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Keywords: clean energy revolution, diversity, equity, inclusion, economic transition, grassroots level
Passionate about innovation at the intersection of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), Marvin Logan Jr. sparks a candid discussion on the integral role DEI plays in the clean energy revolution. Reflecting back on his past experiences with community leadership, he emphasizes the immense untapped potential for creativity and innovation in marginalized communities.
Marvin acknowledges that for the energy ecosystem to truly revolutionize our world, discussions must resonate from the grassroots up, not top-down. When communities are offered empowering, immersive educational experiences, an amazing ripple effect is triggered – one that spans generations and fosters a cascading tide of hope and opportunity. Marvin’s belief is that without robust representation, the strides we make may not be sustainable or inclusive enough. True progress, he argues, hinges on ensuring a seat at the table for all voices in our collective energy future.
Learn more about Oh WOW Children’s Center for Science & Technology
Transcript:
Rick Stockburger
Hello and welcome to BRITElights, where we’re exploring the clean energy revolution together. I’m Rick Stockbrigger, the president and CEO of BRITE.
Autumn Hankinson
And I’m Autumn Hankinson, the community manager here at BRITE. And I’m so excited for our special guest here today. Rick, you and our guests have a ton of history together, so I’m going to let you introduce them and take it away.
Rick Stockburger
Well, I’m so excited to have Marvin Logan Jr. On our podcast today. The CEO of the oh, wow. Children’s Science Center. I always try to think through, like, how would I awkwardly introduce a friend at a dinner party when it comes to this? And first and foremost, there’s no awkward way to do it. Dude, you’re one of the coolest people I know, and sometimes I get to work out with you. Sometimes I get to just ruminate on all of the things that are happening in this world. But first and foremost, you’re one of my best friends and I’m so grateful to have you on here so we can go into your history and our history and all of that a little bit later. But Marvin, thanks so much for joining us today.
Marvin Logan Jr.
Absolutely. Thank you. Rick and autumn, super excited to be here. Always love everything, Rick. Always love everything. BRITE. So this is a love sandwich, if you will. So looking forward to the conversation. Cool.
Rick Stockburger
Well, Marvin, I like to always start these things. A, first and foremost, put the topic out in front here. And so one of the things that BRITE did at the end of last year is we signed a letter to President Biden along with Laci and everybody, talking about the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion in the clean energy revolution and some of the meaningful steps that we believe that organizations like ours, but all organizations should be taking to ensure that everybody is involved in this economic transition that we’re trying to push forward in a meaningful way. And so it’s really fortunate that, a, we have such a strong relationship, but b, were able to get you on the board here at BRITEon.
Rick Stockburger
So today, one of the things that’s the main topic that we’ll be talking about is how do we get more people engaged, people that frankly don’t look like me engaged in this clean energy revolution. And, man, you’ve inspired me in so many ways on that. So excited about that. So the first question, as always, what excites you about this topic?
Marvin Logan Jr.
Oh, my goodness. What doesn’t excite me about this topic? I love innovation. I love creativity. And I think oftentimes when people think about marginalized communities, they don’t consider that the mere existence of marginalized people is innovation at work. We figure out how to do the most with the least. We always have to come up with creative ways to be able to be in spaces, get a seat at the table when there isn’t an opportunity, and when we can’t get it a seat at the table, we create our own table. Anybody who comes from a rural, low income, or primarily ethnic minority neighborhood, we all have a relative who can make a vehicle operate to almost peak functionality without all the parts that came from the manufacturer. That’s innovation.
Marvin Logan Jr.
We’ve all experienced our loved ones scraping two nickels together and somehow making sure that we don’t go hungry. That’s a form of innovation. And so when it comes to this particular conversation, a lot of times when we think about clean technology or just technology in general, these are conversations that are not being had at the grassroots level of different communities. And oftentimes it isn’t a matter of capability. It isn’t a matter of just the opportunity to learn skill, just not having the conversation, not being present, not finding ways. And I think one of the awesome projects that we got the opportunity to work together on recently with the group of Kent State architecture students that pretty much built a roadmap for our community to figure out how we could use design to solve some of our problems.
Marvin Logan Jr.
