The oubli is an ultra-sweet tropical fruit from West Africabut its not full of sugar. Instead, it contains a type of sweet protein called brazzein. Recognizing the potential of sweet proteins to replace sugar, California-based food-tech company Oobli is using precision fermentation to make them at scale.
Because they evolved along with us to trick us into thinking they were sugar, they hit our sweet taste receptors in a very similar way, says Jason Ryder, Ooblis founder and chief technology officer. But after that, they digest just like other proteins do. The proteins dont affect blood sugar, so they can avoid the health issues of sugar and sugar alternatives, such as heart attack and stroke.
Ooblis fermentation-based approach avoids the difficulty of harvesting the fruit in its native tropical environment. For every 1% reduction in sugar production, the company estimates that it can save 525,000 acres of land, 88 billion gallons of water, and a million metric tons of CO2 emissions.
In 2024, when the FDA reviewed the safety data for two of Ooblis proteins and raised no objections, other food-ingredient companies, such as Ingredion, ramped up their R&D with Oobli. The sweet proteins can replace up to 90% of sugar in most sweet food and drinks, and since the proteins can be as much as 5,000 times sweeter than sugar, only a tiny amount is needed. That helps the proteins compete on cost with sugar, which is cheap to produce. In products like baked goods, Ooblis alternatives leave room in recipes for other nutrients, such as extra fiber. They can also be used to reduce the aftertaste of sugar alternatives.
The company now makes its own line of chocolates using the proteins. Multiple global brands, including Mexico-based Grupo Bimbo, the worlds largest baked goods company, are preparing to launch products with the ingredients soon.
Healthy soil is alive. Its full of insects, fungi, and microbes that break down dead organic matter and convert it into nutrients. Microbes are the most abundant: One teaspoon of soil contains more microbes than there are people on Earth. As all these organisms do their work of decomposition and nutrient cycling, they release energy.
Milú Brunells Soli lamp turns that energy into light. The recent Savannah College of Art and Design grad designed the outdoor lamp to use microbial fuel cells, a type of battery that converts the chemical energy released by microorganisms (like those in soil or wastewater) into electricity. When Brunell, an industrial designer with a passion for sustainability, embarked on her senior project at SCAD, she wanted to design lighting with more than just function in mind. She says she was guided by the question, How can we create things that help us be in tune with our environment?
Microbial fuel cells arent totally new, but they are still a nascent technology. Researchers have said they could be an alternative to fossil fuels, powering everything from biosensors to wastewater treatment and desalination plants. In research labs, the cells have powered small fans, LEDs, and calculators, and scientists have also conducted wastewater treatment pilots. But scaling up this electricity source is still a challenge because it produces relatively low power and isnt yet cost competitive. Brunell focused on designing lighting because she loves the way it can shift emotions or create ambience.
Though mostly a conceptual project, the Soli lamp is now a functional prototype, powered by a microbial fuel cell Brunell built herself using the soil from her own garden. She sees Soli working one day for streetlights or in public parks, too. Soli is just the beginning of creating awareness, and asking ourselves, If we nurture soil and we give back, how can we explore this relationship further? she says. Instead of just exploiting Earth, how can we collaborate with it, respect it, and coexist with it?
Explore the full list of Fast Companys World Changing Ideas, 100 inspiring projects that are making the world more accessible, equitable, and sustainable for everyone.
In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released a policy statement warning that plastic foodware could potentially leach hormone-disrupting chemicals into childrens food. Seven years later, millions of children across the U.S. are still eating hot cafeteria lunches off plastic dishware. Manasa Mantravadi and her startup, Ahimsa, are working to change that.
A board-certified pediatrician and mother of three, Mantravadi was spurred by the AAPs findings to launch Ahimsa in 2019 to make steel dishware for children. Having gained traction with direct-to-consumer sales to thousands of families, Ahimsa is now aiming to get into schools across the U.S. Through a partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative, the company launched a national pilot in 2024 called the Conscious Cafeteria Project, which saw 15 elementary schools (in California, Minnesota, Indiana, and New York) swap their plastic trays and utensils for reusable stainless steel over the course of a school year.
The nonprofit Upstream claims that permanently eliminating plastics from these cafeterias can reduce their average annual CO2 emissions by 83%. The project displaced more than 1 million single-use items in total and decreased water usage by 78% (the difference between water used during production for single-use plastic and production for reusable steel). And, by making the swap, each school saved nearly $4,000 per year.
