Champions of the Lost Causes

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to City Leadership executive director John Carroll at his Crosstown Concourse office. The two explore how the nonprofit helps recruit, catalyze and develop leaders at every level to help Memphis grow and thrive.

Guest host/producer J.D. Reager interviews Champions of the Lost Causes founder Marvin Stockwell at the Memphis Listening Lab. They discuss last summer's podcast road trip, what's next for the show, the Mid-South Coliseum, and more.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to Libby Crimmings, president of Atlas Community Studios, at her office in Des Moines, Iowa. The pandemic showed everyone just how portable some types of work can be, and that was an advantage to small to midsize cities looking to attract and retain creative professionals who can do their job from anywhere. Marvin and Libby talk about how adaptive reuse of old buildings is helping renovate downtowns and neighborhoods across the United States, and how Libby’s work is helping communities adapt to meet evolving quality-of-life expectations.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to Joe Vital and Dean Dovolis of the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute at Dean's office in Minneapolis. With the help of many, Joe and Dean have championed the cause of the East Phillips Depot, a building that people in the surrounding neighborhood want repurposed as an urban farm and commercial center, but that the City of Minneapolis wants to demolish, despite the environmental dangers to people living nearby. Decades-old disinvestment, redlining, environmental racism, a hostile and indifferent mayoral administration, marches in the streets, lawsuits, occupations, and forced removal by police have all been part of this eight-year fight. Marvin, Joe and Dean talk about all that, but also about how the tide has recently turned in favor of the activists.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to Keith Hammonds and Charlie Denison, owner and editor of the Boulder Monitor, at their office in Boulder, MT. Championing the cause of a free press has always come with its challenges, but journalism is in the midst of a paradigm shift away from printed newspapers to digital distribution, and toward new funding models, among which there is still no clear standard. Marvin talks to Keith and Charlie about the challenges of informing a public that has many other options for receiving information, and about the unique role journalism must continue to play alongside owned media and social media.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to Mark Lakeman at his office in Portland. Mark is the founder of the City Repair movement, which has changed countless neighborhoods in Portland, OR and spread to other U.S. cities and other countries. People need civic gathering spots, but when American cities were designed, the plazas and piazzas were left out. Marvin and Mark talk about why social bonds between neighbors have suffered as a result, how that maps over to larger societal problems, and the steps Mark and others have taken to change that, one neighborhood at a time.

