know a lot of places on several continents and thus has some context to judge cities and their economic health. So I asked for his outsider's perspective on Cleveland.

His take was far from rosy. Cleveland's old wealth isn't investing in the kinds of things that will generate the next round of wealth, he thinks. And then there's all the empty posturing of the business community. He'd attended a nonprofit event the evening before, and he came away unimpressed.

“Everyone is on this committee or that committee (devoted to the region's economy). But what have (they) done?” he asks with a frustration typical of most entrepreneurs who prefer action to talk.

In his new book, A People Adrift, which assesses the state of the Catholic Church in the wake of the clerical sex scandals, longtime New York Times religion writer Peter Steinfels observes that the church “is on the verge of either an irreversible decline or a thoroughgoing transformation.” That seems to also describe the current state of affairs for Cleveland and its surrounding region. The area will either slowly decline or turn the corner to something better. And unlike my breakfast partner, I see plenty of cause for optimism.

AFTER ALL the corporate headquarters moves, the stagnant population and the endless, dispiriting waves of media “Quiet Crisis” pummeling, followed more recently by the convention center fiasco and the electrical infrastructure failures, there's plenty of evidence that we may well have hit our collective breaking point.

But has it broken our civic spirit beyond repair? And is that in turn prompting a regional death spiral?

Surely a nearly unprecedented series of bad developments has given rise to the impression of disaster. The clumsy, high-profile manner in which the convention center idea crashed only illustrated the deeper civic dysfunction and political leadership vacuum. The vacuum is fed by an unfortunate juxtaposition: back-to-back mayoralties of one of Cleveland's strongest-ever leaders (Mike White, who believed in too little democracy), and one of the weakest-ever (Jane Campbell, who may believe in it too much to really lead such a financially challenged city).

To complicate matters, several of the institutional players who in the past always stood in the background, ready to prop up the flagging public sector — the so-called “shadow governments,” as Campbell aide Tim Mueller publicly referred to them early in the administration — have had their attention diverted by their own challenges. Both the Cleveland and Gund foundations have seen the recent retirements of their longtime leaders, each big-foot players in all things regional.

As for the top law firms, stabilizing (some would say meddling) powers behind the civic scene for at least a century, one has recently spectacularly dissolved (Arter Hadden), while the largest (Jones Day) has a new managing partner who no longer operates out of Cleveland, sending another shock wave through the town's teetering morale.

Of course, we've been here before, after municipal default in the late '70s. But there are some major differences. For one, unlike crises past, we can't lean on cavalries of cash from Columbus or Washington. Today, Northeast Ohio's political representation is at an historically bad juncture to bring home political pork from either Capitol Hill or the Ohio Statehouse, at precisely the moment in which the region so desperately needs giant capital infusions.

Where senior state legislators, such as Patrick Sweeney, were once in a leadership position and able to channel millions of dollars to this area, the legislature's power has shifted downstate. On the national level, the situation may be even worse. The reason you'll find Lou Stokes' name on so many buildings today hasn't so much to do with his famous name. Rather, it's because as a ranking, long-tenured member of the House Appropriations Committee — the “college of cardinals,” as it's been dubbed — he was in a position to steer hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts and earmarked funding to Cleveland. That pump-priming money is now being channeled elsewhere.

So there's no getting around it: things look grim.

BUT TRY THESE different lenses on for a moment. I liken the region's dynamics to “capitulation,” a term stock traders use for the tipping point at which long-term declining markets, having seemingly reached their worst possible point and having dished out the maximum investor pain and despair (with no end to the carnage in sight), can finally reverse course and march back upward.

As painful as this community transition might be in the short term, not unlike an addict's hitting rock bottom, the moment of capitulation ultimately proves to be the necessary precursor to recovery. After all, nothing so concentrates the mind as the prospect of being shot at dawn. It has a stimulating effect on creativity, and prompts innovation, however crisis-driven it might be.

And our impending regional execution has given rise to plenty of innovation in the civic sphere. It has helped birth a tremendous outpouring of formal and informal groups and initiatives designed to cure what ails us. Web-enabled networks of activists have added speed, scale and at least some coordination to the dense network of individuals and formal and informal groups working on their own brand of economic development.

All of this requires some overarching leadership, if even of the merely rhetorical variety.

