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Franklin startup works towards traceable menstrual-care products with hemp
Titans sports performance director aims to minimize chances of injuries
Many Nashville developments require outside-the-box approaches
Area
nonprofits prepare the next generation of innovators
Touring
Belmont’s
28 Bruno Clark
community by developing innovative programs to meet workforce needs
Nashville is a thriving city and Lipscomb University offers top programs to meet the dynamic demands of today’s workforce in one of the hottest job markets in the country.
This fall, Lipscomb is launching an exciting lineup of innovative new offerings that are designed to equip students with cutting-edge skills in high-demand fields. They are tailored for working professionals to advance their careers or to make a career change. These programs were developed to meet workforce demand and are offered in flexible, convenient formats. Classes begin this fall.
Master of Science in Applied
Arti
cial Intelligence (AI)
Lipscomb introduces Nashville’s first graduate program in applied AI this fall. This program is crafted to meet the growing need for AI expertise across various industries. Offering both a master’s degree and a graduate certificate, the program is designed for professionals in health care, business, entertainment and beyond. Courses are delivered in 8-week sessions with flexible formats—online, in-person, or hybrid—to accommodate working professionals. The master’s degree may be completed in as little as 18 months.
The new Entertainment, Design & Creative Enterprise Stackable Graduate Certificates program is the first of its kind in Tennessee and one of the few in the nation. Specialized credentials are offered in screenwriting, television writing, animation foundations and advanced 2D animation. The certificate programs allow artists and entertainment
professionals to gain expertise and skills in small components but also provide a pathway to the full graduate degree if desired. Courses are offered in an online format, making the program accessible from anywhere in the world.
Master of Science in Sport Analytics
Lipscomb’s new Master of Science in Sport Analytics is Tennessee’s fi rst and one of only three in the southern U.S. The sport analytics industry is booming, with projections indicating signifi cant growth in the next fi ve years. This program prepares students for careers in professional and collegiate sports, e-sports, fi nance, media and sports marketing. With a fully online, asynchronous format, students can earn their degree in as little as one year, mastering skills in data management, visualization and interpretation crucial for this evolving industry.
Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing (ABSN)
Addressing the critical need for nurses, Lipscomb is launching an Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing (ABSN) program in August. This fast-track program, one of the few in Tennessee, allows individuals with a bachelor’s degree in another field to earn a BSN in just 16 months through a hybrid format of online and in-person learning. As the demand for qualified nurses continues to rise, Lipscomb’s ABSN program provides an expedited path to a rewarding career in nursing.
Explore these innovative programs and all that Lipscomb University has to offer at www.lipscomb.edu.
For more than 133 years, Lipscomb University has been an intentionally Christcentered community in the heart of Middle Tennessee preparing learners for lives of purpose through rigorous academics and transformative experiences. At Lipscomb University, students are not only prepared for their chosen field of study, but they also discover their life’s purpose. Lipscomb offers over 200 fields of study in undergraduate and graduate programs offering bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees along with graduate certificates.
Location One University Park Drive Nashville TN 37204
Website www.lipscomb.edu
Phone 615.966.1000
Facebook facebook.com/ lipscombuniversity
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SPECIALTIES
Animation, Business, Education, Engineering, Health Sciences, Leadership, Liberal Arts, Ministry, Music, Nursing, Pre-Med, Worship Arts
Moving Forward
From the influx of new businesses and state-of-the-art developments to the embrace of technology, Nashville’s evolution seems poised to continue unabated into the next decade.
In the latest issue of our Innovate magazine, we explore the rise of Nashvillians who have embraced new ideas and technologies in multiple industries that will help the city in that upward trajectory.
With insights from educators at Tennessee State University, we examine the role AI is playing in the manufacturing, logistics, retail, music, hospitality and entertainment industries. We visit bakers who are using technology to connect a community around food. We talk to teachers working with grade school and high school kids to prepare them to lead us to new things in the future.
Even assessing injuries to athletes is undergoing a transformation, and the Tennessee Titans are at the forefront. We tell you how.
Writing these stories allowed us to explore what’s driving Nashville’s innovators and how their ideas are changing the city. To learn more, subscribe to our daily online coverage.
Kevin Spain, Editor kspain@fwpublishing.com
editorial
EDITOR
Kevin Spain
MANAGING
EDITOR
William Williams
STAFF WRITERS
Kelsey Beyeler, John Glennon, Hannah Herner, Nicolle S. Praino
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Lena Anthony, Caitlin Burke, Margaret Littman
art & production
ART DIRECTOR
Mary Louise Meadors
STAFF PHOTOGRAPHERS
Angelina Castillo, Eric England, Hamilton Matthew Masters
GRAPHIC DESIGNERS
Sandi Harrison, Tracey Starck
PRODUCTION COORDINATOR
Christie Passarello
publishing
PUBLISHER
Heather Cantrell Mullins
SENIOR ADVERTISING SOLUTIONS MANAGERS
Carla Mathis, Niki Tyree
ADVERTISING SOLUTIONS MANAGERS
Teresa Birdsong, Maddy Fraiche, Kailey Idziak, Rena Ivanov, Allie Muirhead
Vehicle-tracker sales need not bother Commercial Industrial Construction: this Nashville commercial general contractor doesn’t use trackers. Time clocks? No need: all jobs are visited by a roving superintendent and project managers. Issues with subcontractors? These are rare, as this company—also known as CIC—utilizes on-site supervision, meaning for large jobs, a superintendent will be on-site every workday. CIC never uses thirdparty estimators nor estimating software: project managers create estimates having put their eyes on a site and on plans. The most surprising trick of all? Commercial Industrial Construction’s exceptionally low turnover: in the past ten years, only three staff members have left for other positions.
How has CIC achieved these results without the technology that claims to prevent waste, track employees, or estimate costs? For CEO Jon English, the keys are training and trust. “I treat my employees like I’d want to be treated,” says the 35-year construction veteran. Having left a competing firm twenty years ago, he and business partner Tony Williams, CFO, started CIC in 2003 with a goal to reward employees for hard work, generating employee loyalty and pride.
Senior staff, some with more than 40 years’ experience, train their helpers on the job by passing on practical skills, and they have not been forced to learn ever-evolving software that might slow them down. Project managers train directly under English, who still does plan
take-offs by hand to identify potential problems and unusual circumstances. Experience creates accurate pricing; the team has seen estimation software used by others. make costly mistakes. Software also will not suggest alternatives to save a client time or money. As a result, many find that CIC’s budgets and bids fall in the middle when compared to the competition: not the highest, like those who would pad numbers to increase profit artificially, and not the lowest, like those who may try to “make up the difference” with change orders.
The resulting benefits for clients may surprise others in the construction industry. Projects usually finish on time, as project managers understand the job better, and field staff keep projects moving. If a subcontractor shows up late, changes teams, or brings the wrong materials, CIC’s on-site staff can report and help fix problems immediately. Field staff are on hand to meet Codes inspectors, and when shipments arrive, someone on-site will receive them and verify they are correct. Even during demolition, CIC can utilize deconstruction practices to preserve reusable materials that clients wish to save, such as millwork, doors and frames, lighting, and flooring. This not only reduces waste but also reduces costs—dumpsters are another cost driver in Nashville.
By resisting trends that shift every few years, Commercial Industrial Construction found it can provide one of the most valuable things of all in construction: consistency.
COMPANY PROFILE
Commercial Industrial Construction, Inc., aka CIC, is a locally-owned commercial interiors contractor working throughout middle Tennessee. Founded with the idea that happy employees perform good work, CIC’s employees develop longterm relationships with clients to provide a positive construction experience for all involved.
KEY CONTACTS
Jon English CEO & Project Manager
Kenny Bundy Senior Project Manager
Denys Cochran Project Manager
Wenn Turner Project Manager
SPECIALTIES
• Deconstruction
• Shell Space
• 2nd Generation Space
• Renovation / Remodeling
• Adaptive Reuse
• Value Engineering
Entrepreneurship is risky business.