*We apologize for the poor audio quality of this interview.*

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to Alyse Nelson, a board member of Squeaky Wheels, a grassroots, bike-advocacy nonprofit in Bainbridge Island, Washington. Marvin and Alyse discuss Alyse's work to implement Bainbridge Island's comprehensive bicycle pedestrian infrastructure plan, and how her day job as city planner with the City of Seattle helps her understand the pressures and limitations of her Bainbridge Island municipal counterparts, as they work together to realize change.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to book marketing coach Sue Campbell in Portland, Oregon. A published author herself, Sue helps authors overcome self-doubt and develop the mindset and habits to bring their books into the world. Sue and Marvin talk about the importance of books, how stories have power, and how Sue works to remove traditional barriers to writing to make the world more just and kind.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to VooDoo Doughnut founder Ken Pogson in Portland, Oregon. Even a for-profit business is a cause to those hearty souls who take the risk, but Voodoo Doughnut has had a charitable thrust since its earliest days. Ken explains how the company's philanthropy started simply enough with giving away day-old doughnuts, and how it grew along with the business into larger checks that do more good. Ken and Marvin also explore Ken's Memphis roots. Back in the mid 1980s, Ken was Marvin's first real boss at the old Fare Four movie theater. Ken was shaped by Memphis’ 80s and 90s Antenna Club music scene and his friends in the Grifters. Throw in Memphis pro wrestling and Prince Mongo's various establishments, and all of a sudden the Voodoo Doughnut brand makes complete sense. It's uniquely Portland, but has Memphis’ hands all over it.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to Brand New Voices publisher Cory Cachola in Portland, OR. Cory is an advocate for web3 and the community that's growing around this emerging evolution of human connection on the web. The promise of the internet was always to connect us, but as the tech and computing power have improved, so has the web's ability to deliver on the depth of what we all dreamed was possible in the web’s earliest days. Cory is a proponent of cryptocurrency, NFTs and the blockchain, but he's most interested in why these developments have come about, and what it says about human yearning for connection, meaning, freedom, and opportunity.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to Jason Waligoske, owner of Yep Yep Organic Farm in unincorporated Dexter, Oregon. For Jason, the benefits of eating organic started with working on his grandparents' farm as a boy, then later working at, then owning his favorite health food store. After a short-lived, crop-science job showed him the negative effects of pesticides and GMO technology, he had a vision for starting an organic farm. Jason chose aquaponic farming because it creates a symbiotic relationship between the crops that grow in water and the fish that swim below, and because he says it creates produce with superior nutritional value and taste.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to artist and musician Joe Demaree at his home in San Jose, California. Many artists first champion the cause of their creative vision and then organize their lives around moving it forward. Joe has an unwavering commitment to his artistic vision, and the community he's built around art, music and the free exchange of ideas.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to educator Mischelle Brown in Oakland, California. Mischelle's use of risky play to provide better learning opportunities for her neurodivergent students was at first seen as unorthodox, and besides, there was no funding at her school for what she wanted to do. Undaunted, Mischelle crowdfunded the money she needed through ioby, and after after engaging in rock climbing, blowing glass and building forts, students' grades went up and disciplinary incidents went down. In fact, the benefits of risky play are well-documented in research dating back to the 1960s. Now armed with the data to show her program works, Mischelle is looking for new ways to use risky play to improve education.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to Terrence Murtaugh in Phoenix, AZ. Terrence is the founder of the Heavy Pedal, a cycling apparel company based in Phoenix. Marvin and Terrence talk about his non-traditional, iterative path to finding his calling. His transition from graffiti artist to graphic designer, web developer and business owner with a track record of backing good causes didn't happen overnight. It started by championing the cause of his own life, and digging down deep to expect more of himself.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to Sara Vaas at CONO's offices in Colorado Springs, CO. CONO is a nonprofit that works to connect neighbors to each other and the civic process. Marvin and Sara talk about the challenges of elevating citizens' voices as the city grows, and how CONO is working with the City to organize ongoing citizen input. The two also talk about Sara's work as an artist, and how that has translated into the creativity and drive necessary to work with her community to effect change and empower others.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to LA-based writer and director Sean Crouch at his home. Known for shows such as Wolf Pack, The Exorcist, Lore, The 100, Numb3rs and Unforgettable, Sean talks to Marvin about his role in the current writer's strike, and how it differs from his experience of the writer's strike of 2007. The two explore why changes in how episodic shows are produced have hurt the apprenticeship model that helped Sean work his way up, as well as AI's potential to plagiarize and diminish the role of writers.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to Sarah Kephart and Andy Hoffman at Envision's Wichita headquarters. Sarah serves as Envision's arts manager, and Andy serves as call center supervisor. What started in Wichita in 1933 as an effort to find jobs for blind people has grown into a multi-state nonprofit with every service imaginable to support people who are blind and visually impaired. The three talk about Sarah and Andy's ongoing work and ruminate on what it means that a cause still calls new Champions, whose dedication to mission is undimmed by the many years.

Host Marvin Stockwell talk to Andy Scurto at the Tulsa's Promenade Mall. Andy followed his daughter's love of playing hockey into being a fan, coach and ultimately owner of the Tulsa Oilers. Marvin and Andy talk about Andy's passion for youth sports, how the team gives back to the youth in Tulsa, and how a vacant former Macy's is being converted into a facility with two new ice rinks to serve the team and the Tulsa community.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to Janae Bradford at Tulsa City Hall. Janae leads the City of Tulsa's Office of Financial Empowerment and Community Wealth. Marvin and Janae talk about how her career in finance and nonprofit work prepared her well to champion the cause of financial stability from within municipal government, and how she's applying best practices that are working in other cities.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to Sharon Chapman, executive director of the Next Step, at the Ft. Smith, AR shelter for people experiencing homelessness. What began as a church outreach serving a daily meal in the 1980s has grown into a multifaceted nonprofit that provides not only emergency shelter, but also transitional housing and other services aimed at helping people become permanently housed. Marvin and Sharon talk about why Sharon feels called to this work, and how her circuitous path and unique mix of professional gifts prepared her well to lead the organization in this phase of its growth.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to Steve Foutch at Hy-Vee Arena in Kansas City. Steve bought the historic Kemper Arena for $1 and set out to do what many people said was impossible – save and repurpose the building. After he and his team solved many structural and engineering challenges, the building was relaunched in 2018 as the multi-use Hy-Vee Arena. Steve also weighs in on the fate of Memphis' Mid-South Coliseum. There are many correlations between the two arenas and several shared lessons learned.