One major challenge Mantravadi continues to face is that many school administrators are unaware of plastic dishwares risks. She shares educational content and research on Ahimsas Instagram account, and the companys website includes additional resources.
Children cant advocate for themselvesthey dont have voting power, they dont make purchasing decisions, Mantravadi says. Its my job as a pediatrician, its parents jobs, its legislators jobs, its teachers jobs. Were the adults in the room, and weve got to make better choices to invest in the health of our children.
Explore the full list of Fast Companys World Changing Ideas, 100 inspiring projects that are making the world more accessible, equitable, and sustainable for everyone.
Top-selling Peruvian cement brand Cemento Sol partnered with ad agency Circus Grey to make the sidewalks of Peru more accessible. In collaboration with the countrys largest advocacy and service organizations for the visually impaired community, the Sightwalks project created cement tiles with coded markings detectable by an individual using a walking stick. The tiles feature tactile horizontal lines; the number of lines are associated with adjacent businesses, services, or venues. The project is both scalable and adaptable to any urban setting.
Creativity can be a powerful tool, says José Luis Rivera y Piérola, creative chairman and CEO of Grey Peru.
Explore the full list of Fast Companys World Changing Ideas, 100 inspiring projects that are making the world more accessible, equitable, and sustainable for everyone.
When Adebayo Alonge and Amy Kao launched RxAll in 2016, the Yale business school classmates were focused on helping reduce counterfeit medications in the supply chain of African countries. RxAlls flagship RxScanner uses AI and light spectroscopy to spot counterfeit pills, helping pharmacies and regulators improve safety. As the scanner picked up adoption, Kao and Alonge identified additional ways to secure supply chains.
Those now include everything from drug procurementhelping to connect pharmacies and hospitals with companies whose products routinely test as high qualityto demand prediction via a point-of-sale platform, and even financing for independent pharmacies to ensure they can maintain product supplies.
Alonge says that 95% of African pharmacies are independently owned and still operate with handwritten records. The friction really is around understanding what products are low quality, understanding what products are in demand, and getting access to the financing to purchase [quality] products and put them on the shelf, he says, noting that RxAll uses a pharmacys POS dataand aggregated data across regionsto help predict demand.
In the past year, RxAll has seen its network of pharmacies more than double, reaching 5,000-plus locations, largely in Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda. Meanwhile, the RxScanner has helped remove 1.3 million counterfeit medications from the supply chain.
RxAll is also working with regulators and governments to identify bogus pharmaceuticals and even plan public outreach around illnesses based on what medication is in demand. Last year, the company forged five partnerships with government agencies, including Nigerias National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control. The goal, Kao says, is to enable these public partners to take a more proactive approach and address counterfeiting and drug safety before tainted products get to patients. Ideally, we work ourselves out of a job, she says.
Explore the full list of Fast Companys World Changing Ideas, 100 inspiring projects that are making the world more accessible, equitable, and sustainable for everyone.
Last June, conservative activist Robby Starbuck launched a campaign targeting woke companies, threatening boycotts unless they renounced their policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Through the end of 2024, many companies buckled, including Tractor Supply Co., John Deere, Harley-Davidson, and Walmart. The movements momentum continued to grow after the November election, claiming McDonalds, Target, Amazon, Meta, PBS, and others.
Then the anti-DEI mob ran into Ron Vachris, a guy who started at Costco as a forklift driver more than 40 years ago and rose to become the CEO in 2024. In January, the National Center for Public Policy Research submitted an anti-DEI proposal at Costcos annual shareholder meeting. On January 23, Vachris and the companys board of directors unanimously recommended that shareholders reject the proposal, and more than 98% of shareholders did just that. Three days later, 19 Republican state attorneys general sent Vachris a letter demanding Costco end its DEI policies.
Vachris and Costco didnt budge, which is why Fast Company is recognizing him as the inaugural recipient of the World Changing Ideas Visionary of the Year. Vachris declined to talk to Fast Company. (Who can blame him? The last thing he needs is to look like hes taking a victory lap.)
Vachriss actions, says David Glasgow, a DEI expert at NYU Law School, provided a good example for other organizations that are feeling a lot of fear and anxiety right now.
Studies from McKinsey, MIT, and others confirm the long-term financial benefits for companies with strong DEI policies. They tend to have teams that are more creative. Workers tend to be happier. Theres less attrition and turnover when you have a focus on inclusion, says Northwestern Universitys Alvin Tillery.