THREE QUESTIONS
Samar Ali
Millions
of Conversations founder
talks innovating ways to unite people as divides run deep
BY LENA ANTHONY
Samar Ali is the founder of Millions of Conversations, a Nashville-based nonprofit that started in 2017 to address America’s disinformation-fueled polarization problem. It does this through various means, including listening, respectful engagement, programming, research, media and storytelling campaigns, and grassroots communitybuilding. All this work centers around bringing Americans together through common values for a shared future.
A “peace entrepreneur” who previously served as a White House Fellow under then-President Barack Obama and assistant commissioner of economic development for Tennessee under then-Gov. Bill Haslam, Ali is also a political science and law research professor at Vanderbilt University. Additionally, she co-chairs the Vanderbilt Project for Unity and Democracy with Haslam and Jon Meacham.
Ali spoke with the Post about her work, its ties to innovation and why it’s as important as ever.
What does innovation mean to you, and what role does it play in the shared future that Millions of Conversations is working toward?
Innovation is a new way of doing things. Right now, we are facing many old problems but also new ones brought on by rapid technological advancement in the 21st century. Social media, remote work, campaign finance laws — all of these have contributed to the problems we’re facing today. The one constant here is that we are still dealing with humans. It is just that humans are being triggered negatively
in innovative ways that didn’t exist before. Unfortunately, doing the same thing over and over again has not been working. So we also need to be innovative in our approach to disrupt negative norm-setting cycles by designing positive pathways forward.
How is Millions of Conversations being innovative in addressing America’s polarization problem?
People are naturally looking for silver bullet answers, but they don’t exist here. We can’t solve these problems by just talking it out or with a social media campaign. In fact, it takes at least seven messages to counter one piece of hate speech online. There’s not one thing we can pinpoint that will solve the polarization problem, and that’s why we are innovating new solutions to today’s complex problems. This is how we are fostering a community to counter polarization. We don’t rely on just one method. Instead we combine all these things — the listening, the research, the campaigns, the programming, the community project piece — to move people towards each other when so many external forces are forcing us away. We spend a lot of time in focus groups and on research to help us fine-tune the language of our messaging.
This fall, we’ll launch a “Life With Robots” conversation series, because we haven’t figured out how to live with robots yet, have we? Some of this tension is because of robots messing with the human experience and the human condition, and we’re hoping to spark a conversation about that, which in turn leads to activating a healthier way of living together with robots.
We think our version of innovation is
catching on. We’ve received invitations from over 50 counties across the country asking if we can bring our rural county program to their communities. We have launched in three Tennessee counties and will be in seven by the end of the year. We’ve also conducted listening workshops for dozens of workplaces, including Alliance Bernstein and the Harvard Kennedy School. We have a capacity issue, not a demand issue. It’s a good problem to have but also a frustrating one. We all know we need this now.
What are you hearing from business leaders about the impact polarization has on their teams’ ability to function?
Because we’re humans, we tend to take our whole selves to work with us. We hear a lot from business leaders that they don’t want their workforces to be so divided anymore, and they want to stop widening profit margins, conflict profiteers. What’s behind that division really varies depending on the company. It could be political, generational, racial or some will say all the above. Our goal is to identify why these business communities are divided and understand what their goals are. Then we can design the right tools to help them de-escalate the problem, deal with the underlying issue, and move forward as a team.
Even in the business community, there are people who buy into dystopian views and at the same time mock utopian views. Neither is reality. In approaching polarization, we need to be realistic — what are our expectations of reality and what can we realistically achieve. And at the same time, we must be hopeful, because we’re human.
ROBBIE MELTON, TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY
AI’S NEXT CHAPTER
How Nashvillians are using artificial intelligence to enhance business, education and health care
BY NICOLLE PRAINO
Artificial intelligence may have become mainstream over the last year, but it has been around for decades.
Tennessee State University’s vice president of technology and innovation Robbie Melton points out that it’s been in everyday items such as smartphones and Alexa devices. For years, she’s been testing technologies to figure out new uses for education. She was even one of the first people to try out a first-generation iPad.
“I get very excited when we talk about technology,” Melton says. “Because I’m before technology – meaning they didn’t even have the internet when I started. I’m from the era where to have the computer, you had to be rich. It was the haves and the have-nots.”
Melton is also the head of the university’s
SMART Global Innovative Technologies Division. This center aims to make technology accessible for all and focuses on education opportunities.
“My role is to look at technology in terms of enhancing, improving, teaching, learning and preparing our students for tech careers,” Melton says. “Prior to AI, we were into smart technology. That’s anything that you connect to … Of course, it segues right into artificial intelligence.”
Now that AI has had its public boom, it has developed outside the technology space and into every industry.
While health care is Nashville’s largest economic driver, co-founder of the Innovation Studio Brian Moyer says manufacturing, logistics, and retail, along with music,
hospitality and entertainment, are all major parts of the industry ecosystem that makes up Middle Tennessee.
“When I think about technology and what the role of technology is in our future, I think it’s making people’s lives better,” Moyer says. “I think that technology and AI in particular is going to change everyone’s lives over the next several years and primarily in a good way.”
Aaron Salow, CEO of field service technology provider XOi, says AI is opening up ways to improve workflows because the company has data about how its technicians interact with equipment.
“At the end of last year, we released AI-generated summaries,” Salow says. “Now our system will look at the work they’re doing
HAMILTON MATTHEW MASTERS
organically on the job site and turn it into paragraphs of relevant detail about what they did.”
Nashville entrepreneurs have captured AI’s lightning in a bottle, implementing it into their companies and starting new endeavors - but they aren’t stopping there. They are already getting ahead of the next curve that technology could throw at them.
“I want to be involved in launching the next generation of tech companies that in the long run can have so much more impact on our economy than all of these companies that we’ve recruited over the past couple of decades,” Moyer says.
Moyer says cities like Atlanta and Nashville have been successful in recruiting larger companies (like Oracle’s commitment to making Nashville its global headquarters). However, he adds that a recruited company’s influence on the local economy is nothing like the effects of businesses that are born within a city, like Microsoft’s impression on Seattle or HCA’s in Nashville.
For the Innovation Studio’s part, Moyer says the goal is to launch 12 new tech companies here in the next four years, and adds there’s never been a better time.
“That’s due to the work of a lot of people over the past at least 20 years that have been involved in growing the tech workforce,” Moyer says.
With AI’s evolution comes concerns over privacy. Tennessee was the first state to pass a law protecting people’s voice, image and likeless from unauthorized use. Amanda Pietrocola says her company, Momentum Technology, will focus on consumer protections in 2024. Momentum is a software company specializing in caller privacy and robocall defense apps.
“I think for years people got very comfortable giving away their data in exchange for getting free products and services,” she says. “I believe that’s coming full circle where consumers are realizing that there is a price to their personal privacy and giving that up.”
History has shown that fear is a part of the development of new technology — not just in computers, Moyer says, but in revolutionary inventions from the steam engine to nuclear energy. That development has also shown that opportunity can abound.
“People are worried about AI replacing jobs,” Moyer says. “That’s not necessarily evil. It’s part of what we’ve seen in history repeated over and over again … We’re now in the fourth industrial revolution.”
Salow sees the benefits, too. He used an example: When a long-time employee retires from a trade, they often take a lot of knowledge with them because the only place it is kept is in their mind. However, by gathering that information over time in XOi’s systems, the company can build a dataset that’s never existed before for industry-specific information and solutions.
“Technology is continuing to allow our customers to hire younger, greener talent; encourage young people to get into the trades; and be able to give them technology solutions that allow them to be more effective,” Salow says. “It really is about centralizing and democratizing that knowledge and skill set so that it can be used by a much larger group of people.”
Replacing busy work especially, he says, will force people into more complex thinking.
“I think eventually it will actually allow humans to build expertise in more nuanced topics and abilities,” Salow says. “I hope that we continue to use technology to elevate humans’ ability to do things that are fortifying to them; that allow us to have people that love what they do every day.”