One of the experiences that those students had was just, I can’t tell you the way that they reacted when they first came into our community. And I mean, little Weary, little like, is it okay to be here? It’s like, absolutely. You’re with the people who are from here. We’ve invited you in, so we’ll ensure that you have a good experience. But those students were shocked to find out how many ideas and how many original thoughts people had about ways that we could use design to solve the problems of the community. And a lot of times in marginalized communities, folks think that all the answers have to come from the outside. When nine times out of ten, the answers are available on the inside, we just don’t have the resources to solve those problems.
Marvin Logan Jr.
And so I think the opportunity to build a bridge that works and to be able to see everything from a middle schooler or a high schooler exploring what clean technology is and how it could work for them, and a parent getting an opportunity to level up and scale up and break into another career pathway, I think those are the things that excite me the most. Finding creative, innovative ways to build public private partnership that helps advance our community in a meaningful way.
Rick Stockburger
That’s awesome. A. It seems like you’re excited about a lot. We love opportunity, and I think there’s so much opportunity to grow in this space and this region and this community. My second question, always my follow up question, because I like to set rails right. So what scares you? What is scary about the clean energy revolution, and specifically in this vein of diversity, equity, inclusion, and making sure that everybody’s engaged as we move forward. What’s the scariest thing to you?
Marvin Logan Jr.
I’m always afraid of failure without lessons. One of my favorite poems, it has a stanza about a man being willing to win because he isn’t afraid to fail. And I think anytime you think about innovation, you can’t have the fear of failure. You have to kind of go into it feet first, of course, with ethics, but being able to take a leap off the cliff and see what you’re able to make work. I think what scares me about opportunities like this is we don’t get the right people to the table. We spend too much time preaching to the choir. We don’t put sustainable things in place so that this work can continue. Because obviously, in the nature of nonprofit work, we’re all trying to work ourselves out of a job. Right?
Marvin Logan Jr.
Everybody wants to be able to have a mission that doesn’t need to exist. And if you don’t have that thinking in a nonprofit world, you are in the wrong industry. But I think, how do we. It’s a huge issue, especially when you think about just a community like the Mahoning Valley. And, I mean, there are so many different types of communities. You have communities all on the steel belt. You have old coal communities that obviously, when you talk about environmental justice and clean tech and clean energy, they felt a lot of the brunt for decades about what that looks like and how it can shift things. Or in a community like ours, where sometimes people hear clean tech and they’re like, oh, this is just rubbish. This is some ridiculous thing that isn’t going to take hold, that isn’t safe.
Marvin Logan Jr.
People don’t know a lot about it. And my fear is that we make the effort and then don’t make the right moves, and suddenly we grow the margin. We make it even worse. Suddenly we have less and less diverse people with diverse backgrounds having the opportunity to get into the field at its various points. So I think that’s probably the thing that scares me the most.
Rick Stockburger
Yeah, no, I get that. And so let’s take a step back now that we’ve kind of set some rails. And I actually want to share your background because I think it’s really amazing because you and I have actually kind of touched some points at different points in our career or in our lives that were talking about earlier. But we both went to Kent State University, both classes. Yeah. But you also went on to go to Notre Dame as well.
Marvin Logan Jr.
Go Irish.
Rick Stockburger
You’re a domer. Is that.
Autumn Hankinson
Fun fact real quick is I’m actually a Notre Dame fan. I grew up a Notre Dame fan. Go Irish. My dad’s been a Notre Dame fan. We’re from Kentucky. But I’m like, I think it’s so interesting when it comes to community and connection, the small things that can connect everyone. Like you and Rick are connected by Kent, but it’s like, you love Notre Dame, and I’m just like, I can relate to that.
Marvin Logan Jr.
Absolutely. No, it’s an interesting community, and it’s always interesting to see the webs that weave.
Rick Stockburger
Yeah. And so track star as well.
Marvin Logan Jr.