Costco retains workers at a higher rate than its competitors, and employees earn a median annual wage of $47,000 (compared with about $27,000 at Walmart). Vachris, a prime example to shelf-stocking employees that Costco rewards top performers, may also inspire other leaders to stand up for their principles.
For eight years running, World Changing Ideas has celebrated the people and companies working to make the world safer, cleaner, more sustainable, and more equitable. It’s no small featbut it’s inspiring to see the progress these groups are making and the impact that their projects are already having. This year’s World Changing Ideas Awards recognizes 100 projects around the world that are pursuing innovation for good.
To get there requires an editorial team that spends months poring over applications, vetting projects, and ultimately telling the stories that bring these projects to life. Here is a behind-the-scenes look at how we make it happen.
METHODOLOGY
More than 1,500 applications were submitted to the World Changing Ideas Awards 2025. A team of staff editors and writers, alongside trusted freelancers, assessed each application based on our criteria, which include:
IMPACT
We look for projects that have created (or are trying to create) substantive, positive change in the world. We want the impact to be something that can improve lives, society, or the environmentnot just business bottom lines.
DESIGN
We think about this both conceptually and physically. We look for projects that have well-thought-out plans for how theyll create their impactand how they will avoid potential negative externalities. Functionality and aesthetics are also important when we evaluate applications.
SCALABILITY
Projects may be small right now, but do they have the potential to grow and bring the change to more people? We look for ideas that have the ability to change the world. This can mean projects that create enormous change for a small number of people, as well as projects that will create small but substantive change for an enormous number of people. Either way, we look for projects that can scale to serve the entire market they’re targeting.
INGENUITY
We evaluate projects that range from conceptual to just launched to fully operational. But no matter what stage the idea is in, we judge it on whether it’s bold, new, and innovative. The best entries offer a path-breaking solution to an important problem.
World Changing Ideas taps the collective knowledge of our editors, reporters, and outside writers, says Morgan Clendaniel, Fast Company‘s digital executive editor. We use these writers’ deep understanding of AI, urban design, climate tech, and transportation to create this curated list of the projects delivering the most impact and ingenuity in their sectors.”
Each winner is chosen after multiple rounds of judging and conversations about a project’s role in the current needs and challenges of this moment. This monthslong process ensures that every project chosen to receive a World Changing Idea award is representative of the best work in its field.
Meet the team
Writers: Maria Jose Gutierrez Chavez, Yasmin Gagne, Steven Melendez, Adele Peters, David Salazar, Grace Snelling, Kristin Toussaint, Talib Visram
Judges: Jeff Beer, Elissaveta M. Brandon, Morgan Clendaniel, Shalene Gupta, Jessica Hullinger, Veronica Irwin, Lily McDonald, Steven Melendez, Jocelyn Mintz, April Mokwa, Alex Pasternack, Adele Peters, Clint Rainey, Aimee Rawlins, Danielle Renwick, David Salazar, Elizabeth Segran, Grace Snelling, Eric Sullivan, Kristin Toussaint, Talib Visram
Editor: Aimee Rawlins
Copy Editors: Joanne Camas, Charissa Jones
Coordinator: Shealon Calkins
Design/Photo: Alice Alves, Jeanne Graves, Heda Hokschirr, Haewon Kye, Eric Perry, Sandra Riao, Daniel Salo, Maja Saphir, Mike Schnaidt, Amy Wong
Development: Bryan Cuellar, Cayleigh Parrish
Theftosterone (noun): When a woman shares an idea with her colleagues, perhaps in a meeting, and five minutes later, a man says almost the exact same thing, posing it as his own original idea in an effort to bolster his professional reputation at the expense of hers. (This aggression is exacerbated when the collective response to the woman is lackluster but the man gets credit for his great suggestion and is all too happy to bask in the praise without the slightest sense of guilt.)
It doesnt matter how smart or accomplished the woman is, men still conversationally steamroll them and sometimes outright steal their ideas. We call this phenomenon theftosterone.It happens even in the highest court in the land. Transcripts of fifteen years of Supreme Court oral arguments show that as more women have joined the court, male justices have increased their interruptions of the female justices. Many male justices interrupt female justices at double-digit rates per term, but the reverse is almost never true. During a twelve-year span, when women made up 24% of the bench, 32% of interruptions were of the female justices, but only 4% were by female justices. Strangely, as the gender imbalance on the court has lessened over the past several years, the incidents of this have not gone down. In fact theyve increased.
