The story of Midstory: Young, innovative, talking up Toledo

TOLEDO – Some talk about bright, talented young people leaving Toledo – a brain drain, it’s called. Then there’s the four who left, earned degrees and started good jobs, but returned.

They’re on a crusade of sorts: to tell the story of Toledo specifically and the Midwest in general. Hence, in 2018, they formed Midstory. It’s not only “our” story, but theirs.

“We are a nonprofit. Our mission is to progress the Midwest narrative,” said Logan Sander, one of the four founding Midstorians. The other three are Samuel Chang, his sister Ruth Chang, and Alex Lim.

Sander explained the three branches through which Midstory does its work:

• Multimedia storytelling, from podcasts to written journalism to graphics.

• Solutions-oriented research, in partnership with universities and organizations on long-term projects.

• Programing it calls ThinkLab, in which interns from universities nationwide and locally spend a summer with Midstory.

In a sense, the internships speak to the original concerns fueling the “brain drain” talk.

“Through the internship programs,” Sander said, “we’re cultivating, retaining, and attracting bright young talent to places like Toledo to invest themselves in our region and envision what regions like ours could be.”

She said the interns range from Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Duke, Northwestern to the University of Toledo and Bowling Green State University.

While those interns – around 20 to 25 each year and about 200 in total to date – are here for only a summer, “we’ve put Toledo on their map,” Sander said. So much so that some have returned for Midstory’s year-long fellowship program, in which they develop projects and gain experience in nonprofit and multimedia storytelling, she said.

Sander added that when Midstory began, it had a high school intern program. The 2020 pandemic brought that to a close; the collegiate one continued virtually. However, the high school program will be rebooted in 2026, drawing from local high schools and those across the Midwest.

Speaking of Midstory’s beginnings, the concept wasn’t immediate. Sander said she is a Toledoan, the Changs are immigrants from Taiwan who grew up in Toledo, and Lim is from Kalamazoo, Mich. Each went to universities on the East Coast, graduated, and in some cases began their careers. They all came to know each other – Logan and Sam married; Lim was Sam’s roommate in Boston.

Then they all came to question where they were and why. “We grew up, left, and experienced life elsewhere,” Sander said, feeling as though they were at a crossroads, as was the country at the time. “The epiphany was for us to give back to the place that raised us.”

So the four moved back to Toledo and began brainstorming. “What does our community need, how can we contribute to solving some issues, like the brain drain,” Sander said. Some people questioned why they returned, but “we wanted to make a statement. We wanted to be the first among many, that we’d be able to draw other young people to follow suit.”

The Midstory concept arose, and the four became their own grant writers to seek startup and operating funds. The University of Toledo Business Incubator provided an office, and the arrangement grew to the point where today Midstory has more-permanent space at the university’s incubator to also accommodate its interns.

In 2019, Midstory had a fundraiser in which it showcased its mission and its collaborative outreach, attracting about 1,000 visitors to the city’s Downtown Train Station.

Now, Sander said, instead of such fundraisers, Midstory banks on grants – local, regional, state, and national – and partnerships in conjunction with collaborations.

Midstory is in motion. “We’ve got a couple of really cool things upcoming,” she said. There’s an online exhibit with the Toledo History Museum highlighting local manufacturing and innovation, a new podcast looking into brain drain and population loss, and in the fall, an exhibit at the gallery space at the Main Branch of the Toledo Lucas County Public Library downtown on adaptive reuse sites – historic buildings that are being reused creatively.

“We’re changing the way people think about Toledo and the Midwest,” Sander said.

Learn more about the nonprofit at midstory.org.