It feels like it was a lifetime ago. Yeah. I’m a valley kid through and through. Really kind of found my passion for advocacy through athletics. As a matter of fact, one of our favorite former journalists from Mahoney Valley, John Vargo. Our friendship started because I had just broken a record at a track meet, and he came up to give me the interview, and I didn’t want to talk about that at all. I was talking about something that was going on in the community, and he was like, you know what? I’m going to have our editor reach out. And they ended up doing a story. And that started to become kind of my flavor of things. I was a star athlete and a student leader who had a platform, and I just loved being able to make it count.
Marvin Logan Jr.
My father really instilled that background in me early on. I used to have to stay home and watch speeches from world leaders. I had to read a bunch of books at a young age. And so he wanted me to be aware of the world because of his experience as a scholar athlete and how the world kind of made him choose. And he always let me know I didn’t have to choose. I could be a great athlete, a great student, a great citizen, and be able to make an impact on the world however I could. So my athletic career led me from orangey Harding high school as a state champion and an all american to Kent State, where I furthered my track and field career. Unfortunately, as many young athletes do, I did not take great care of my body.
Marvin Logan Jr.
And by year four, I was, as the kids like to say, washed. I blew my achilles. I was a shell of myself and, you know, came all this way, why don’t we still finish the mission? And luckily for me, I had been involved in student leadership my entire time at Kent State, was in student government all five years, served as the president of the black student union, and then became the student body president shortly thereafter. Got to do some awesome work with then vice president Biden on the it’s on us campaign. Got to work with a lot of other entities advocating for college affordability. So causing a ruckus to make a difference has always been a part of who I am, and I fell in love with this work.
Marvin Logan Jr.
At 13, I met three african american men who worked in the nonprofit industry, and I was like, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I want to be able to be in a place to lend my talents and skills back to the community. And so been on that same trajectory ever since. Ten years later, now I have the awesome opportunity of leading one of the valley’s preemptive STEM organizations and continuing to make a difference. And I get the opportunity to work with cool people like Rick, working with people who care about our community, and working with people who care about innovation. That’s the thing that kind of pours life back into me. So that’s a really quick snapshot of my background.
Rick Stockburger
That’s awesome, man. Well, I mean, you skipped one of my favorite parts, because when I was founding my first company, I was fortunate enough to shoot feature length documentaries. And one of my most interesting places in the world, to me was. And nonprofits, I believe in the world, was actually pony ride in Detroit and the boys and Girls Club there. And some of the things that were going on there in what I was there in 2011, 2012 were just so unbelievably amazing to me.
Rick Stockburger
I think the thing about cities that I’ve always cared about and why I love and we work so hard in the Mahoning Valley is, I think people get this idea that a city has this certain culture or whatever, but really, at the end of the day, you get to meet the people that are the culture and so different when you actually get to meet people and see what they’re doing and have them share something with you that is personal, and that’s, like, what makes you fall in love, right? And so tell me about your time in Detroit, man.
Marvin Logan Jr.
Yeah. People make places. Don’t let anybody tell you any different. Detroit is, if not, one of the greatest comeback story in american history. Detroit is an american city if there ever was one. And I got the opportunity to spend a few years in Detroit with the boys and girls clubs of southeastern Michigan, initially joined the strategy team, ended up leaving as a director of programming. And while there, we developed this really cool and unique relationship with a brand called Pony Ride Detroit. Shout out to Phil Cooley. Shout out to slow’s barbecue. My guy Phil started pony ride out of just this idea that Detroit had all of this space. Lots of people forget Detroit used to be almost twice the size that it is now, having over a million people being there and being one of the largest cities in America.
Marvin Logan Jr.
And as Detroit was beginning to recover from white flight bankruptcy, a lot of corporations kind of leaving the city itself. We just had these beautiful empty warehouses with nothing to do with them. And Phil and his crew ended up renovating a space and creating this cool, collaborative, kind of feng shui deal for creatives and entrepreneurs. And as that brand continued to grow, when the leadership team with Sean Wilson, Gavin McGuire and several other individuals and myself were with the Boys and girls Club, we had a couple of instances where we wanted to kind of take the organization in a new direction, in a new light.
Marvin Logan Jr.
And we had this really unique situation where we had a young lady sharing an experience about how she had to witness a robbery take place with her mother, and that one of our board members, who was over 20 years her senior, was a club kid and had the same experience. And we thought to ourselves, if we have been embedded in communities for this long, and we have over 100 year history here, and we have people 20 plus years apart having the same experience, are we moving the needle?