That’s how Pietrocola says her company is using it right now.
“AI has certainly helped us compile a lot of information very quickly for different topics that we’re looking to cover to educate consumers on,” she says. “Then our team is, of course, going in and fact-checking and also adding our own thoughts and knowledge and experience to it.”
Melton says AI’s use for educators will be “to break down complex problems and put them into sequential steps that will personalize learning.” She adds, “It will learn you. It will prompt you. It will bring you to another, what we call critical, higher-order skill level.”
“I’m a big proponent of continual learning,” Moyer says. “Because life changes, the only thing for certain is that change is going to happen. You have to be ready to adapt and to learn new skills. I think that is the opportunity that exists here - to learn a new skill.”
BRIAN MOYER, INNOVATION STUDIO
AARON SALOW, XO i
As for those critical of artificial intelligence, Nashville’s tech leaders agree people must stay vigilant with innovations.
“AI will never replace the human touch and the empathy that humans bring to the world,” Pietrocola says. “I think that people who are utilizing AI need to do so responsibly and understand the gravity of the technology that they have in their hands.”
“We have to harness it and keep it safe and not let it become what some people think it could,” Salow says but adds, “I think it is going to elevate the human experience.”
In education, the potential dangers aren’t new challenges Melton says, “If you just let [students] use it without instruction, they’re going to cheat. But they’ve been cheating before they had technology.”
She says she’s working on best practices guidelines for teachers alongside Tennessee’s commissioner of education Lizzette Reynolds and Steven Gentile, executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.
The group represents Tennessee in working with 15 other states as a part of the Southern Regional Education Board’s commission on artificial intelligence in education.
While working on guardrails for artificial intelligence, Melton is already paying attention to the clouds ahead.
“You’ve heard of the internet, but most people do not know of Internet2 … That is a robust, private, secure - what we call, the next level of the internet, that is to come - that is going to also transform teaching and learning,” she says. “The Internet2 is like AI, and it’s all going to converge together in a blink. That’s how quickly data is being transformed.”
While change seems to happen as fast as lightning strikes, Nashville’s tech pioneers will keep watching what’s in the distance.
AMANDA PIETROCOLA, MOMENTUM TECHNOLOGY
People want cake
The Baking Notification Project has developed a platform for home bakers to share their creations and create a community.
BY MARGARET LITTMAN
eople want cake. It’s a catchphrase of The Baking Notification Project coined by Henry, the then-toddler of BNP’s owners.
The Baking Notification Project is the brainchild of Jessica and Brandon Morrison. It is a tech-enabled initiative that allows hobbyist bakers to give or sell home-baked goods to people in their neighborhoods. Started in 2021, BNP has experienced significant growth because, yes, Henry, people do want cake, croissants, pies, sourdough loaves, and whatever else their neighbors make.
But now, looking at its third anniversary, perhaps the catchphrase should be, “People want community.”
Jessica loves to bake, and when she left her full-time job in 2021, her colleagues gave her A Good Bake: the Art and Science of Making Perfect Pastries, Cakes, Cookies, Pies and Breads at Home, a cookbook written by Melissa Weller, who is a chemical engineer. Jessica has a chemistry background, so she was fascinated by the book’s perspective. She started baking her way through the book, making things she had never tried before, such as laminated pastries like croissants.
She was successful, save for one problem: There were more baked goods than the Morrisons could eat. Because people were still somewhat isolated during the COVID-19 pandem-
ic, she didn’t have the opportunity to bring a plate to share to church or elsewhere. She offered her East Nashville neighbors extras.
“I thought, ‘Man, I wish I had a friend who would text me and tell me that they just had cinnamon rolls coming out of the oven and ask if I wanted one,’” Jessica remembers. “I thought, ‘What if we build a thing that lets people say, ‘I want to hear from you,’ so that I didn’t have to feel like I was bothering people?”
Over one weekend, Jessica and Brandon built a platform prototype using AirTable
and Twilio. They tested sending text messages to a pool of interested subscribers. It worked, and they refined the technology. Early on, Brandon says they decided they didn’t want to force bakers or subscribers (the people receiving the baked goods) to download an app to participate. Neither had direct experience building applications that send or receive text messages.
“There are several vendors out there that make the lift easier than if we had to do this from scratch, but there are a ton of considerations to keep in mind that aren’t
immediately apparent, such as how cellphone carriers manage their own systems for blocking and dropping texts for unclear reasons,” Brandon says. “We also had to navigate changing regulations around how cellphone carriers managed automated text messages, which forced us to rebuild [our] onboarding process for bakers.”
Initially, Jessica was the only baker using BNP. Subscribers — up to 25 per baker — pay $10 monthly to be on a baker’s list, getting a notification when they have baked goods ready to give away. Interested subscribers claim that extra chocolate croissant and pick it up at a designated time.
In January 2022, BNP expanded to add other bakers to the platform. The audience is hobbyist bakers, who bake in their own homes and follow “cottage food laws,” which allow certain foods to be made and sold from a private kitchen, with specific guidelines and restrictions. The idea was to aid people who like to bake, but some people use it to test products before expanding into larger baking businesses. Most bakers offer four items per
month (the minimum is twice a month).
Sara Stokes launched her Peach Bunny Bakery in Inglewood during the pandemic. “I was excited to find a way to connect with people and share my very new and limited concept,” she says of BNP.
Stokes makes coffee cake (her favorite) and s’mores cookies (a crowd-pleaser) and tests other new recipes. She’s had a few failures, of course. “There was a vegan cake I tried to make that turned into an oily mess. Usually, I just eat the less perfect pastries, but that went right in the trash,” she says.
Since October 2021, 90 bakers have signed up to use the BNP platform, providing baked goods to more than 1,200 subscribers. The platform currently supports bakers in six different states.
There are typically 25 to 30 active bakers on the platform at any given time, with an all-time high of 50. Bakers pay $27 per month to be on the platform. They decide whether to charge their subscribers $10 per month or give the baked goods away.
While the chocolate espresso shortbread
and the Cinnamon Toast Crunch bars are delicious, BNP’s connections are more important than the baked goods for the Morrisons, who each have full-time careers. “One of our earliest bakers was in the Bay Area, and she told us that she would sit out on her porch when people came to pick up, and she met a neighbor that she had lived beside for 20 years who she didn’t know at all,” Jessica says.
“If you’re a subscriber, you don’t have to meet the person who’s giving you stuff, but I think it adds this really sort of rich layer to it, “ she says. “It helps people feel more connected in their life.”
Now the couple is looking to expand and experiment with the platform that will feed the connections, because people want community. “We joke occasionally,” Jessica says, “that we just put another word in place of ‘baking.’ So, The Playdate Notification Project, or The Pottery Notification Project.”
Whatever happens next has to work with the existing platform’s framework. Jessica adds: “It is transactional because - capitalism - but that’s not the spirit of the thing.”
Roll out the barrel
into the investment industry.
ough newer to the stock market, the duo were no strangers to entrepreneurship. Smith initially got his footing in the software world by founding the email marketing platform Emma in 2003, and Hogan launched the health care software Medalogix in 2012.
BY CAITLIN BURKE
mong Nashville’s pulse of creativity and pro table drinking culture, two former software business owners have taken a unique approach to evolving their professional paths while diversifying their investment portfolios in the stock market. Bourbon barrels, once mere vessels for aging spirits, are transformed into pro table assets thanks to Dan Hogan and Clint Smith. As cofounders of their business, Barrel Stock Trading Co., the two share a lot in common, including a years-long friendship as neighbors and a passion that led them to explore deeper
AIn recent years, Hogan was introduced to Nashville resident Je Hopmayer, who founded the largest bourbon brokerage in the spirits world. Hogan began consulting with Hopmayer on a potential software project, but he soon realized there was a more signi cant opportunity to explore. In the spring of 2020, during one of their weekly pandemic walks around the neighborhood, Hogan suggested they look at the chance together.
eir collaboration spurred the inception of Barrel Stock Trading, a pioneering investment platform that o ers a gateway into the wholesale bourbon market.
