The Civic is a former Jewish temple located in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. The building was close to being abandoned and possibly torn down after its former congregation built a new facility farther out in the suburbs. This study describes how a former temple came to serve the community in a new and different way in the secular world. This study will chronicle the Civic as a historical building; describe the efforts to remake it into a multi-purpose building that is a community asset; and serve as a model to other communities interested in adapting houses of worship to secular purposes. While there are differences between states in terms of the details of this kind of preservation work, such as tax codes and other government regulations, the basic tools are the same everywhere. People responsible for the stewardship of older buildings that must be extensively retrofitted, as the Civic was, find it almost impossible to generate enough revenue to both sustain the operations of the building and to provide the capital necessary to perform the retrofit.

There are only two resources that can be accessed to fund a project such as saving the Civic - government and the private giving community. The people who saved the Civic were fortunate to find themselves in a city with people concerned about saving historical buildings and willing to use some of their political and monetary capital to help. They were also fortunate to live in a community with a wealth of private charitable foundations that also shared the city's goals of saving the best of its historical architecture.