Marvin Logan Jr.
And so did some work with Ernst and young to kind of throw some things up on the wall to see what would stick, what ended up coming out of that work and know furthering it with Bridgepan, we created this movement, if you will, a theory of change that involves students being career, startup and homeowner ready. And we ended up opening up a pony ride co working space inside of our flagship club. And what we wanted to do is give people the opportunity for economic mobility. There was obviously a huge amount of detail that probably a great conversation for another time when we talk about how we can make differences in other marginalized communities. But the big piece of it was we wanted to create a multigenerational impact model that worked.
Marvin Logan Jr.
And my favorite time before this one thing happened in 2020, was that we had a group of students one side learning a little bit about video game design. I had some students doing dance, have some students doing coding activities. We’ve got a little bit of sports going on in the gym. And then over here, we literally have parents taking public speaking classes and pathways to homeownership, people learning. How do we take me just as an example, like a person who’s been a serial renter, or there’s someone who lived in subsidized housing to start to understand, like, hey, with your income, this is what it would take to get you into a home. And people realizing that there weren’t as many barriers as they thought that they would be. We offered financial literacy and it was just this super cool mix of things happening.
Marvin Logan Jr.
And then when the pandemic happened, and obviously we had to shutter our clubs for a period of time, we thought, hey, this is something that seems to be working. Why don’t we double down? And so we had some crazy number, like over 40% of the square footage in our clubs was being underutilized. And so we decided to do an expansion with pony ride and allow for pony ride members to be able to have below market rate leasing space inside of our club under the agreement of a few things. One, you’ll have to go through the same background check as all of our staff. Two, you have to find a way to do programming for families. And then three, you have to be able to tie in what you do with our young people.
Marvin Logan Jr.
And so being able to create that synergy just caused this really fun thing to blossom. I mean, we would have weekends where we easily have 1000 people in our clubs participating in different programs. And you have a pop up market over here. You’ve got a class going on over here. You got someone operating their business out of here. Some of those folks employed are club students. And so it was just this really cool ecosystem that was created. And it was the first time in my career that I got to put all of those economic development, community advocacy, community development, financial literacy, workforce development, being able to put all of those things into one place and seeing them all function.
Marvin Logan Jr.
And so I’m glad that you brought it up because it was definitely one of those watershed career moments where it helped to kind of shift and lead me to be like, hey, this is the kind of stuff that I want to do moving forward, being able to create impact and create change.
Rick Stockburger
So one of the things that I wanted to say and why I think pony ride was so inspirational to me and to talk about one of my favorite days of work is growing up. My father lost his job when I was 16 years old. And I think that does something to a young person’s psyche that they don’t just understand when they’re 16. That you can’t grow up and do what your father did for a living or do what your mother did for a living from that perspective. One of my favorite days at work, hands down, was when were able to bring. Oh, wow. And you and Pastor Todd Johnson and the kids at second baptist church into our lab here.
Rick Stockburger
And one of the things that was going on, and for those of you that are listening that don’t know, but Altium cells is just down the road from us. It’s a $2.3 billion joint venture between general Motors, LG chem. They’re building electric vehicle batteries for Cadillac and all these General Motors vehicles. And it’s just this really cool opportunity where they’re hiring 1300 to 1500 to 1701, 800 people now in our community. And BRITE was able to help them get trained up on their first week of work and so go through battery 101, safety stuff, and so on. Our mezzanine here at BRITE, we had 80 altium employees, right? And so to bring it back full circle, we love to bring students into our research lab.
Rick Stockburger
And in our research lab, we do battery testing of electric vehicle batteries to little batteries that are in your watch and Iot. And we have a wet lab, and we have startups in there that are doing cool stuff. But we like to bring these students in, these young people in and do just different types of battery technologies and let them see what’s going on. And my hands down, my favorite day at work was one of those kids, actually, a couple of those kids started waving to somebody that was getting trained at Altium. And I was like, oh, do you know them? And they’re like, yeah, it’s my dad. He’s getting a job. He’s been out of work for x, y, and z. So he’s working at Altium. And I want to learn about batteries so I can have a chance to work at Altium.