In Hogan’s words, “Barrel Stock Trading provides the opportunity for individuals, syndicates and family o ces to invest in
the wholesale bourbon market. Bourbon is a spirit that increases in value as it ages, is a non-correlated asset that isn’t tied to broader market trends and can be an excellent way for people to diversify their portfolio — and have fun doing it. We do the heavy lifting of establishing distillery partnerships, procuring high-quality bourbon from Kentucky’s top producers, and managing the entire process,” he says.
Bold steps, determination and community support marked the beginning of their start-up.
“Our rst summer, we bought 1,000 barrels as a ‘beta’ test of sorts, enjoyed the process, and started talking to friends to see if they might want to invest with us. By the fall, we had organized our rst LP fund, and by year’s end, word of mouth spread, the LP group grew, and what started out as a plan to perhaps buy 1,000 barrels once or twice a year saw us purchase more than 20,000 in 2021 alone,” Smith says.
Hogan and Smith say the allure behind the business lay in departing from the intangible
Barrels of bourbon become valuable investment assets for Nashville entrepreneurs
Clint Smith & Dan Hogan
realm of software to embrace a more tangible product — one steeped in tradition and craftsmanship.
“As former software company founders, there was something really appealing about working with a tangible product you could see and touch — and drink. Walking into a rickhouse and seeing row after row of wooden barrels slowly transforming the liquid inside, in a process that has been around for hundreds of years, is a special experience; and so different than anything we had been a part of,” Smith adds.
Hogan underscored their commitment to creating an investor-friendly model and an immersive brand experience.
“With Barrel Stock, a big part of what drove us initially was the idea of trying to create the most investor-friendly model we could — better than anything else we’d seen. Then layer on a great brand experience, with clear and consistent communication, fun events like distillery tours and annual socials, and a real spirit of openness and transparency. A big part of delivering that great experience has been the addition of Stephanie Albian to the Barrel Stock team — our investors will tell you she’s the best part of what we do,” Hogan adds.
In terms of a traditional fiveyear business plan, Hogan and Smith explain that Barrel Stock’s goal is simply to continue providing a beneficial service for as long
as it is needed, with a few other plans up their sleeves.
“We’ve always said we would do this as long as it makes sense. We have an incredible group of investors, and we hope to continue delivering good results for them while supporting some of Kentucky’s best distillers. And there are some fun things on the horizon, including a new partnership with a distillery that will launch early next year, and perhaps our own friends-and-family Barrel Stock brand of bourbon as the ultimate investor swag,” Hogan says.
Nashville-based ventures like Barrel Stock Trading exemplify the spirit of creativity that Music City nurtures, a testament that Hogan can confirm.
“There’s a collaborative flavor of innovation that happens here, whether it’s songwriters co-writing their next hit, or entrepreneurs co-founding a startup — or a crazy-sounding bourbon venture. It’s why groups like the Entrepreneur Center and EO and other groups we’ve been a part of play such a vital role in bringing Nashville’s builders and creators together,” Hogan says.
“We’ll continue to make this opportunity available to people as long as there is demand, and there are strong indicators that this is a reliable and predictive value increase. I would say that we came to a place of innovation because we literally had no experience in this industry. We learned everything from scratch,” Hogan says.
In the bank
VUMC and
Meharry
seek to put genetic data to good use
BY HANNAH HERNER
Sequencing the rst complete human genome took more than a decade and millions of dollars. In other words, to chart just one person’s entire DNA strand. at was in 2003. Today, the pace is much quicker, and scientists can sequence several genomes per day.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Meharry Medical College are building upon those scienti c discoveries with their own DNA banks — each with slightly di erent goals. e biobanks o er de-identi ed patient data for researchers and pharmaceutical companies, among others, to look for patterns and, ideally, make scienti c breakthroughs.
VUMC started its own biobank in 2007, and has since collected 330,000 samples from leftover blood used with patient consent. In 2011, the bank opened to just Vanderbilt investigators. NashBio was formed in 2018 as an intermediary and VUMC insubsidiary connecting internal researchers and outside companies to data.
“It was just limited to be VUMC investigators for a number of years, and then recognized, it’s such a valuable asset, how do we make this available to the broader research community?” says Elizabeth Ann Stringer, chief scienti c o cer for NashBio.
NashBio in 2022 partnered with biotech company Illumina to kick up its e orts in a partnership called the Alliance for Genomic Discovery. Four biopharma partners came on board in 2023 and three more in 2024, to help fund the sequencing of 250,000 genomes.
“Tubes of DNA in the fridge are partly
useful, but actual data sitting on a computer are much more useful for the types of experiments that we’d like to support,” says NashBio CEO Leeland Ekstrom.
Meharry Medicla College revealed four of its own partners in the 2023 announcement of the Diaspora Human Genomics Institute. President James Hildreth is working to jump-
start the bank with data from existing banks, such as those used for the Southern Community Cohort cancer study. A collaboration with VUMC is in the works, and MMC is also set to hire an executive director for the institute.
e bank will focus on those with African ancestry, with a goal of a statistically signicant 500,000 DNA samples from that population. It’s important to be able to compare DNA within the collection of those with African ancestry, Hildreth says.
“One of the most powerful things to do with such data is comparisons,” says Hildreth. “If there was a disease that primarily a ects one group, you might be looking for a gene that’s expressed in one but not the other, for an example, as a starting point to understand why that disease occurs in the rst place. e problem we have is that there are not enough samples of people with African ancestry to power that kind of study.”
Existing biobanks trend white, with the
UK BioBank one of the most established in the world. Having such banks in the American South makes a lot of sense, explains Stringer.
“Most of the research that’s come out linking genes to disease has been in the Northern European population,” she says. “We have a unique opportunity in America because of a diverse population, and particularly here in the Southeast, because we do have more individuals of African ancestry and a more diverse population — that allows us to start to learn about the links between disease and genes and populations outside of just those of the Northern European background.”
Part of the Diaspora Human Genomics Institute’s goal is also to get youth excited about careers in genomics and related elds. Meharry will build a DNA learning center on campus for elementary and high school students, which is slated to be completed by the end of 2024.
e Chan Zuckerberg Initiative also granted $11.5 million to help Meharry hire six researchers to work with its biobank. Beyond existing researchers at Meharry, e Diaspora Human Genomics Institute will o er the four pharmaceutical companies (which each invested $20 million) access to the bank. Hildreth says he also wants to get HBCUs across the country
signed on for access. at access could help them write grants to study diseases disproportionately a ecting Black people.
Timing is ripe to get buy-in from the community, Hildreth says, as sickle-cell disease, a disease mostly a ecting Black Americans, was recently cured using gene editing enabled by genome sequencing.
“We are seeing, in real time, the premise of this [DNA research] being realized,” Hildreth says. “It just so happens that the rst disease cured is one that affects primarily people of African ancestry. I use that as a starting point when I talk to minority communities about this technology.”
For Dummies
Belmont students in health disciplines learn to collaborate, make mistakes in simulations
BY HANNAH HERNER
t’s a place ripe for a science- ction plot. e robots are outnumbering the humans.
e omas F. Frist Jr. College of Medicine at Belmont will welcome 50 medical students in its rst class to the grand new building this fall. In the same building, 60 mannequins will aid in the students’ education.
Each mannequin has a name. Franklin, a young boy, can blink, breathe and speak. He has a pulse. His plastic eyes will track the students when they speak to him. In the maternity suite, Betty can give birth to the same baby several times daily, each with a di erent labor duration. Using special goggles, students can
see through her skin to view the inner workings of the delivery. From behind a one-way mirror, a sta er controls her vital signs, movements and can even add screams for e ect.
e future is here at Belmont’s Center for Interprofessional Engagement and Simulation, housed inside the new omas F. Frist Jr. College of Medicine. e building boasts dozens of hospital beds, an apartment to practice at-home care, hospital-style rooms, a practice inpatient and outpatient pharmacy and 12 clinic rooms to learn in an urgent carestyle setting. All these rooms are out tted with cameras connected to debrie ng rooms, where students review the lms.
ere is also a separate bullpen for actors, or standardized patients, so the students won’t pass them in the hallway. ose 100 contracted actors will wear sensors that o er students lung and heart sounds that are programmed di erently.
