 |
|
|
|||||
In a sprawling, 6-square-mile plot of land in rural West Tennessee, the Ford Motor Co. is building a massive new electric vehicle assembly plant it’s calling BlueOval City. Estimated to cost more than $5.6 billion and create more than 6,000 jobs, the industrial park is envisioned as the world’s most modern automotive manufacturing facility since Ford pioneered the assembly line. It will also remake this part of Tennessee, which has seen little, if any, economic development in decades. But despite this scale and ambition, the most impactful part of the project may be tucked inside a 3,600-square-foot dilapidated schoolhouse. The schoolhouse is being transformed into the new Ford Community Center for the city of Stanton, population 415, which sits closest to the edge of BlueOval City. Located 50 miles outside of Memphis, Stanton is a predominantly Black community built on former plantation land. Once the heart of the community, the schoolhouse was decommissioned after desegregation. Now through an unusually community-centric process, the building is being converted into a resource center that provides residents with job training, financial literacy, healthcare access, legal services, and more. It’s a front door for helping people who wish to participate in the rising tide of BlueOval City, says Josh McManus. His consultancy, M|B|P, spearheaded this community-focused approach, which involved more than 2,500 hours of community meetings and input sessions to understand what was needed before any investment was made. Josh McManus [Photo: courtesy M|B|P] What you find very fast is there are a lot of lifelong residents in the area who, because there’s been next to no economic activity there for a long time, are in need of hard skills and soft skills, McManus says. Working directly with Ford Philanthropy, the automaker’s philanthropic arm, and Civic, a New York-based creative and marketing agency, M|B|P did on-the-ground research to learn about the conditions in the community, and used that information to set a 15-mile radius around the plant as the zone of its greatest potential local economic impact. Little by little we came to realize that there’s no physical space for the community to gather. There’s no physical space from which to conduct these forward and upward social services, McManus says. Dialing in on the needs of the people within that zone, M|B|P suggested creating a central space where community members could access the services, training, and resources they would need to either get a job at the BlueOval City plant or play some other role in the economic development it would bring to the region. The empty schoolhouse, known to nearly everyone in the community, was an obvious location to focus this corporate giving. Anticipated to fully open by early 2026, the new community center is part of a $9 million investment by Ford Philanthropy in the community around BlueOval City, which has been under construction for three years. Ford announced in September 2024 that production at BlueOval City would be delayed by 18 months, pushing back its opening until 2027. Earlier this year, the company projected up to $5.5 billion in losses on its electric vehicle and software operations in 2025. Mary Culler is president of Ford Philanthropy, which was founded in 1949 and made more than $76 million in philanthropic contributions in 2024. She says McManus was instrumental in helping ensure the project was more than just a tone-deaf exercise in corporate social responsibility. It’s easy to say let’s do a community center, we’re open to everybody, we’re going to help you or support you. But in some ways you could end up with a big peanut butter smattering of nothingness if you’re not really focused, Culler says. [Photo: courtesy M|B|P] McManus has come to understand the importance of using community data and community input to guide these kinds of place-based corporate giving efforts. Born into a middle-class family in a factory town in the South, he started his career at the United Way in Atlanta and then Chattanooga. He went on to found his own nonprofit, CreateHere, focused on arts, economic, and cultural development initiatives in Chattanooga. In 2015 he relocated to Detroit to serve as chief operating officer of Rock Ventures, the family office of Rocket Mortgage founder Dan Gilbert, who had been investing heavily in redeveloping the struggling city’s downtown, restoring abandoned buildings and leading a surge in downtown’s residential population. Working as Gilbert’s right hand on these interventions, McManus saw the transformative potential of applying a corporation’s deep pockets to projects with both a bottom line and a broader community impact. I had the aha tht [capitalism] wasn’t to be avoided, it was to be harnessed, McManus says, and that there was a way to find the intersection of moral imperative and market imperative. After leaving Rock Ventures in 2017, McManus dabbled in other place-focused philanthropy and even founded a fintech startup before establishing M|B|P in 2020. Since then, he’s been working with major corporations like Ford, large foundations, and smaller nonprofits to use their philanthropic and mission-driven investments to create more impactful benefits in communities. This approach is a redesigning of corporate social responsibility, engaging more deeply in communities and working to provide the kinds of resources they actually need. When so much corporate giving takes the form of sprinkling money out into small-scale nonprofits, McManus sees a more targeted and personal strategy that he believes can give both the corporations and the communities more desirable outcomes. I believe that the spray-and-pray model of corporate philanthropy that’s existed before can be improved upon, he