Rick Stockburger
And just the type of hope, I think, that comes with good employment and good paying jobs and what that can do for families is unbelievably important to me because of my circumstances growing up. But when I saw multiple and then a couple of kids were like, hey, no, that’s my dad over. That’s my mom over there. It made me tear up a little bit just thinking that these opportunities are coming. And that’s why I think clean energy and this space is so important because the Midwest has consistently built the products that the rest of the world wants and needs.
Rick Stockburger
And right now, we have an opportunity to bring all of that manufacturing back from China and from Mexico and all of these other places because of things that were put in the IRA, the bil around american made and here in the midwest we can build these things again and our kids, dads and moms can have these jobs and they can have a reason to stay here. So sorry, that was a long lead up and me telling a little bit about myself. But into you now have this amazing role at OH WOW. Where you get to engage with talented young people and people that want to explore science in a meaningful way. And I’m just so excited to have you as a partnership. But tell me a little bit about OH WOW.
Rick Stockburger
And your mission and how that pertains to all of this economic growth that we’re seeing and what we hope to draw here and how we can keep young people here. Man.
Marvin Logan Jr.
Absolutely. So, yeah. OH WOW has really started to become this amazing engine of innovation and different things in our community. And how we do that is we have kind of this big picture of work that we do. First and foremost, we help to breed creativity and ingenuity and really independent thinking and problem solving, which literally is embedded in our mission. And we do it in a fun and colorful way so that everybody has the access to STEM education. Our late, great co founder, Gloria Jones, when I got the opportunity to sit down with her, I asked, know why did you and Roger do this in the first place? And she said, we wanted to make STEM accessible to everyone and we really just kind of took that and just kind of catapulted off of the platform that we have.
Marvin Logan Jr.
We have a beautiful 30,000 square foot facility in downtown Youngstown that features currently over 20 zones of exhibits that walk students through the different disciplines of STEM in the scientific process. And what we’re in the middle of doing is renovating that space and expanding that space in the historic Macquarie building to be able to really bring these innovative community education experiences to our physical location. And it doesn’t stop there. We actually serve another huge chunk of folks outside of that building with our outreach programs. So putting on camps, after school programs, being able to do professional development for educators and project and challenge based learning soon, this upcoming summer is something I’m really excited about.
Marvin Logan Jr.
We’re going to be launching an app development challenge and so different entities from our community will be able to come together with a group of students over the summer and we’re actually going to take those students through wireframing an app and hopefully eventually be able to get one of them to market. And we kind of take everything that Miss Frizzle and Bill Ny, the science guy, started and taking it to the next level with learners pre k all the way through twelveth grade. So some amazing things that are going on at oh, wow. Excited to have you on our board. Excited to have you on the team. But yeah, we’re about to do some stuff.
Rick Stockburger
Yeah, man, I know so much. It was the right choice for me to join your board as well. But recently you did the science of hip hop. And to me, we just need so many more ways to reach our young kids with opportunities to learn science and to engage in this. And I’m just like, what are some clean tech lessons that we can do with the kids that would be as exciting as learning about the science of hip hop? Because my kids loved every second of that opportunity, and I want to figure out how I can make this more exciting around the clean tech space. So shifting back to clean tech, what do you see as the opportunities to educate and get more diverse voices to the table in the clean energy space?
Marvin Logan Jr.
I think first and foremost, you start with the easy part. You ask why not? Instead of why? I think you brought up our science of hip hop event and one personally, as a hip hop scholar, I knew, hey, there’s a lot of cross sectionality. There are a lot of different ways that we can do different things here and make it so that it’s an attractive way for students to get a really good lesson that just combines it with something that they may be interested in. I think you got to have the same strategy with clean tech, even the way where you described your favorite day at BRITE. We just have to continue to do those same things. When it comes to clean tech. Access, adoption, innovation, the first step is just knowledge.
Marvin Logan Jr.
