The OhioX Tech Tour presented by HMB visits Toledo to talk with technology and innovation leaders in Northwest Ohio. Guest speakers include: Keith Instone of Dexterity User Experience, Gene Powell of Spoke, Molly Reams Thompson of Perrysburg Energy Solutions, and Logan Sander of Midstory.
Press RoomMidstory in the News
Design work is under way to create a master plan in Toledo’s Garfield neighborhood and amend existing urban improvement projects in the Old South End.
One homegrown organization, the media organization Midstory, was recruited to develop the initiative’s public education and awareness campaign.
We’re continuing to catch up with previous guests of The Rough Draft Diaries to see how their doing. This week we check in with Midstory, a nonprofit dedicated to creating an authentic Midwest voice through research, publication, public engagement, and broadcasting. We originally met with Midstory back in February of 2019. And that’s where we’re headed on the Rough Draft Diaries Revisit on FM 91.
Sam Chang is the co-founder at Midstory, Toledo’s Media Thinkhub, a nonprofit that examines, researches and reports on the issues of brain drain, community, and the historical intersections between environment, industry, and technology.
In this episode, we spoke with Sam about why he returned to Toledo after attending Princeton and beginning his career on the East Coast, what exactly is a thinkhub and how their work can help cities like Toledo across the country.
Brain Drain? Urban Flight? Who really wants to live around here if they don’t have to? The answer to the last question, it turns out, is Logan Sander, Samuel Chang, Ruth Chang, and Alex Lim, co-founders of Midstory.
One year ago, this group of recent graduates returned to Toledo to found a “media thinkhub” called Midstory that they hoped would become a catalyst for economic growth and creative innovation in the city.
Midstory wants to attract millennials to its founders’ home city of Toledo, Ohio. It aims to find new ways to tell the story of Toledo’s history and its prospects — for example, a GIF-filled summary of television references to the city and a glossy master plan for using the American lotus to solve Lake Erie’s toxic-algae problem.
Logan and Samuel are graduates of both Sylvania Southview and Princeton. Now, they are the founders of the non-profit ‘Midstory.’
The journey to get young people to want to move back and reinvigorate America’s small towns. Co-Founder and Director at Midstory.org This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.
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.
Our story and our mission—how personal our motivation is for doing what we are doing. Midstory was born out of our own experience leaving—and now returning to—our home. We hope others can do the same! Our mission is to retain, cultivate, and attract young people and the public at large through creative storytelling and solutions-oriented projects in post-industrial cities.
On August 3, 2019, COACT Associates will be exhibiting at a local gala entitled “A City in Transit” at the downtown train station in Toledo, Ohio.
TOLEDO, Ohio, July 31, 2019 – SSOE Group (www.ssoe.com), a global architecture, engineering, and construction management firm, announced today that they are a proud sponsor of the “A City in Transit” gala x expo hosted by Midstory, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to retaining, cultivating, and attracting young people in post-industrial communities—beginning in Toledo, Ohio—through creative storytelling and solutions-oriented projects. This event will take place on Saturday, August 3, 2019 at the Downtown Toledo Train Station, third floor, from 4pm – 9pm.
The group behind Toledo’s “MIdstory” tells us what’s behind their effort.
Midstory talks about what ‘brain drain’ means and why they are looking to reverse it.
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
Midstory wants to attract millennials to its founders’ home city of Toledo, Ohio. It aims to find new ways to tell the story of Toledo’s history and its prospects — for example, a GIF-filled summary of television references to the city and a glossy master plan for using the American lotus to solve Lake Erie’s toxic-algae problem.
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.