Belmont won’t eliminate cadaver work entirely (there’s a cadaver lab in the building), but students will also be able to learn through virtual reality headsets and controllers and an
operating table-sized touch screen with virtual cadavers.
e fact that the Center for Interprofessional Engagement and Simulation is not owned and managed by the new medical college, or any Belmont school, is intentional. It is meant for all of Belmont’s health-related majors — nursing, health sciences, physical therapy, occupational therapy, pharmacy, social work and others.
During “impact” weeks, students from various disciplines will spend all day together in the classrooms working through topics including social determinants of health, anti-racism, ethics, health equity and advocacy. In one of the rst activities, they’ll change a tire together. at’s the brainchild of Tracy Frame, the director of interprofessional engagement.
“It’s so important that everybody understands the value that they bring to each other, and the communication within that, because I do think that that ultimately improves patient care,” Frame says.
Beth Hallmark, the center’s director of education, says using mannequins and actors is an e ort to make students feel comfortable making mistakes. She institutes a tactic called psychological safety, a term used in aerospace engineering, which also heavily relies on simulation to prepare students for real-world work. e students answer questions about their choices, coming to their own conclusions about the processes, she explains.
“Having a little bit of anxiety is OK .… You want them to have a little bit of an edge, but you don’t want to scare them,” Hallmark says. “It’s really important that they feel like they’re not going to be in trouble for making a mistake, and that’s what psychological safety is all about.”
Dawn Zwart, director of operations, has experience teaching EMTs using
mannequins — but the ones she used were the curly-corded home phones to Belmont’s new iPhone. e latest iterations connect to Wi-Fi and do not need to be plugged in.
“Here, if you make a mistake on a mannequin, we turn it o , and turn it back on,” Zwart says. You make a mistake with a [standardized patient], they’re
acting. is is a safe environment for that to happen. In the real world, if you had a mistake, we want you to be an advocate about it and own up to it because we all make mistakes, but there are some pretty signi cant consequences.”
Majoring in health-related studies is certainly not for dummies.
SEPTEMBER 19
Dawn Zwart, Beth Hallmark & Tracy Frame
From farm to flow
How a Franklin-based startup is working towards traceable menstrual-care products featuring hemp
BY KELSEY BEYELER
nnovations often present us with more than a new product or service — they present a new perspective that challenges norms and inspires change. Such is the case with TRACE, a Franklin-based startup creating traceable period products made with a blend of hemp and cotton. Through this product, TRACE is challenging us to reconsider what is normal — and acceptable — in the period care industry.
TRACE was born from CEO and founder Claire Crunk’s experience as a women’s health nurse practitioner. During her 10 years in the profession, she noticed her patients were experiencing irritation and health issues that she linked to period and incontinence care products.
“It was very frustrating because there’s no ingredient transparency in our industry,” says Crunk.
Most pads and tampons are made with cotton and/or rayon, and contain other ingredients such as polypropylene, polyethylene, polyester and paraffin. While ingredients are listed on these products, details about where they come from and how they’re processed typically aren’t. Chemicals like phthalates and parabens — which have been linked to impacting reproductive health and potentially increasing risks for breast cancer, respec-
Claire Crunk
tively — have also been detected in menstrual products that are currently on the market.
As Crunk navigated health issues with her patients, she was also trying to live a more environmentally conscious lifestyle at home. She felt guilty about the waste associated with her period care products, which can contain lots of plastic and aren’t really biodegradable (Crunk admits that less wasteful options like reusable period cups aren’t for her). Then she started learning about hemp.
“When I saw fiber that’s good for the environment that absorbs better than cotton, my brain automatically went to tampon,” says Crunk of hemp. “And so that’s what kicked off the journey.”
So began the process of creating a traceable tampon containing hemp. Crunk enlisted the help of Olaf Isele, who spent more than two decades working in research and development for period and incontinence products with Procter & Gamble. What started as a consultation blossomed into a full-on partnership, and Isele has since become co-founder and director of product development and manufacturing. Megan Galaske was also a TRACE co-founder. While she is no longer with the company, Crunk says Galaske still supports it.
TRACE’s products are made from hemp grown in North Carolina (The hemp used to create textiles comes from the stalk of plants, while THC and CBD are found in the flowers and leaves — Isele and Crunk say their products would not get users high) and Climate Beneficial Cotton from a California-based coalition that supports Central Valley farmers transitioning to regenerative farming practices. The crops are processed, cleaned, blended and shipped to Germany to be made into fully biodegradable tampons. These products are not yet on the market be-
cause the tampons must complete Food and Drug Administration testing.
The years-long work of creating the tampon has been full of challenges. For starters, a strong infrastructure must be built to manufacture hemp textiles in the United States. Other challenges included finding a manufacturer willing to work with TRACE’s own materials, facilitating expensive product testing and participating in a lengthy FDA approval process.
While new tampons must be pre-approved by the FDA before hitting the market, unscented menstrual pads don’t. So TRACE leveraged pre-existing relationships and resources to make pads that became available in December. While there are other pads made with hemp fiber on the market, the same isn’t true for tampons, so TRACE could be among the first companies selling them pending FDA approval.
Nashville-based OB-GYN Nicole Schlechter says the idea of using hemp as a more eco-friendly alternative to traditional period care products has “massive potential.”
Schlechter also encourages education and caution, as technological developments in period care products have led to widespread health issues among users. This includes asking questions about the testing and production processes, where and how materials are grown, and what research went into the development. She encourages people trying a new menstruation product to “use it with caution” and test it out before switching over entirely.
Regardless of whether people would be willing to use TRACE’s tampons, its founders challenge those who menstruate to consider what ingredients they’re willing to put so close to — and even inside — their bodies. This consideration, however, comes with privilege, since many can’t afford even basic period products, and those made with higher-quality ingredients inevitably cost more. But no matter what new products and technologies are hitting the shelves, people will keep menstruating, and all that blood has to go somewhere.
Diagnosis before the diagnosis
Titans sports performance director aims to prevent potential player injuries before they happen
BY JOHN GLENNON
very NFL team likes to lead the league.
Except, of course, when it comes to categories like injuries.
The Tennessee Titans have utilized the most players in the NFL in each of the past three seasons, primarily — though not entirely — because the team has suffered so many injuries.
Enter Zac Woodfin, the Tennessee Titans’ new director of sports performance.
Woodfin, hired in March by new head coach Brian Callahan, plans to use a two-pronged approach — in his words, part blue-collar and part cutting-edge — to keep the Titans as healthy as possible in 2024 and beyond.
The blue-collar part is relatively self-explanatory. Woodfin, a former NFL player who has worked in the sports performance field since 2006, will push Titans players to their limits.
“We have to program training that’s hard for our athletes,” Woodfin says. “It’s got to be challenging. If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.”
Meanwhile, the cutting-edge side of things is as much about the mind as the body.
It’s Woodfin and his staff adopting what he calls a growth mindset to their profession, constantly trying to learn and grow regarding the many advances in technology and equipment that can be used to serve Titans players.
That doesn’t mean simply purchasing state-of-the-art machinery, but also knowing the best way to use it.
The point is to discover asymmetries — or imbalances — in players’ bodies before they lead to injuries.
“For example, the left and right hamstring, if they’re symmetrical, then they produce the same amounts of force when you test somebody,” Woodfin said. “[But] if the left hamstring produces, say, 500 newtons of force and the opposite only produces 200 … that’s a problem. That’s like a ticking time bomb waiting to blow.