says. The community center connected to BlueOval City is one example of this change. Ford Philanthropy’s Culler says the project shows that there’s a shift underway, and that a growing number of companies are seeing the wisdom in using their dollars more strategically than performatively. She says McManus helped the BlueOval City project to make as comprehensive an impact as it could. [Photo: courtesy M|B|P] Instead of bringing in a caterer from Memphis for events, they hired a local cook, and helped turn her into a caterer. Instead of renting tables and chairs from an existing rental company outside of town, they helped locals form their own furniture rental business. Corporate philanthropy has learned that it’s less about dictating programs that they think are important and more about listening to the community and building capacity for organizations to really deploy and do what they probably know best to do right there on the front line, Culler says. McManus says M|B|Pan homage to architect and urban designer Daniel Burnham’s famous 1909 advice to make big plansis actively working on projects with other Fortune 500 companies, as well as some foundations and family offices like Gilbert’s Rock Ventures. Even at a moment when political friction and economic uncertainty have clouded many companies’ short- and long-term vision, McManus is seeing growing interest in his approach to corporate giving and investment. If you don’t like the big plan that’s in place, he says, posit your alternate scenario and then build audience for that as fast as you can. That’s the gumption behind the community center in Stanton, and why McManus sees it as a model for corporate giving that actually makes an impact on a community. I mean, it’s a tiny, tiny intervention, he says. But it’s built on a much bigger idea.
Category:
E-Commerce
The likelihood that everyone in your office has the same shoe size is probably really low. Between differences in height, gender, and age, shoe sizes can vary widely. So when all of your officemates are using the same standard desks and chairs, it would track that a lot of people find that their work environment doesnt quite fit right either. Compounding this problem is the fact that the average American spends approximately eight to nine hours a day sitting at work. No wonder 42% to 69% of office workers are estimated to have neck pain and 31% to 51% to have lower back pain. Some of the main risk factors that are leading to those injuries are awkward and non-neutral postures, says Lora Cavuoto, director of University at Buffalos Ergonomics and Biomechanics Lab. Luckily, learning some of the basics from the field of ergonomics can help you adjust your working environment and lower your risk of developing long-term injuries from sitting improperly at work. Here are some ways Cavuoto recommends adjusting your work environment: 1. Maintain a neutral position To begin assessing how ergonomically your office set up is, its important to begin by finding your bodys neutral position. When your body is in neutral posture, your joints are aligned and there is minimal stress on your muscles, tendons, bones, and nerves. When sitting at a desk, this means positioning yourself so that your feet are resting on the floor, you are sitting up straight with your head aligned with your shoulders and hips, your shoulders and neck are relaxed, and your elbows and knees are at 90 degrees. If your chair and desk do not comfortably allow you to maintain this position, you should consider making some adjustments. Lets say your table is too high, for example, says Cavuoto. Then, in order to rest your arms on the table, you’re winging your arms out so you’re needing to hold up the weight of your arms. All the muscles in your neck and your shoulders really need to engage to do that. Or if your chair is too high and your legs are hanging . . . then you might be putting pressure on the back of the knee, and that can lead to some stopping of blood flow down to the feet, causing your feet to fall asleep. The solutions for these can be as simple as adjusting your chair height or adding a foot rest under your desk. Adding a box under your desk so that you raise your feet to get your knees into a good position and rest your feet on the ground, or adding a riser to your monitor so that it’s in a good position for you to look comfortably are low-budget ways that can make a big difference, says Cavuoto. Its also important to consider how these adjustments may need to differ from day to day depending on what you are wearing and what tasks you are completing. One thing we often forget is if you wear different shoes, you may need to adjust the height of your chair, or add or remove a foot rest, Cavuoto says. Even if you’re switching from using a keyboard to writing something on a piece of paper, you might need to adjust the chair a little bit so that your arms are in a better position, because . . . the keyboard has maybe an inch or 2 of elevation. 