People sharing the information, people understanding and being able to create spaces in the community where people can understand things in lay terms. People can participate in a few activities that sparks that interest and then helps them to continue to take it from there. But really pushing that forward in third spaces and the places where people formally and informally gather in a community and having those stalwarts and community connectors. One of my favorite, Abuela D was her name, or is her name, and she was a young lady that was a community member around one of our clubs in Detroit, and it became one of those things. Well, hey, if you want people in the neighborhood to be able to know what’s going on, you got to go talk to Abuela D. She’s the twitter for this neighborhood.
Marvin Logan Jr.
And being able to use those kinds of informal communications, whether it’s going to the barbershop, going to the beauty salon, getting in the grocery stores, being in the churches, community centers, and just creating places where anybody can get involved at any level. If I’m a 75 year old retiree and I’ve never heard of clean tech, then I should be able to come up and participate in an activity. One of the coolest things about our science of hip hop event, which is consistent with all the programming that we do, the adults get just as interested as the young people. And definitely they try to squeamishly, kind of look around and make sure no one sees them because they don’t want people to know that they’re enjoying themselves as much as they can. But I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had adults.
Marvin Logan Jr.
It’s why we kind of came up with our concept with the parent academy to where they’re like, man, I kind of never knew that. I’ve never done some of those things. And when it comes to understanding clean tech and how to get that into diverse communities, it’s got to be a lot of the same ways. And members of the community that become early adopters, just like with your founders, there’s always, with every founder, there are a group of early adopters that believed in the concept, that thought it was something worthwhile and wanted to make an investment. Well, the same thing is true when it comes to community adoption of ideas and different opportunities.
Marvin Logan Jr.
And so I think continuing to do that, continuing to have these excellent community partnerships and bringing in people who have different areas of expertise and who do different things well so that we can have a nice clean tech gumbo for the community, is the best way to try to pathway forward.
Autumn Hankinson
I haven’t been saying much because your guys’conversation has just been flowing so effortlessly. And I just love listening to both of you guys. But I think my question really is, because in a lot of these, I come from a poor rural community as well. And I think the question really is, whenever I told my dad or my family or anyone what I do and what BRITE does, their immediate response is, we’re never getting away from coal. Like, clean tech’s never going to make it. It’s too expensive. What about my taxes? All of these things. I guess I’m asking, what kind of advice would you give to someone? I think Youngstown is just like the exception to the rule. Like everyone there is so into clean energy and clean tech. But what’s some like?
Autumn Hankinson
Okay, it’s got me excited, but yeah, what’s the advice you would give to those who can’t get past that barrier with their communities.
Marvin Logan Jr.
So I have two pieces of advice that are contrary to each other. Everybody has common ground and commonality somewhere. And so continuing to have the conversations will help you find where that connecting line is. I think it’s not clean tech, but it’s a different issue that affects the future of clean tech. We’ve obviously been through at least two years now of conversations with broadband Ohio, and really kind of understanding Appalachia rural communities. What are the challenges? I think there were even some misconceptions early on that rural communities didn’t want to be connected. And then you start finding someone who works in the agricultural industry and, like, who told you that there are lots of things that would make my business and my life simpler if I had connectivity.
Marvin Logan Jr.
And I think if you just continue to have those conversations with any different kinds of communities, because the conversation in willing, West Virginia, is going to be different than the conversation in Cleveland, Ohio, which is going to be different than the conversation in Louisville, which is going to be different than the conversation in lima. Right? So it’s a bunch of different ways where you have to find that commonality to talk to people. Now, on the flip side, the future waits for no one. And as Dr. George Garrison used to say in class, hey, this train is leaving the station. And so either you have the opportunity to get on the train or you can wave to the train goodbye, but the train is leaving. And I think we have seen for a variety of reasons. One, through great innovations.
Marvin Logan Jr.
Two, through a lot of the challenges that are coming to our energy grid, hey, we have to find some solutions. Fossil fuels are not going to be the end all, be all for us. And how can we find ways to adopt new technologies, cleaner technologies? How can we be good stewards of the earth? That was given to us to make sure that it was here before we got here, it’ll be here after we leave. How can we clean up the house as the party is going on? And how can we find different ways to have different points of inflection and intersection in different communities? So those are the best two pieces of advice that I would be able to give.