“It reveals in the sports world as a pulled hamstring. But we can find this out and hopefully attack it before it happens. I call it working upstream. You try to find problems or small issues before they become major issues.”
Here are five examples of equipment that will help Woodfin and his staff in their search for problematic asymmetries:
NordBord: It measures hamstring strength.
Force plates: Metal platform that athletes stand on and jump, measuring how much force they can apply through the ground when they jump, and also how much force is absorbed when they land. It calculates leftto-right leg-force production, often revealing asymmetries.
1080 Sprint: Resistance sprinting machine. An athlete wears a belt, which is attached to a cord coming out of a machine. Every step of the sprint is calculated, giving a good measurement of force produced.
ForceFrame: Machine that measures the strength of adductors (groin muscles), as well as the glutes and the outsides of the hip.
Dynamometer: Equipment that athletes squeeze with all their might, first with one hand and then with the other. If there’s a significant newtons-of-force imbalance, there may be an underlying issue in the wrist, elbow or shoulder that needs to be investigated. What Woodfin likes about the various assessments is they create conversations between trainers and players, exchanges that can lead to more ways to keep Titans players healthy.
“Maybe it was something that wasn’t in their medical charts, and so the more you know about the person and their history and what has happened to them, the better you can help them,” Woodfin says. “I’ll be able to ask a guy, `Do you ever remember a time when you had
Zac Woodfin in a Titan’s practice
this or that going on?’
“Maybe it takes them a couple minutes, but then they’ll say, `Oh yeah, my first year in college, I did this,’ and little did they know, it had created an asymmetry five years later. So they can’t understand why they’ve been dealing with chronic groin pulls or hamstring pulls. But now we discover the potential issue and we address it, and hopefully we get this athlete to be in a healthy state longer.”
That’s music to the ears of Titans fans, who’ve seen a seemingly disproportionate number of
players suffer soft-tissue injuries over the past three seasons.
Woodfin isn’t concerned with what happened in the past, concentrating instead on the future.
“I think comparison is sometimes a trap that causes you to focus on the wrong things,” he says. “It’s like, `Hey, I’m going to try to do this to prove to this person this,’ and really, I don’t see us needing to try to prove anything to anybody except ourselves. We want to live up to our own standards, and we want to work as hard as we can, as smart as we can, to serve our athletes.”
THE MEN’S EVENT
NOVEMBER 2024
Zac Woodfin
Building with Innovation
Many of Nashville’s construction projects require outside-the-box approaches
BY WILLIAM WILLIAMS
ashville has experienced a tall-building construction boom — unlike any other before the 21st century — that started in the early 2000s and has since seen only a pandemic-caused pause.
Of the city’s 34 buildings standing 300 feet or taller, 22 have been completed since 2015. In addition, seven towers of at least 300 feet (the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat considers a skyscraper as a building of 330 feet minimum) are currently under construction. And with that building boom comes innova-
tive design and construction techniques.
For example, Nashville-based development company Giarratana will implement “ state-ofthe-art technology” for its 750-foot-tall residential tower, which is currently under construction in the 1000 block of Church Street.
Tony Giarratana, the company founder, says a “self-climbing formwork system” will be used for the building’s shear wall core, along with self-climbing perimeter screens/shields that will cover 100 percent of the perimeter of the active deck (and a couple of floors below).
“This type of construction component is very common in places like New York and Chicago, but is atypical for a market like Nashville or anywhere else in the Southeast,” Giarratana says.
Two cranes — one about 915 feet tall and the other roughly 860 feet tall — will eventually tower over the site. The former will be the tallest tower crane ever used by general contractor Brasfield and Gorrie and, not surprisingly, the tallest in Nashville construction history.
On the crane theme, Minnesota-based
Mortenson is using a level-luffing crane on the site of its under-construction Motto Hotel in SoBro. The Third Avenue South space — sandwiched by the Drury and Hyatt Place towers — is tight for traffic, construction vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists. As such, the specialized luffing crane, instead of a fixedarm tower crane, will offer flexibility in the limited space.
“Our site is just 60 feet wide,” says Dan Mehls, Mortenson vice president and general manager for the company’s Nashville office.
“There are many challenges that come with such a small site — the largest being employee and guest parking,” Mehls adds. “For a conventional site to accommodate parking, it needs to be at least 60 feet wide for a two-sided aisle of parking, growing to 120 feet wide to allow vertical switchbacks needed for stacked parking. Understandably, parking was not a viable option [for the future building]. The hotel valet will work with nearby parking owners to accommodate guest parking.”
Since many guests of the future Motto will
not arrive in their own cars, Mortenson will encourage them to consider taking public transportation (an outside-the-box approach for hotels).
“We are proud to be working with WeGo and Metro to upgrade the nearest bus stop at the corner of Fourth Avenue South and Korean Veterans Boulevard,” Mehls says. “The current stop consists of a simple edge-of-curb sign with no bench, bus shelter or ADA ramp. The enhanced stop considers the forthcoming Connect Downtown transit plans by providing space for a bike lane in addition to the new bus shelter, planting areas and ADA loading zone.”
Mortenson is covering all costs associated with the enhancements.
Another unusual element of the Motto’s construction is that Mortenson plans to perform the bulk of its work during normal business hours to avoid disturbing those sleeping in nearby hotels and residential towers.
“This means we will be pouring concrete after the sun has come up most days, which is unusual in our industry,” Mehls notes. (Large concrete pours tend to be done at night or early morning, mainly due to the opportunity to avoid heavy traffic and to capitalize on the ideal temperature range for pouring concrete, which generally is 50 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit, according to various online sources.)
On the “unusual” theme, Nashville is about to see one of the most innovative construction projects in its history, as work is now underway on the future Nissan Stadium. The $2.1 billion facility will serve as home to the Tennessee Titans.
The Tennessee Builders Alliance — a combination of Turner Construction Company, AECOM Hunt, Polk & Associates Construction and ICF Builders & Consultants — is overseeing the monumental effort.
John Gromos, Turner senior vice president
for the Mid-South and principal-in-charge for the alliance, says multiple distinctive and innovative construction techniques will be deployed during the effort.
For example, the construction team (as of publication time) is drilling more than 700 vertical piers into the ground (as deep as 70 feet) to support the massive structure. The drilling is being done with drilling rigs that are not typical to Tennessee, Gromos says.
In addition, the stadium design will incorporate an approximately 190-foot truss span on the west side of the building, which will require “detailed logistical planning and the use of a high-capacity crane for precise placement,” Gromos says, adding that, at its peak, the project will have eight cranes on site.
The advanced ETFE (ethylene tetrafluoroethylene) roof will require a central tension ring and cable structure to support the 345,000 square feet of translucent roof.
“The project team is currently using drones equipped with advanced technology to measure topography and volume calculations, and to capture daily conditions to inform hundreds of experts and project team members working remotely from around the country,” Gromos says.
Relatedly, laser scanning will also be implemented to ensure precision between the built conditions and design models. Laser scanning assists with quality control measures that ensure accuracy up to one-quarter of an inch.
“The project team is utilizing AI (artificial intelligence) in several capacities to increase efficiency across the project — including design document comparisons and equipment and safety tracking,” Gromos says.
“The project will undertake on-site waste segregation and recycling practices to reduce landfill waste and implement soil erosion and sediment management to protect local water
quality,” he adds.
The challenges and scale of the Nissan Stadium project will require a huge workforce. Coordinating the workers across various project phases and trades, managing shifts to ensure continuous progress, and maintaining high safety standards for all personnel is a massive logistic undertaking that will require innovative utilization of time management techniques, Gromos notes.
“The stadium site is located near other development projects and an active NFL/event venue and a hub for outdoor activities and events,” he says. “Construction activities are coordinated across jobsites, ensuring synchronized schedules with shared roads and utilities. Construction schedules are also planned around events to minimize disruptions, manage parking and traffic, and ensure security measures are in place for the site and event attendees.
