If 2020 has been thoroughly loathed for the death and disruption wrought by COVID-19, it has also been a time for humanity to show its resilience and innovation. So when it came time for Inside Memphis Business to consider the Innovation Awards for 2020, there was no shortage of worthy candidates.
IMB has been recognizing the top thinkers and doers in the city for several years.
These people and organizations are at the forefront of evolution — tinkerers, questioners, visionaries — who make our city a better place.
This year, the eighth time we’ve honored innovators, we recognize Wendi C. Thomas who is using the MLK50 nonprofit newsroom as a tool to pursue justice; Kent Phillips for his efforts in expanding Trezevant Manor’s senior community and creative reactions to the challenge of the pandemic; Leigh Mansberg for raising the bar of teaching financial literacy in her leadership of Junior Achievement of Memphis and the Mid-South; and Christopher Reyes for being ahead of the curve for years in bringing together the local creative community and for his development of “experiential art.”
Previous winners covered a range of areas, from medicine to music, education to civics, tourism to the arts.
Last year, we honored Phil Baker and Ayilé Arnett of RemediChain, Ekundayo Bandele of Hattiloo Theatre, Jay Martin of My City Rides, and Mark Pryor of The Seam.
The 2018 winners were Van Turner of Memphis Greenspace, Gebre Waddell of Sound Credit, Michael Dyer, Ph.D., and Alberto Pappo, M.D., with the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Childhood Solid Tumor Network, and Brian Booker with One Step Initiative & Global Pathways to Success.
Other previous winners include Charlie McVean and Charlie Newman for the Big River Crossing, Dr. Isaac Rodriguez of SweetBio, and Meka Egwuekwe of CodeCrew.
IMB will host a public panel discussion with this year’s innovators and two previous winners to talk about innovation in times of crisis and how we can emerge from difficult times with an even stronger community.
Leigh Mansberg – Junior Achievement of Memphis and the Mid-South
Leigh Mansberg
Kids are the future, and even with a pandemic raging, it’s crucial to keep the wheels of knowledge turning in young minds. Fortunately, Junior Achievement president and CEO Leigh Mansberg has experience as a teacher to call on while leading the organization through the hurdles of 2020. When the pandemic threatened to derail education as we knew it, she and JA maneuvered to reimagine the organization’s curriculums and create new ones so that every student was included and engaged.
A longtime educator for Shelby County Schools and St. Mary’s Episcopal School, Mansberg knew how important it was to make lessons both interesting and accessible to kids; in a year where that all had to be done remotely, it was that much harder. But Mansberg wasn’t fazed, quickly moving to make all of Junior Achievement’s programming virtual.
This July, JA partnered with Shelby County Schools to implement a new series of digital lessons for the SCS Summer Learning Academy, with each lesson including a local entrepreneur as a guest host. The series proved immensely popular with videos disseminated to hundreds of classrooms, and thousands of students.
A second collaboration with the City of Memphis Division of Youth Services saw JA continue to offer its impactful programs, like MPLOY, financial literacy programs that encourage students to join the Memphis Ambassador Program, or the I Am Included program, a personal branding and soft skills curriculum for hearing-impaired students.
Mansberg introduced this programming all while maintaining high standards for JA’s normal offerings like BizTown, the organization’s flagship experience that sends fourth- through sixth-graders to a fully interactive simulated town facility to mimic running a business. Further plans for a pop-up BizTown mobile are in the works for next year.
And Mansberg continues to expand JA’s network, creating connections with charter schools and other institutions to create financial literacy classes from kindergarten to high school. Innovators spin a moment of crisis into opportunity, and while covid-19 could have signaled a downturn in the fortunes of both young students and Junior Achievement, Mansberg’s quick thinking ensures that Memphis students will continue to be able to carve out a better path. — Samuel X. Cicci
Kent Phillips – Trezevant Manor
Kent Phillips
When the pandemic came on the scene, it hit senior and retirement communities hard, with many of these groups seeing higher rates of infection. That made the stakes even higher for Kent Phillips, who arrived at Trezevant as COO in March 2015, but quickly became CEO that September. Juggling health concerns with all the other potential needs of the community was no easy feat, but Phillips did it, implementing a series of programs that kept residents safely engaged and active in community endeavors.
Trezevant is a 15-acre LifeCare community in East Memphis, offering everything from independent living, to assisted living, to nursing home and rehab services. Phillips and Trezevant set their sights on philanthropic goals when it came to designing communal programs. One was a “Green Team” focused on recycling. The group has recycled 27,140 pounds of cardboard and paper and 26,328 pounds of mixed recyclables. Residents also launched a “Rock the Vote” campaign to encourage younger Trezevant staffers to get out and vote this year. And in a more personal touch, Phillips even organized a drive-by parade to help residents connect with their families. And all this with an extra emphasis on health and safety covid-19 protocols.