Host Marvin Stockwell talks to John Rash at the Champions of the Lost Causes home studio in Memphis. John is the creator of the Southern Punk Archive, a growing physical and digital repository of videos, photos, fliers, music, films, and oral histories that document the South's many thriving DIY punk scenes. Before now, the contributions that southern punk scenes have made to the national conversation on free expression has been underreported and underappreciated.

People champion all sorts of causes, but the uber-cause that we can sometimes miss is that of our own precious lives. This is where Jen Frank uses her gifts as a career and life coach to help the people she coaches. Our lives and how we make contributions in the world is a multi-faceted equation in which we balance the things we yearn for with other competing priorities. Jen helps people get unstuck and on to living lives of deeper fulfillment. 

IOBY is a crowdfunding site that helps people make positive changes in their communities. We discuss how Erin and her founding partners discovered their niche in helping smaller neighborhood-level actors make change. We also chat with Dawn about her development from being a project leader in Cleveland to her role as IOBY's Place-Based Strategies Manager, with national responsibilities. 

Svitlana Muzychenko, founder of UA Brokers Without Borders, works with Ukrainian grassroots organizations to address emerging humanitarian needs that stem from the ongoing war with Russia. We’ll discuss Svitlana’s early life in Ukraine, how she moved to Brazil and started her own technology firm, and how she has used her professional skills and network to help her fellow Ukrainians survive.

Mia Henley is the executive director of Creative Aging, a nonprofit that makes music and arts programming more accessible to older adults in Memphis. Everyone needs community to live a healthy, fulfilled life, but family and work connections often fall away as we age. The arts have the transformative power to build skills, confidence and community, and in doing so, the arts can improve physical and emotional health among seniors.

McKrell Baier is the director of the BridgeUp, GiddyUp nonprofit program. Through her unique and compassionate approach to horseback riding and Equestrian sports, McKrell and her team work with children ages 11 to 18 to help them become more confident, responsible, empathetic and goal-oriented. With wealth and privilege often associated with Equestrian sports, McKrell is also working to make the sport more accessible to all through her free program.

Tina Sullivan, executive director of the Overton Park Conservancy, played a pivotal role in resolving the decade-long fight over the Memphis Zoo parking cars on the park's Greensward. Today's hard-fought wins are built on the activism of Overton Park's past, including the landmark Supreme Court court case in 1971 that kept Interstate 40 from bisecting the park. Tina's passion for the park's rich history is matched only by the excitement she has for the park's future, in which the Overton Park Conservancy will work with stakeholders at the Overton Park Shell, Metal Museum, the renovated golf course, Memphis Zoo and old growth forest to collaborate on future programming at one of Memphis' crown-jewel signature parks.

Media consolidation in the 1990s forced John Michael off the 96X airwaves in Memphis and on to a successful career in radio that included a stint at the vaunted KROQ in Los Angeles. John found that his varied experiences taught him a lot about what worked in radio. Those experiences also showed him how radio was broken and disconnected from the audiences it once served, and he began to think about how to reinvent it. John recently rebooted 96X and plans to involve the Memphis music community to make the station all it can be.

After cutting his teeth as a musician and producer in New York City, James Dukes (IMAKEMADBEATS) returned home to Memphis in 2011 to find a music scene that at first seemed stuck in the past. As he began to work with local artists, he discovered an eclectic and uniquely creative group of artists that would become the backbone of Unapologetic, a label and artist collective James founded and has since grown. 

Nick Oyler is the Bikeway & Pedestrian Program Manager for the City of Memphis. When the push for bike lanes in Memphis resulted in early victories for the bike/ped movement and then gave way to the city’s initial buildout, Nick was away at college, grad school, then working in Germany. Following all that news from afar, Nick thought that he might have missed his moment to get involved. But as many multifaceted causes require, there was plenty of work left to be done when he got back to his hometown. Nick’s experience of riding a bike when he was young helped pave the way for his interest in city planning and to his current role, and helped him see the many benefits to cities and people of having a well-designed system of bike lanes and walkways. Memphis has come a long way, but it still has a lot of work ahead of it.

Roshun Austin and Quincy Jones of the Works Inc., are working to rebuild, restore and renew families and where they live by focusing on housing, economic development and social services. With the recent merger with Neighborhood Preservation Inc., the Works has strengthened an already strong partnership and is now capable of doing more to advocate for the needs of residents, and ambitious plans are underway to renovate and reopen Northside High School.

Eric Barnes is the CEO and publisher of the Daily Memphian, an online daily news outlet launched in 2018. The global decline of the daily print newspaper meant the decline of the Commercial Appeal, Memphis' legacy paper. The Daily Memphian was a response to that decline, and as the paradigm shift in journalism continues, the Daily Memphian continues to adapt to find a funding model to support its part of the city’s independent press. The Daily Memphian is part of Memphis' unique media ecosystem, and the benefits of competition with the Commercial Appeal and other outlets, have been a boon to news consumers.