2. Move your body regularly Even if you did maintain perfect neutral sitting posture throughout the workday, you might still encounter problems like blood pooling in parts of your body if you arent moving enough to circulate it. Additionally, sitting for long uninterrupted periods of time can lead to your blood sugar levels rising, causing the body to release insulin. Over time, as the body gets used to this, this could lead to inflammation and plaque buildup in your arteries. Cavuoto recommends getting up and taking regular movement breaks throughout the day to avoid these adverse effects. She also recommends paying special attention to areas of the body that tend to be under a lot of stress over the workday. Doing regular wrist extensor and wrist flexor exercises are important to stretch those tendons and ligaments in the wrists to reduce pain for people who spend a lot of time typing, she says. Similarly, she recommends taking a few moments throughout the day to stretch your neck. 3. Use a chair with proper back support Using chairs without good back support for long periods of time can put a lot of stress on your back and leg muscles to hold up your body. If you dont have fully fit core musculature, [and] you’re engaging those muscles all the time . . . those muscles can be tired, causing you to slouch and put pressure on your spine and other muscles, Cavuoto says. If youre able to choose your work chair, she recommends looking for one that can recline and has a headrest which allows you more flexibility to relieve pressure and adjust your body throughout the day. That allows you to rest your neck, your head, and your shoulders . . . so you can offload that head weight right off your neck, she says. 4. Consider your lighting environment Its important to note the impact that lighting has on our eyes throughout the day. Eye strain can cause a number of unpleasant effects, from migraines to neck and shoulder pain. While an office setting likely provides more even lighting conditions, Cavuoto says that a lot of people dont think about light sources as much when working from home. She recommends setting up your work environment with lighting that you can control over the day and to avoid settings that cause strong glare off your screen. 5. Use a monitor or a laptop screen, not both I don’t really use my laptop screen at all, actually, says Cavuoto. While using an external monitor is helpful because it enlarges the screen, another challenge when youre using a laptop and an external monitor on a desk is that the laptop is down on the surface and the monitor is a little bit raised. Ideally, to maintain a neutral posture, your screen should be at eye level. But when switching between a laptop and monitor, you may experience some neck pain and eye strain from switching focus between two screens at different heights and scales. If you dont have access to a monitor, try raising your laptop on a stand or stacking books underneath it to get it to eye level.
Category:
E-Commerce
Fast Company has been covering a sea change in American business over the last 15 years or so. Companies big and small have embraced the idea that they ought to be accountable not just to shareholders but to all stakeholdersincluding workers, customers, communities, suppliers, and the planet. Some refer to it as stakeholder capitalism. Others like conscious capitalism. And for those of you who prefer woke capitalism, hey, thanks for joining us. But then, within the last year or two, it all fell apart. Even before Trump retook the presidency, CEOs had begun shuttering DEI programs and climate initiatives, and clamming up about the greater good they were pursuing. What happened? How did a megatrend that transformed boardrooms and C-suites unravel so rapidly? Thats the big question we asked James Surowiecki to dissect in this issues cover story, How Business for Good Went Bad.” Surowiecki, a veteran business journalist and author of The Wisdom of Crowds, does not disappoint. He deftly explicates a number of questions inside the big one. Perhaps the most disturbing: Was corporate Americas embrace of stakeholder capitalism ever real in the first place? In addition to those big words on the cover, Id like to call your attention to some smaller type: Summer 2025. Yes, our print magazine is now quarterly, down from five issues last year. Id like to explain the thinking behind this change, and what it means for the print magazine. Theres no point in denying the obvious: Print media aint what it used to be. I wouldnt be much of a business journalist myself if I pretended otherwise. Fast Company is susceptible to the same shifting business dynamics and consumer behavior that have forced countless publishers to cut back or eliminate their print products. And yet! We still believe deeply in print. We know that it delivers a special kind of experience for readers, one that no other medium can match. The beautiful, tactile object you are holding was reported, written, edited, and designed specifically to allow you to engage with the latest ideas of the innovation economy without the distraction and chaos of the daily news cycle. Read it on the weekend, ideally in a hammock. The coverage areas will be familiar: tech, design, marketing and branding, creativity, social impact, the future of work, and more. But unlike the up-to-the-minute news coverage youll find on fastcompany.com and our social channels, the magazine offers a view from 30,000 feet. In every article, data report, photo essay, long-form interview, and list of recognition program winners, our reporters analyze and contextualize industry trends, take readers deep inside the worlds most compelling companies, and mine the wisdom of the business leaders who are building tomorrows world today. We hope you enjoy it, and we welcome your feedback at editor@fastcompany.com. Mnuka Slab was designed in 2021 by Kris Sowersby for Klim Type Foundry A playful punch For this issues headline typeface, we chose Mnuka Slab. Its tall, condensed proportions are like a typographic punch in the guts, says designer Kris Sowersby, making it perfect for an issue that explores how stakeholder capitalism got the wind knocked out of it. Mnuka is inspired by 19th-century wood type, evoking posters that promoted the circus and civil protest. But it has a lighter side: Check out the pigtail of the uppercase Q and the ball terminal of the Jfitting for the issues tribute to Sharpie markers. And like Sharpies, condensed typefaces never go out of style. Mike Schnaidt, creative director
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||