Josh McManus has been instrumental in implementing innovative programs and community improvement projects in Cincinnati, and he’s now considered a top 100 individual helping to move the world forward by doing, according to GOOD Magazine’s
GOOD 100.
McManus, who founded
Little Things Labs, says he’s always been interested in the fusion of social good and economic productivity, so he leverages his two interests in ways that prompt community engagement and change.
Over the past seven years, McManus, 35, has launched three place-based invention laboratories and more than 25 community improvement projects in Cincinnati, Detroit and Chattanooga, Tenn.
SpringBoard Cincinnati, a nine-week crash course that helps participants take a dream or idea and, if feasible, bring it to fruition by starting up a business, and
CoSign—the first project to move through
Cincinnati’s lab Haile’s Kitchen—are two of the best-known McManus-inspired programs that have improved the city.
“With CoSign, I think it gives an entirely new imagination of what signage in the public realm can be,” McManus says. “And it also has a direct benefit to the businesses in that they’re much more visible now.”
CoSign paired local artists and signmakers with small businesses in Northside to bolster economic activity, and it’s these types of engagements that McManus says are necessary in order for individuals to keep up with industry and technology.
“We’re not evolving as quickly as technology and manufacturing have, so I think we’re due a tremendous social revolution,” McManus says. “And in order to do that, you have to have these places where you experiment and try new things and you’re unafraid to fail, so the need for these laboratories comes from this new revolution I think we’re set for.”
Do Good:
• Like Little Things Labs on
Facebook.
•
Apply with SpringBoard Cincinnati if you have a business idea.
• Like CoSign on
Facebook.
By Brittany York
Brittany York is a professor of English composition at the University of Cincinnati and a teacher at the Regional Institute of Torah and Secular Studies. She also edits the For Good section of SoapboxMedia.