HuffPost's Greatest Person Of The Day: Josh McManus And Helen Davis Johnson, Founders Of CreateHere
Today we're featuring Josh McManus and Helen Davis Johnson, founders of CreateHere. Josh and Helen started CreateHere in their hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, to address the wide array of problems the town faces. The organization helps to gather people from across the community to solve these problems -- and make Chattanooga a better place to call home.
Huffington Post: Tell us about yourselves and what you were up to before you started CreateHere.
Josh McManus and Helen Davis Johnson: Prior to co-founding CreateHere, both Josh and Helen spent their time building community in a variety of other ways, Josh with an eye toward business and Helen with a focus on creativity. Helen is an artist and spent a dozen years in non-profit work and arts administration, directing the nationally ranked 4 Bridges Arts Festival and coordinating innovative museum programs, as well as designing and launching community-focused arts initiatives. Josh is an entrepreneur at heart and spent more than 10 years doing resource and organizational development, running a private consulting practice, and launching several for-profits.
HP: What are the big ideas/goals behind Create Here? How do you execute them?
JM & HDJ: CreateHere works with one guiding principle in mind: We love our city for what it is, has been, and could become. CreateHere exists solely to make Chattanooga a better place. We drive and pressure-test sustainable solutions to overwhelming needs and issues in the community.
Our work grows from an ever-evolving set of core values. Rather than creating programs for the sake of perpetuity, projects are launched with an understanding that they will last only as long as they're relevant to community needs. All initiatives, big or small, seek to provide long-lasting tools and resources to individuals in the community.
HP: What kind of tangible results have you achieved? How has the organization grown over time?
JM & HDJ: The vision started with the attraction and retention of creative individuals through a relocation incentive that brought over 32 artists to Chattanooga's urban core. That quest to develop talent also led to the launch of a competitive fellowship program that has graduated 80+ young people; a grants program funding over $575,000 in creative projects; and a progressive workspace that doubles as a community center and civic engagement laboratory. Additionally, CreateHere just launched The Company Lab, a new entrepreneurial initiative that exists to increase the viability of high-growth start-ups in Chattanooga by helping entrepreneurs determine their next steps and by connecting them with resources to move their venture forward.
The Company Lab leverages the success of CreateHere's Springboard program. Building an entrepreneurial and creative culture doesn't happen overnight and knowing that these kinds of creative efforts are often difficult to sustain, CreateHere launched SpringBoard. The first SpringBoard business planning class was launched in January of 2008 and has since graduated over 250 entrepreneurs over the course of 20 classes, resulting in the creation of at least 60 new ventures.
One of our proudest accomplishments has been Stand, CreateHere's community visioning effort. It began with the goal of garnering 25,000 responses to our four-question survey about the Chattanooga region. We see a visioning process as bringing the future into the hands of residents, recording needs and successes through surveys, open dialogue, and community forums. By the time the survey process closed, over 26,263 survey responses were collected.
Chattanooga's history is a testament to the success of "place-making" development initiatives, but CreateHere goes one step further, jump-starting efforts at "people-making," and finding ways to celebrate public spaces in the process.
HP: Who inspires you? Who are your heroes?
JM & HDJ: We both value ambitious ideas and honesty and continually look for that in people both near us and in those we can celebrate from afar.
Josh: Abraham Lincoln and Corey Booker for their fearless leadership from the front.
Helen: I am surrounded by people who make my life better and push me to be my best. One of those heroes was my mother, who believed in the power of communication and encouragement and continued to communicate beautifully long after ALS had taken away her physical ability to do so. I've also been able to see a cadre of local men and women who have achieved a great deal professionally and unselfishly pitch in to make the community a better place.
HP: What do you get out of doing the work that you do?
JM & HDJ: It's exhilarating and exhausting all at the same time. At times, it means just being raw and honest. Other times it's about being celebratory -- celebrating the fact that the small things can help us find answers to big questions. Our generation has a critical eye. We've experienced multiple disappointments from insincere leaders who lost their ability to fool the public. Our generation has been told that things would be taken care of, and they haven't been. We know that there are big challenges ahead and that it's important to ask for everyone's participation in constructing new ways of looking at issues and taking action. We've seen it work time and again. CreateHere offers a platform for this type of participatory conversation and we encourage a deep level of involvement from our program participants and our neighbors.
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The Huffington Post Dominique Fenton
First Posted: 11/30/10 12:43 PM ET Updated: 05/25/11 07:15 PM ET