A group of motivated, young Midwestern natives thinks Toledo is great and wants to help the city show it.
Samuel Chang, Logan Sander, and Ruth Chang — graduates of both Sylvania Southview High School and Princeton University — along with Kalamazoo, Mich., native and MIT graduate Alex Lim, all dropped their early careers on the east coast to return to the Midwest and found Midstory, a nonprofit “media thinkhub” that aims to cultivate a love for Toledo among young people and attract outside talent to the area.
Samuel Chang and Logan Sander with Midstory.org Midstory is dedicated to retain, cultivate, and attract youth and the public from disparate segments of post-industrial cities—beginning in the city of Toledo, Ohio—by interweaving stories of science, art, and culture. Our Vision is to have a powerful midstory in the nation, curating a voice for postindustrial communities—toward renewed socio-cultural capital in the Midwest. www.midstory.org
Boyk Law has a new reason to be proud this summer as one of our former interns has returned
home to focus his efforts on making the Toledo area a place where people want to build their lives
and careers.
Telling great stories about Toledo to keep and attract people to our area, Midstory.org.
Starting from 1:27:30.
In this week’s podcast episode, Logan Sander, Alex Lim, Ruth Chang and Sam Chang talk about returning to Toledo with swanky Ivy League-level educations and founding a storytelling nonprofit. In providing promising young people both local and from around the country with a platform to share stories inspired by life in Toledo, Midstory looks to bolster Northwest Ohio’s self-image with a healthy dose of perspective.
In early March I received an interesting LinkedIn message from an old grade school peer. Her name is Logan Sander, and the last thing I had heard about her was that she had gone off to Princeton, and was back in Toledo to lead a media Thinkhub called Midstory. I was surprised by the entire situation; Logan’s message was to inquire about meeting for coffee, but I couldn’t help wondering why she moved back to Toledo from the East Coast, and why she would want to meet with me, the manager of a Toledo-based band.
After graduating from the GSD, Ruth Chang MArch ’17 is now back in Toledo, Ohio—her hometown—to start a nonprofit invested in the cultural renewal of the Midwestern region. Midstory‘s mission is to inspire, attract, and retain young talent by telling the hidden stories and enacting thought projects and programming in the area. Together with two of her Princeton alumni classmates and one alumnus from MIT, Ruth and her colleagues are on the ground to re-imagine the future of postindustrial towns in the Midwest, beginning in Toledo, Ohio…
Flyover country. Middle America. A cultural desert. These descriptions of America’s Midwest might sting if you’re a native, but, at this point, they are more than likely white noise to you, a ubiquitous background note played by east and west coast media outlets. They either tell a bleak tale of economic destitution, or a romanticized vision of a simpler, more agriculturally based way of life, neither of which exists on the coasts where those stories are written.
Either way, too often, someone else is telling the Midwest’s story. Four young people from this area are trying to change that with Midstory, a nonprofit that launched last year.
In the 1920s, “The Bright Young Things,” or “Bright Young People,” was a nickname given to young aristocrats or socialites in London. They were one of England’s first celebrity cultures. But it’s 2019, and I’m going to reuse the term to describe a different group of people. The young, intelligent, driven, creative individuals behind Midstory.