And Progressive Insurance's Peter B. Lewis, in some ways perhaps the most

unlikely Cleveland leader of all, has provided much of it. His searing critique of a key regional institution — Case Western Reserve University — hit like a nuclear blast, echoing even louder today than when he first dropped it a year and a half ago. He called CWRU “a diseased university that is collapsing and sucking Cleveland into a hole with it.” And he pointed to cautious corporate lawyers and interlocking boards of directors as among the things holding the town back.. Cleveland and its key institutions haven't been the same ever since.

As if to cleanse itself from the disease, CWRU has changed its name (or in the new-age parlance, “rebranded” itself) as Case, angering pre-merger Western Reserve alumni and, sources say, wasting more than a quarter million dollars of work performed by a Minnesota ad agency commissioned by new Case President Ed Hundert.

But in a more meaningful vein, the university has been racing to help energize and support every form of regional economic development organization and strategy it can find. It has all but pledged its billion-dollar-plus endowment to help save the area.

And just as regional economic development has won a powerful new supporter in Case, it has also gained considerable momentum from a near-disaster. Last summer's power outage that prompted a loss of water may one day come to be viewed as a positive development, a stunningly concrete reminder that this region of ancient inner city, inner-ring suburbs and even white-and-wealthy outer-ring exurbs actually do share a common fate.

No longer can we pretend to be a region only in the superficial sense of sharing a single broadcast signal or a common rooting interest in the Browns, Cavs and Indians. Now, we've been freshly reminded — by a particularly vivid near-catastrophe, no less — that we also share a common infrastructure delivering the most elemental building blocks of life. And that should eventually trump the arguments of even the most obstructionist of parochial interests clinging to the political and business status quo.

Former Cleveland Press reporter and Cleveland Edition columnist Fred McGunagle, a wonkish, walking institutional memory of Cleveland, has written about how Cleveland missed a choice opportunity a century or more ago by failing to aggressively pursue annexation as the price for outlying areas being allowed to tap into its water system. We can't go back and change that, but we can use the near-disaster to drive a range of meaningful forms of closer cooperation, if not full political integration.

THE PARALLELS BETWEEN Cleveland's situation and that of the Catholic Church don't end at the turning point of decline or transformation. Each is being shaken to the core by loud internal grassroots demands for reform and real, not simply cosmetic, power-sharing. Like the church — whose dogmatic hierarchy is being pushed from within to modify its old top-down, father-knows-best approach — the region's usual-suspects brand of governance is similarly being forced to justify itself.

And in both cases, it took a wealthy, homegrown maverick entrepreneur to deliver some harsh medicine in the form of an embarrassingly public tongue-lashing. CWRU had Peter Lewis. And the local church and Bishop Anthony Pilla had Jack Kahl, who brought things to a head by publicly challenging the bishop to pledge that no funds solicited on behalf of Catholic Charities would be diverted toward settling lawsuits over sexually abusive priests. To this day, he's never received a reply from the bishop.

Like Kahl and Lewis, most entrepreneurs have a way of boldly saying what's on their mind. So I find it an altogether healthy development that these more independent voices are increasingly being courted and listened to by business groups and even the local media.

And there are others who have something crucial to teach the rest of us about how business can be both a wealth-building and civic-building enterprise. These non-leader leaders include the likes of Coventry Road's Tommy Fello, who somehow finds a way, unlike most in his industry, to provide his Tommy's restaurant employees with health coverage.

Or like David Gray, who for more than a decade has been confounding skeptics who insist that the economics of book publishing work against local and regional-themed subjects. Instead, his Gray & Co. Publishers has published nearly 50 of those excellent books, which have added color and depth and energy to the region's story.

Or Cindy Barber, who, as the former editor of this publication, invested her modest nest egg in saving her neighborhood by purchasing an old Slovenian dance hall. It resulted in the creation of the Beachland Ballroom, a nationally known music venue that has helped turn once-blighted North Collinwood into a better place.

But even dozens of these bright and highly motivated mavericks won't be nearly enough to replace the old political/business leadership vacuum we have.

Thankfully, they won't have to. They're being joined by a rising cohort of hundreds of what might be called social entrepreneurs. These are community leaders who aren't elected to office, nor who even run a business or organization (though some do).

Instead, their stock in trade is social (and sometimes financial) capital, accumulated simply through the power of their ideas, achievements and social networks. And in their rich appreciation for the town's real culture, history and appealing stew of ethnic complexity, these activists are building a new generation of leadership richer than anything that went before largely because they are increasingly being connected through small collaborations that can often lead to large changes.