In 2000, Christopher Reyes founded Live From Memphis, a website that showcased the city's burgeoning music, film, and art scenes. The site gave artists new tools and ways to connect that bigger social media platforms had not yet built. It galvanized collaboration and helped grow community among artists. Always ahead of the technological curve, immersive multimedia art was next for Chris. In creating Baron Von Opperbean, an interactive art installation, he once again used storytelling to build community. In the future, Chris plans to introduce virtual and augmented reality dimensions to the Baron's story, a story he insists is more about the participants telling their own stories than it is about the Baron.

Panelists Isaac Daniel (Stax Music Academy), Elizabeth Cawein (Music Export Memphis), J.D. Reager (Back to the Light) discuss the past, present, and future of the Memphis music landscape. Each panelist has championed the cause of Memphis music in different ways.

Recorded live on Saturday, December 4th, 2021 at the Memphis Listening Lab inside Crosstown Concourse.

Many consider Mike McCarthy the godfather of independent film in Memphis, but in addition to his films, he has created comic books, graphic novels, sculptures, played in bands, and was the co-founder of the Coliseum Coalition, the grassroots group that worked to save Memphis' historic Mid-South Coliseum from the wrecking ball, and is now working to reactivate it. The common thread in all of Mike's work is a desire to make meaning and build culture through art.

Aaron Shafer led the grassroots effort to open Memphis' first public skate park in 2011. We discuss how his passion for the idea drew others to the cause and how they collaborated with the city of Memphis and the community to open the park. We also talk about his idea for a wave park and other civic projects on the horizon.

Jared Boyd is the program manager for WYXR, Memphis' newest community radio station, which grew from a germ of an idea and collaboration with others to now broadcasting diverse viewpoints and an eclectic mix of music from Crosstown Concourse in Memphis. Jared's experience as a journalist and DJ also helped him work with others to make the station what it has become in its first year.

Angela Barksdale's focus on improving Memphis' historic Orange Mound community has seen her produce events, lead campaigns, and advocate for the reopening of the dormant Mid-South Coliseum. She and others think the Coliseum could fit in with the City of Memphis' redevelopment of the city's fairgrounds, now known as Liberty Park, as a community asset that would enhance other efforts underway in Orange Mound.

Isabel Gonzalez-Whitaker worked with others to transform an underused Atlanta park into the Sara J. Gonzalez Memorial Park, a park renamed to honor her mother's trailblazing work and reflect the inclusive values her mother stood for and instilled in her. Working through grief after her mother's death became a labor of love that drew others to the effort in unexpected ways. The park now serves as a community gathering place that recognizes the contributions of Atlanta's Latinx community.

Trevor Clarke is executive director of Working Bikes, a Chicago-based nonprofit bicycle co-op that gives donated bicycles new life by redistributing them locally and globally - 10,000 bikes in Chicago and more than 100,000 across the globe since 1999. The organization's global focus has provided access to resources and opportunities that otherwise could have been out of reach - reducing waste and pollution, and improving people's health in the process.

Charlotte Tolley, founder and executive director of Nourish Knoxville started the Market Square Farmers Market in downtown Knoxville in 2004 when downtown wasn’t much to look at. The farmers market not only jump-started the revitalization of the city’s downtown, but it also led to the 2013 establishment of Nourish Knoxville, a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating healthy communities by supporting relationships between local farmers, producers, and the public. Early doubts gave way to momentum including the opening of additional markets and addressing new needs in the pandemic.

Victoria Jones is the founder and executive director of Tone, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering Black artists and communities and elevating Memphis as a global cultural beacon. Tone recently announced plans to team up with Unapologetic, a record label and artists collective, to convert the long-vacant United Equipment Building into Orange Mound Tower, a mixed-use development with a commitment to community ownership and equity. An artist in her own right, Victoria has become a vocal leader for change in the arts and in the wider Memphis community.

As co-founder and spokesman for the Coliseum Coalition, Marvin has worked with others for five years to reopen the beloved midsize venue. In 2016, he also co-founded Friends of the Fairgrounds, which conducted a yearlong stakeholder input process to determine what people wanted to see the wider Fairgrounds land parcel become. In the last two years, Marvin and his fellow Coliseum Coalition board members have worked closely with the City of Memphis on 90+ Coliseum tours for potential investors, two community clean-ups, and plans for revitalizing events inside the Coliseum.