When we asked people in a survey for their firsthand experience observing original-thought theft, over 72% said they had indeed seen it take place. Reassuringly, the percentage of times it was called out, either on the spot or reported afterward, was 10% higher than incidents when the perpetrator was not called out on it.
THE MOST VULNERABLE
Kate White, the legendary editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, says that if youre a good idea person, you need to be extra vigilant in anticipating theftosterone and warding it off before it happens.
I came up the ranks as an idea person. And let me tell you, those who are not idea people often steal your ideas out of desperation.There are two ways to protect against that, White says. Whenever possible, put ideas in writing and cc people. If your boss wants you to generate ideas in meetings, use a claim-the-floor strategy.You can say something like If I could have everyones attention, Id like to take a moment to provide some vital information that I think will be eye-opening and of tremendous value. Dont just blurt out something like Maybe we should employ that strategy in California too. It might get lost in the back-and-forth and then someone (probably a guy) will bring it up five minutes later as their own.Instead, gain the floor, and say, I have an idea. I think we should consider employing this strategy in California, and let me offer some research that explains why. Dont start with all the research. Women tend to show their homework first.
BLOCKING THE PUNCH
But what if the theftosterone has already been perpetrated? Here are three possible courses of action:
Amplification: This requires the cooperation and involvement of women colleagues. Juliet Eilperin, a reporter for the Washington Post, spoke with women who worked in the Obama administration who devised an antidote to theftosterone. Its a technique they called amplification. Heres how it works. If a woman in a meeting makes a suggestion or presents an idea, another woman immediately acknowledges it, repeats it, and gives her credit. This shuts down any possibility that a man in the meeting can later stake claim to the idea for himself. The plan was executed with so much success that women in the administration noticed that Obama began calling on women in meetings more often.
Claiming Affirmation: If assembling a team of female support isnt possible for amplification, and youre forced to go it alone, its up to you to speak up. The lines you should have in your back pocket are Im glad you agree with the point I just made or Its so gratifying to get your affirmation of my suggestion from a moment ago.
Male Advocates: Women would benefit from a more equitable enforcement of communication justice. This requires that men also be on high alert for the appropriation of womens ideas at work. When they spot it, they can say, That sounds like exactly what Kristin said just a few minutes ago. Do you have anything more that you could add to that? or Im glad to see that youre aligned with the idea Kristin shared a little earlier.
BALANCING GENDER COMMUNICATION
Unlike imitation, theftosterone is not the sincerest form of flattery. It is what its name suggests: an unjust appropriation of a womans voice.
Given how long men have been engaging in this behavior, the prospect of eliminating or even dramatically curtailing these aggressions seems remote. For years the struggle to be properly respected seemed to be solely a battle for women to fight, and when they elected to go to the mat, often the consequences of being labeled militant or nasty outweighed the benefits.
Men need to recognize the role they can and must play in combating this scourge to bring about more equity in communication in the workplace.Adapted from SPEAK, MEMORABLY: The Art of Captivating an Audience by Bill McGowan and Juliana Silva. Copyright 2025 by Bill McGowan and Juliana Silva. Reprinted courtesy of Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Available wherever books are sold.
The robotaxi race is heating up in Austin. A decade after Googles self-driving car project quietly tested on the citys streets, a new wave of autonomous vehicle companies is setting up shop. Waymo, now a dominant force in San Francisco, is expanding to the city. Tesla is preparing to debut its long-promised robotaxi. And smaller players like Zoox, Avride, and ADMT are using the Texas capital as a proving ground.
What was once a fringe experiment is now a high-stakes industry comeback, deep in the heart of Texas.
You have a regulatory environment thats keen to capitalize on these developments, says Alison Brooks, research vice president for worldwide public safety at IDC. At the same time, its a blue city in a red state thats predisposed towards alternative vehicles that are more environmentally friendly.
The self-driving companies converging on Austin
The only fully deployed and operational robotaxi company in Austin is Waymo. In 2023, the company announced it was expanding testing to the city that keeps it weird, more than two years after its Phoenix launch. Since its March launch, Waymo now has about 100 robotaxis in Austin, making up 20% of local Uber trips. By expanding our partnership with Uber to Austin, we were able to bring Waymo rides to residents and visitors in Austin even faster, a representative for Waymo tells Fast Company.
Tesla is now gearing up for deployment in the city. The robotaxiwhich Elon Musk has been teasing since 2019appears finally ready for the streets. Musk, who once operated out of the Bay Area, relocated his companies to Texas and brought his robotaxis with him. According to his posts on X, some of the vehicles have already begun driving. (Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.)