David Frazier, president of locally based Hardaway Construction, says a key consideration for construction nowadays in Nashville is the need to budget for warehouse space. Most of the company’s job sites throughout the general area are “tight,” leaving minimal room to store construction materials.
“Logistically, having that extra warehouse space allows for early delivery of materials with volatile lead times and keeps our projects moving forward,” Frazier says.
In addition, and during the last several years, “data” has become a major buzzword on the tech side of the construction industry.
“We decided to take the lead on this and adopt some of the technology that can provide this data,” Frazier says. “I would say we are diligent in trying to use that data to benefit the project, whether it be for documentation, streamlining processes or communicating with project stakeholders.”
Educate to innovate
How area schools and nonprofits are helping prepare the next generation of innovators
BY LENA ANTHONY
ollowing a unanimous vote by the Tennessee General Assembly, computer science is now a course requirement for every public middle and high school student in the state. The new requirement, which takes effect this fall, stems from a 2020 report by the state’s Computer Science Task Force and is an effort to close the equity gap in computer science education and prepare students for 21st-century jobs.
With 60% of Tennessee high schools previously offering a CS course and only 18% of elementary or middle schools using a computer science curriculum, some schools need more time to prepare for the requirement. MNPS’ West End Middle School isn’t one of them.
Since 2017, Bruno Clark has taught multimedia at West End. In his crowded classroom that does triple time as a computer lab, a production studio, and a workshop, students tinker with technology while getting much-needed practice in the Four Cs for 21st-century learning — creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration. His students work together to write code, fix computers, fly drones, take photos for the yearbook, mix songs in a recording booth and broadcast live in front of a green screen.
Clark became one of the first MNPS teachers to earn his computer science endorsement this year and, with a few tweaks to his curriculum (which already included computer science), he is ready for the state requirement.
“When I’d tell people what we’re doing in here, they’d say that’s for high school, not middle school,” he says. “I’ve always disagreed, and I think this new mandate supports that. We know that today’s workers must be innovative, and innovation starts with these young, creative minds in my classroom getting to explore and experiment with adult things like cameras and drones and coding languages.”
Clark says the hands-on experience is fun,
but it also boosts his students’ confidence and empowers them to believe that they can do it.
“They can pursue jobs in computer science or broadcast or become a drone operator because they’ve done it in here,” he says.
Innovation doesn’t just apply to tech jobs, of course. Architecture, engineering, entrepreneurship, marketing, medicine, sales — all these fields and many more demand innovation and workers who identify as innovators. There are examples around the city of entire schools, individual teachers and nonprofit organizations that are invested in educating the innovators of tomorrow.
Since 2011, the Civic Design Center has allowed Nashville students to be innovators through its Design Your Neighborhood hands-on youth program. In art class, middle schoolers design bus stop bench art that reflects their vision for Nashville, and winning designs are displayed at actual WeGo benches near where the students attend school.
Entire schools can participate in student-led transportation improvement projects, in which they design and implement transportation improvement measures to increase safety around their schools.
At the high school level, students can apply for a paid position on the Design Center’s Youth Participation Action Research project. Over the past school year, these interns helped secure more than 2,000 youth responses to the city’s Imagine Nashville survey and designed and advocated for more teen-friendly spaces in public parks.
“We are building the civic leaders of tomorrow and hopefully getting them interested in design careers, but more than that, we are telling them that their voices as young people matter,” says Melody Gibson, director of education for the Civic Design Center. “They don’t have to wait until they turn
Bruno Clark
18 and can vote. They can make a difference now, by helping solve real-world problems that they’re facing or that their friends and families are facing. They’re so engaged and invested in the process because it means something to them.”
That’s the challenge with so much of what’s taught in school — connecting what’s being learned and how to apply it to real life. It’s one of the things Trent Klingensmith, the longtime president of Junior Achievement of Middle Tennessee, appreciates most about his organization’s capstone programs — JA BizTown for grades 4-6 and JA Finance Park for grades 7-12.
These immersive field trips culminate a weeks-long curriculum that aligns with a school’s existing standards, such as math, social studies, or counseling. Students come
to JA’s headquarters for a hands-on lesson in work readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy, using the concepts they’ve learned at school.
In BizTown, which welcomed 11,000 area kids last year, students learn how the economy works by participating in a simulated town. They manage businesses, pay expenses, apply for a loan, get paid, and, hopefully, can pay off the loan by the end of the school day.
“It’s teaching kids to be entrepreneurial and preparing them for life and also for work,” he says. “It’s also about encouraging kids that they can. They get in here and they find out, ‘Hey, I can do this job.’”
Down the hall at Finance Park, middle schoolers try their hand at personal budgeting after being assigned a random life scenario, like a neurosurgeon as a single parent
or a barista with a non-working spouse and two kids. High schoolers, meanwhile, get to choose their own. The situation is designed to help them understand the basics of managing personal finances and explore careers.
In both BizTown and Finance Park simulations, volunteers are nearby to help run the experiences and share their career path stories with participants.
“We’ve got some kids who come in and have a clear understanding of what’s available to them, and then we have others who have no idea what’s outside the neighborhood they live in,” Klingensmith says. “When they’re in here, they get to see what they can be.”
That opportunity is now available to more area students, many of whom are disadvantaged, since JA started paying for the buses that transport students to and from the field trip.
“We had very few MNPS schools participating in our capstone programs primarily because of bus availability,” he says.
Because of morning and afternoon bus schedules, field trips were limited to two hours; the BizTown and Finance Park simulations are designed to take five hours.
The solution: JA board members created the StartUp Youth Economic Empowerment Alliance, seeded with a $25,000 gift from Pinnacle Financial Partners, to pay for charter buses and cover student fees. From 2018 to 2021, only eight MNPS schools did JA field trips. In 2022, that number rose to 30. Last school year, JA saw 39 MNPS schools come through either program.
Because the price of chartering a bus has risen, Klingensmith says he’s spending more time raising money to pay for them. “At the end of the day, I go home feeling good because I know we’re helping a child see their potential and see the value of their education for their future.”
Biztown
Design Your Neighborhood program project
Mining Talent
Companies are collaborating to bring in locals with different experiences to boost the workforce
BY NICOLLE PRAINO
ashville is special.”
That phrase seems to have become a shared belief in the companies that are engaging local people and organizations in technology workforce development.
“We’re big, and getting bigger, but I think we still are working very closely together as a community in support of tech,” says Glenn Allison, vice president of IT applications at Tractor Supply Company.
It truly spans all industries — from the financial sector, with companies that recently moved to Middle Tennessee, like AllianceBernstein, to the health care giants that have long been established here, such as HCA Healthcare.
“If we really want to connect with our mission and change and transform health care, you have to bring in entrepreneurs,” says Brant Beard, HCA’s assistant vice president of talent engagement and development. “If Nashville wasn’t such an entrepreneur area, we would suffer because of that.”
Even companies that are not the type one would expect to focus on tech advancement are getting into the game. That includes retail-based businesses like Tractor Supply, which also encompasses another big Tennessee industry — agriculture. And then there are the kind of companies you would expect, like T-Mobile.
“As all of these different organizations have moved into Nashville, we take the approach
that a rising tide floats all boats,” says Allie Feiner, AllianceBernstein’s vice president of global technology and operations. “We look at how we can build out the talent economy and fill the needs because all of these organizations have different needs and especially for technical talent.”
Partners in education
Kiesha King, T-mobile senior national education administrator, says that means recognizing how companies can contribute to the employment ecosystem by establishing partnerships in a community.
“When we think about diversifying the workforce,” she says, “it’s important that we think of it from a rural area perspective; we think of it from an HBCU perspective; we think about it from a community college perspective. It’s not just one angle. It’s a very dynamic solution that we all have a responsibility to be a part of.”
Leveraging the company’s 5G network, King says those partnerships with universities, in particular, allow students to have experience working on new types of projects for varying indus-
tries, from technology’s internet of things and autonomous driving vehicles to architecture or agriculture solutions.