Marvin Logan Jr.
And obviously, just because that’s the conversation of poor rural community doesn’t mean that’s going to be very much of a different conversation in a poor urban community, because you’ll definitely have just as much skepticism. You just got to find ways to have those conversations. But I think just like those Kent state architecture students, people are surprised to find out when you approach the conversation the right way, and you invite someone in to have a seat at the table and to be able to have input in the conversation, you’ll be surprised at what you’re able to get back from it.
Autumn Hankinson
Yeah, I do have a more personal question, mainly for me and what oh, wow is doing, but I have a nephew who is so into science obsessed with it. We buy him everything we can to keep this fire alive in him. But I’m going to be quite honest, his Carroll county education system is not going to give him what he needs. What’s some advice that you can maybe give me and I can give his parents that can keep that fire alive? And what can I do and what can we do to help him?
Marvin Logan Jr.
Definitely one, connect with our social media because we do a lot of things digitally and provide the opportunity, and that’s something that we’re going to continue to double down on even as we try to fight the backside of that understanding the digital divide, and that everyone isn’t connected. So everyone doesn’t have the opportunity to have access points like that. But the difference is, in 2024, there are so many resources out there, sometimes it feels like there are too many. Definitely connecting with resources like that. Educational youth tv shows are also still a really good place to start. I’m shocked at how many things that I remember about the way that the world works from the things that I watched growing mean. I know everything about the way a bill is built in Congress. And it all started with, I’m just a bill.
Rick Stockburger
I’m just a bill on Capitol Hill, baby. Yes.
Marvin Logan Jr.
How many things I remember from reading Rainbow and from the magic school bus and bill nada. Science, Dorothy, explorer, blues cruise, you find ways to do problem solving, conductive reasoning, all these kinds of things. And so secondarily, anytime we have camps, whether they’re camps for a weekend, whether they’re camps for a few weeks in the summertime, whatever it is, definitely find ways to get them involved. You’d be surprised, especially now, how fast the STEM community is growing because we know Ohio has so much of a need that people are going to be looking for resources, looking for things to do. Awesome.
Rick Stockburger
All right, Marvin, I got one last question before we go, and I’m going to make it really hard, actually, this is going to be super hard.
Marvin Logan Jr.
Real easy. Okay. Got it.
Rick Stockburger
You’re going to have take a second to think about it. No, this is going to be hard. This is going to be hard. In one sentence.
Marvin Logan Jr.
That’s already hard.
Rick Stockburger
I know. I’ve been in this interview, marvin in one sentence, tell me what the most important thing about the energy future is to you and your community.
Autumn Hankinson
Glad you didn’t ask me that question.
Rick Stockburger
I know because my favorite also pastime is putting Marvin on the spot and making him answer awkward questions. And this is going to be fun.
Marvin Logan Jr.
The number one goal, number one thing, most important thing, I am going to borrow from Curtis mayfield and the impressions. People get ready because there’s a train coming, the Voltage Valley is coming and we just got to be ready.
Rick Stockburger
Awesome.
Autumn Hankinson
I love that. Well, Marvin, we are going to wrap up here. I do want to give you time to just say anything you want to say, any last thoughts you want to throw in, anything you want the people to know, the time’s yours.
Marvin Logan Jr.
Thank. Please, please be sure to follow along with the amazing work that we’re doing. You can find us at ww dot ohowkids.org. OH WOW. Science center on all of your major social media platforms. You can catch Rick and I on Friday, February the second at the inside gala where we’ll be giving some more previews into things that we’ll be doing in the future. We’ll be unveiling our innovation wing here coming up soon. So we got all kinds of reasons for you to be all up in our business. So make sure you’re following us on social media, checking out our website, and continuing to follow this journey.
Autumn Hankinson
Awesome. I love it. Marvin, thank you so much for being on the show today. If anyone listening is interested in staying connected with Marvin, be sure to check out the show notes which you’ll find in the description of this video or on Spotify.
Rick Stockburger
Awesome. And thank you all for tuning into this episode of BRITElights. So do your part to support clean tech innovation by liking or subscribing to this podcast, and we will catch you on the BRITE side.