For the past several days, Tesla has been testing self-driving Model Y cars (no one in drivers seat) on Austin public streets with no incidents. A month ahead of schedule.Next month, first self-delivery from factory to customer.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 29, 2025
Several smaller robotaxi companies are also testing in Austin. Zoox, owned by Amazon, is operating vehicles with safety drivers across multiple districts. Avride is running tests as well, though its planned debutthrough a partnership with Uberwill take place in nearby Dallas. ADMT, Volkswagens robotaxi subsidiary, has been testing in Austin since 2023.
As these autonomous vehicle companies converge on Austin, the city is becoming a key arena for robotaxi competition. It may not have the highest adoption of self-driving vehiclesPhoenix and San Francisco still lead in that regardbut with Teslas entry, Austin is fast becoming the most competitive testing ground.
A friendly regulatory environment
Why Austin? Many point to the citys favorable regulatory environment. In Texas, state law preempts local law, which means the relatively relaxed Senate Bill 2205passed in 2017sets the statewide standard for AV regulation. Still, Austins active local government has played a key supporting role, offering infrastructure and coordination through efforts like the Autonomous Vehicle Working Group, which brings together staff from several city departments.
A spokesperson for the City of Austin tells Fast Company that, while the city cannot directly regulate AVs, it can support companies with valuable information. Each robotaxi company has received maps of school zones, schedules for special events, and guidance on emergency vehicle protocols. The spokesperson notes that Tesla, though not required to inform the city of testing, has communicated with the Working Group.
Many companies view this top-down modelless restrictive than frameworks in states like Californiaas an advantage. While California has an extensive permitting system, Texas only mandates that AVs are registered, insured, and have systems to record crash data. A representative for Avride cited the favorable regulatory environment in Austin, adding: The state has clear and supportive laws that allow us to operate and scale our technology confidently, in a statement to Fast Company.
Of course, regulations carry weightboth protective and limiting. They can restrict innovation but also safeguard the public. IDCs Alison Brooks and Remi Letemple, a senior research analyst at the firm, both reference the Cruise crash in San Francisco as a cautionary tale. In 2023, a Cruise robotaxi dragged a pedestrian along the street, prompting a full recall of the companys fleet.
How do we get an environment that balances innovation with regulation in a way that avoids catastrophic events? IDCs Brooks asks. Thats the tension that I think exists in all of those markets. When I talk to adjacent mobility folks, theyre watching this market very carefully as well for the same reasons.
When asked about the risk of crashes or technical failures, the City of Austin spokesperson responded: The City works with AV companies before and during deployment to obtain training for first responders, establish expectations for ongoing communication and share information about infrastructure and events.
Austins intrinsic benefits
Beyond regulations, Austin offers several regional advantages. Its consistently high temperatures tend to keep pedestrians off the streets, reducing unexpected interactions for autonomous vehicles. The city is dense enough to challenge AV systems but not so congested as to make navigation unmanageable. A representative from Avride also highlighted the presence of the University of Texas, noting its strong tech talent pool.
Demographics add to Austins appeal as a testing ground. The city has a sizable base of affluent residentsit now ranks tenth among U.S. cities with the most millionaires. Despite the tech influx, Austin remains largely liberal. Local disability advocates have especially championed robotaxis for broadening access. A representative for Zoox tells Fast Company that locals have established that they like to move around with on-demand rideshare.
Austin also presents unique environmental features including horizontal traffic lights, suspended cable traffic signals, and train track crossings that will help train our AI to better understand and navigate various road patterns and driving conditions, the Zoox representative writes.
Pushback to the AV surge has been muted. Some Austin residents worried about Cruise, specifically cyclists who watched a Cruise vehicle veer into a bike lane in 2023. Kara Kockelman, a professor of transportation engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, says that the only safety worry she’s heard from Austinites was that Cruise cars “came too close to their vehicle.” Now, Cruise AVs are gone from the city’s roads.
“With Waymo, [Austin residents] only complain if it obeys the speed limit,” Kockelman says. “They drive really well, but they do need to speed up.”
Still, Austins local benefits may not translate elsewhere. Other cities have more pedestrians, more complex roadways, or more cautious consumers. I dont think Austin can be patient zero, even if it becomes a success. Its not scalable to other states, says IDCs Remi Letemple. Every city has its own infrastructure and its own barriers.
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.
