"...Reflecting on the experience, I keep coming back to the feeling I got from the first moments spent together in the  Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative  downtown space, which was something along the lines of, “we all speak the same language.”  I’ve been to many conferences and I’ve attended plenty of professional development, but I’ve found it rare that, in a room full of diverse backgrounds as with the 2013 Vanguards, the group will nonetheless feel an immediate kinship of shared values..."