Those campaigns are just a few examples of Phillips’ commitment to innovating. Since he began his role as CEO, he has overseen the conclusion of a $120 million expansion plan and garnered numerous awards for the community, all of which recognize Trezevant’s commitment to community engagement. Holleran’s Choice Community Award found that Trezevant ranked highest among retirement communities for resident engagement over the past six months relative to its peers, while McKnight’s Technology Award put a spotlight on Trezevant doggedly pursuing the embrace of new technology to maintain a high quality of life for its residents.
That extends to employees, as well. Each of Trezevant’s 420 staffers is encouraged to pursue personal growth opportunity, with the organization offering education assistance, soft skills development, and on-site fairs.
While 2020 has seen a much higher risk to residents’ physical health, Trezevant and Phillips’ new approach equally provide a structure that aims to maintain their mental health. The chips were certainly down, but Phillips always kept looking ahead. — Samuel X. Cicci
Christopher Reyes – Baron Von Opperbean’s Exploratorium of Magic, Science, and the Multiverse
Christopher Reyes
Christopher Reyes is used to being ahead of his time. When he was a student at Memphis College of Art in the early 1990s, he was virtually alone in using the school’s computer lab. Upon graduation, he went to Ardent Studios designing interactive CD-ROMs, then a cutting-edge technology.
He decided he wanted to share his love of Memphis music with the world, so started obsessively recording musical performances in local clubs, juke joints, and theaters while using his web design skills to create an online portal for the recordings. His website Live From Memphis (LFM) tackled the problems of streaming musical and video content years before YouTube.
LFM expanded far beyond just a website. Reyes contacted artists all over the Memphis area and created an online directory to allow them to meet in the pre-social media era. At its peak, the directory listed more than 5,000 creatives of all stripes.
When LFM shuttered in 2013, Reyes turned his attention to a new kind of art. Projection mapping allows the artist to impose digital images on the real world, creating the illusion of depth and motion to bring static murals and sculptures to life. First, he collaborated with muralist Birdcap on a multimedia piece Downtown. In 2016, he collaborated with filmmakers Sarah Fleming and Laura Jean Hocking to create Fish, an immersive, multimedia installation at Crosstown Arts. The acclaimed blockbuster exhibit helped legitimize the Crosstown project to the public before the doors of the Concourse opened for business.
All that was just a warmup for Reyes’ big leap: Baron Von Opperbean’s Exploratorium of Magic, Science, and the Multiverse. Set in the Off The Walls gallery in South Memphis, the 2,000-square-foot installation is what Reyes calls “experiential art.” He has created whole worlds for visitors to explore. Even more remarkably, Reyes managed to build it almost single-handedly in the midst of the pandemic. There’s been a scramble to reserve time to visit the Multiverse this fall, making it by far the Memphis art world’s biggest success in 2020.
Reyes has his sights set on the future. He’s planning an even bigger version of the Multiverse — and he’s got ideas for transforming the long-vacant Mid-South Coliseum into an arts tourist attraction the likes of which Memphis has never seen. — Chris McCoy
Wendi C. Thomas – MLK50: Justice Through Journalism
Wendi C. Thomas
In 2014, Wendi C. Thomas left The Commercial Appeal where she’d written fiery commentary for 11 years. She was also involved in helping the newspaper coordinate coverage of the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Knowing that the 50th anniversary would be coming in 2018, her journalistic instincts were to aim for remarkable coverage of the momentous anniversary. She did a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard to further explore social entrepreneurship and talked with nonprofit newsrooms on how they worked.
“I developed a business plan that my social entrepreneurship professor at the Kennedy school told me was impossible,” she says. “And there was no funding model to make it work. But I like proving people wrong.”
Back in Memphis she considered what publishing platform to use, pondered who would write for it, and raised money. “I started with $3,000, a thousand from my favorite uncle and a thousand each from two girlfriends,” she says. With that seed money and living off credit cards the first year, she launched MLK50.
A big grant followed and it got a fiscal sponsor with Community LIFT. “That’s been great for us, and anybody that’s raised money knows that it’s really about relationships and also that money follows money,” Thomas says. And now her project has national funders, which has allowed her to expand staff — four full-time and four part-time — and pay off her credit cards.
Thomas is a member of ProPublica’s 2020 Local Reporting Network and was in its 2019 LRN cohort. She’s also getting recognition, having won the 2020 Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting and won first place in the Association of Health Care Journalists’ 2019 awards for business reporting.
She’s also gotten top awards for her “Profiting from the Poor” investigation that showed Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare’s predatory debt collection practices, a series that resulted in the healthcare corporation erasing $11.9 million in debt.
“We see journalism as a tool to pursue justice,” she says. “I don’t see it as advocacy journalism. Journalism has always looked out for the little guy, the underdog and that’s what attracted a lot of us to the industry. And so we’re just more explicit about that.” — Jon W. Sparks