That's not to say there won't be plenty of death rattles from the old guard, eager to

hold onto their power. Dick Pogue, perhaps the embodiment of old-guard Cleveland establishment top-down leadership (and the man whose legendary arrogance probably first lighted Lewis's anger), is a great example. When challenged by a group of City Club young leaders about when he and his kind might finally step aside, or at least share the leadership reins with a younger generation of leaders, the former Jones Day managing partner and Dix & Eaton PR counselor, responded with a ringing counterchallenge: When are you going to take it away from me?

INDEED, WHEN? We've done it before. Cleveland has a glorious legacy upon which to turn for examples of meaningful civic renewal. Once called the best-governed city in America by no less seminal a figure than the writer Lincoln Steffens, a century ago Cleveland was considered a national laboratory for the Progressive movement, which grew out of a general revulsion for end-of-the-century excesses by Wall Street and radical Republican presidential administrations.

History, of course, can be just as easily used as a hobbling crutch as an inspiring enabler. The tough love news is this: we'll need to “right size” some of our old notions of ourselves as a major American city. Similarly, we'll need to drop the endless, maudlin mourning over Cleveland's shouldawouldacouldas, over its once lofty position as America's sixth-largest city 50 years ago.

It's time to finally get over all that and look ahead.

Admittedly, it's hard to do so when all around us, like an ancient fossil record, are the remnants of the brawny, booming giant that was Cleveland in the 1920s. Look at the giant proportions of the Huntington Building, once the world's second largest office building, and still home to a bank lobby of such immense scale as is rarely seen outside of international financial centers such as New York and London. Cleveland was on its way to that kind of success 80 years ago, but the Great Depression (and the move away from railroads and so much more) forever altered that course.

Now it's the 21st century, and we need to construct a broad vision and a new course.

And rather than just visions of bricks and mortar, that broad vision should, and must, focus on people. It should focus more on education and training than simply building better housing, a far easier task than building better lives.

These new activist leaders will have to be careful to walk that fine line between being co-opted by the establishment and scaring them off, as an earlier generation of activists did, the nonprofit warriors who lit a fire at a catalytic event in the spring of 1982. Activists picketing British Petroleum chairman Alton Whitehouse at his country club sparked a massive pulling back from corporate giving to politically active nonprofits that might embarrass them with such public challenges. As a revealing 1998 report to the Ford Foundation on the subject of building Cleveland's community development capacity put it, that '82 crisis has had the unintended effect of speeding a focus on bricks and mortar rather than on crucial human capital. And we've been paying for it ever since.

FINALLY, AND CRUCIALLY, if this more sensible, more sustainable and more democratic regional landscape has any chance at all of taking root and flourishing, we'll need a smarter, more knowing local media. A media better able to take the community's pulse because of its closer, more authentic connections to average people and to grassroots movements. A media with a better grasp of the region's history, and thus with a better sense of its future possibilities. A media that can somehow treat its audience as citizens at least as much as mere consumers.

Only a more enlightened local media can sift through the din of a thousand discordant conversations, hopes and promises before focusing on those voices of progressive brilliance that can lead us where we need to go.  It's not by accident, after all, that so many of these new-style leaders I mentioned have an earlier background in the media or are concocting new forms of media. If those who have studied personal and social change can agree on anything, it's this: leaders and change agents must first imagine a better situation before they can set out to realize it.

I'm deeply hopeful (call me foolish if you like) that even such traditionally rigid institutions as the Plain Dealer will in some fashion be at least part of this new breed of smarter media. Like the town it covers, the PD is itself poised at a transitional point, stuck about halfway between the old Alex Machaskee publisher-as-strongman era and Doug Clifton's bristly-outsider-reformist regime. Like the Catholic Church and the region it covers, the newspaper is balanced on the edge of either thoroughgoing reform or inevitable decline.

THERE'S NO ESCAPING the fact that this new era is going to be a messier thing, and that this more vibrant form of conversation, collaboration and governance won't be as easily comprehended as the old command-and-control structure it's slowly but inevitably replacing. That goes especially for those weaned on the old Cleveland “public-private partnership” myth, which was always more monologue than conversation anyway and long overdue for updating.

My prayer for my weary old town in the first weeks of the new year is a simple one, really.

I hope that its citizens might awaken to a realization that we're all in this together, and that solving our regional civic challenges can no longer be a spectator sport. And that we come to learn that every small change or improvement each of us might initiate on our own amounts to something staggering when combined with those of 1.4 million people who live in Cuyahoga County and four million in Northeast Ohio.