“The experience is what then drives the innovation, what then drives that future pipeline,” King says. “When we sit at the table with university leaders, the sky’s the limit.”
Discussions on both the industry and education sides reiterate the need for collaboration from all levels in businesses and education to train the growing workforce.
“Our ability to stay in line, through having advisory boards and the like, really sets us up to provide our graduates with the best opportunity for not just a job but career with a potential employer,” Michael Torrence, president of Motlow State Community College, says.
One of the college’s biggest partners is Nissan, he says. They are working to train students for jobs and current employees looking to learn more skills.
“Employers are like, ‘We don’t need them to go through a 60-week program. We need them to go through a four-day or a 10-day program … come back and train their colleagues. And then, we all get that knowledge so that we can move forward.’ Because that’s how quickly the industry is moving.”
He says that’s led to training opportunities where the college can generate income by training industry partners and their workers online, too.
“We added the world’s three largest robotic manufacturers under one roof, which was unheard of,” Torrence says.
These international companies are ABB, Yaskawa Motoman and FANUC. Since then,
ALLIE FEINER, ALLIANCEBERNSTEIN
the college has added more than 120 partners in mechatronics and robotics, including Mitsubishi, Honda and Mercedes-Benz. Torrence says Motlow is training students on how technology is evolving in manufacturing and the automotive space. The college is opening an 8,000-square-foot electric vehicle addition to its McMinnville campus. Torrence says he hopes that will lead to studies not just on the EV alone but also on energy savings and AI.
Glenn Allison at Tractor Supply says the company partners with Nashville State Community College, where students can work on Tractor Supply projects while still in school, which benefits the organization as it looks to recruit talent from home.
“The demand for technical skills has continued to increase, and so workforce development is really important because it creates that pipeline of talent coming into the organization,” Allison says. “We’ve had great success just working with the students, giving them some training, and then hands on, applying what they’re learning.”
The company hosts hackathons in Nashville, where students form teams to solve problems the business presents and create proof of concept. One idea has even led to the company’s tech endeavor, Tractor Vision.
“We’re getting insights into customer traffic. We’re getting dwell notifications if a customer needs assistance in the side lot. That started as a hackathon project several years ago,” Allison says. “Later we saw there was value in taking that capability out to the team and just further investing in it in-house.”
In the same spirit, King mentions how
T-Mobile’s partnership with Tennessee State University helps the students work with new technologies before they get a full-time job, helping to create perpetual innovation when they enter the business world.
“Now you have this vast group of scholars at TSU that are pursuing these innovative careers, leveraging our network,” King says. “Not only do we want them to be innovators, we want them to have the expectation that the businesses that they’re working with and collaborating with in their future careers are going to want to innovate as well.”
T-Mobile’s first Customer Experience Unconventional Award in 2022 was awarded to TSU. The award recognizes innovations by organizations that create transformation for their customers or, in TSU’s case, its students. The university won the award for developing an academic Esports program to create a pathway from gaming to STEM. That same year, Motlow State came in third place for its program, which provided students with smartphones to aid their connection to education and technology.
Investing in the team
Allison says reinvesting in Tractor Supply’s current employees and training them on new technologies is just as important as working to develop innovators in higher education.
“We’re rolling out innovative AI capabilities to the team,” Allison says. “It gives the team members the opportunity to kind of work with cutting-edge technology. It’s not just in the lab or in a classroom, but they’re directly applying
what they’re learning with the stores or with the mobile app, with web or in-store technology.”
“Development is one of our values,” he says. “With the company, we want team members to develop and grow.”
Beard says what sets HCA apart is its values. Because the company prioritizes culture, the leaders have always emphasized this, leading to long-term retention of employees.
“If part of your values is to help build up,” Beard says, “that makes you intentional about having mentoring programs, that makes you intentional about looking internal, and getting people ready for those next opportunities. If you’re not intentional, they won’t happen.”
Anthony Plank, a senior vice president and chief communications officer at AllianceBernstein, also oversees some human resources functions, like talent and career development. He says AB offers mentorship and coaching programs for people in higher-level roles.
“It doesn’t really stop once you come through the door,” he says. “There’s different ways that we try to continue that learning and that development.”
To support programs for workforce development, Feiner says it’s crucial to prepare internally by having the managers who will support new employees.
“It’s always dependent on the people who are invested in it, and we’re very lucky at AB to have people who are really passionate about growing talent,” she says. “Managing that transition and having that support system as well as a very prescriptive mentorship system around it is make or break for these programs.”
Creating programs for developing current employees as well as for young people entering the workforce is where Torrence says partnerships with universities and other education organizations can help.
“We talk about pathways. We talk about
on-ramps. We talk about offramps. But there are some opportunities to create what I would call middleware, or middle ramps,” he says. “You don’t have to stop, start, get off, to come on. You can do quite a bit of this simultaneously.”
Another example is AllianceBernstein’s partnership with the Nashville Technology Council, which many other companies also rely on for help with tech workforce training. AB’s program with the NTC gives employees an apprenticeship-type job while they learn new tech skills.
“Their prior careers came in really handy. One girl was working as a hairdresser. The way she described it was how she mixed chemicals, and the things that she did actually translated really well into how she learned how to code lines of software,” Feiner explains.
“There’s a lot of studies of the correlation between musicians and people who have a propensity to write code. Here we are in Nashville, right, with all these folks in the music industry. So we like to think about how we can help support people are as they’re transitioning in their careers,”
Plank described a six-month program the company calls “reinvest,” in which people who have taken a career break and are looking to return can reengage in work.
“Talent is everywhere,” he says. “Don’t shortchange that. It’s really trying to find the best available people for the roles
you’re looking to fill. And can you look at unconventional places? Because you might miss out on different perspectives, insights, a way of doing things that perhaps you thought was the only way of doing it within the walls of the firm.”
No matter the expertise, Beard says that from the start of the hiring process managers need to consider an applicant or employee’s future development in the company.
“It’s about when you make a hire, and I don’t care what level, we’re hiring you for two to three roles down the road,” Beard says. “I’m hiring for a need today, but really if you’re a good hiring manager you’re hiring for the need two levels up. It doesn’t mean they have to move there, but I can see them moving there. And it puts the company in a good spot 10 years from now.”
Training as fast as technology is moving may present challenges, but Torrence has a metaphor in mind.
“It’s a great cake to bake,” Torrence says. “But you know, if you reach your hand into the oven without a mitt, you’ll get burned.”
Still, he says the positives outweigh the negatives. And working as a team with other higher-education institutions like Tennessee State University and the University of Tennessee alongside corporate partners allows for an exchange of ideas and a pipeline for anyone’s career.
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Gig life
BY LENA ANTHONY
he live events industry has hit it big. After a pandemic-induced hiatus, the market was valued at nearly $652 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $1.1 trillion in the next decade, fueled partly by colossal sold-out stadium shows spanning musical genres from country to K-pop.
But while ticket prices have soared and the technical difficulty of the shows themselves have increased, one aspect of the industry — how these shows get staffed — has remained essentially the same, relying on word of mouth and who you know to fill the roles.
As a former tour worker for artists like Eric Church and George Strait, Nikki Sanz understands how risky this can be. Not only is it time-consuming to post about positions in group chats and chase down leads, there’s also no guarantee the effort will pay off.
Among her most recent gigs was looking for talent for upcoming tours.
“It was after the pandemic when so many people had left the industry,” she says. “At least a quarter of the people I reached out to would respond, ‘I don’t do this anymore.’
Adding to this problem is the sheer number of professionals needed for big shows and the fact that a lot of the roles have gotten highly technical. The pressure to not just get people, but also get the right people, has never been higher.”
In 2022, Sanz started Giggs, a platform that connects live event managers to qualified gig workers. A beta version was released
last fall with support from the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, LaunchTN, and a dozen other seed investors. After five months of testing, Giggs officially launched in April, with 10,000+ gigging professionals looking for jobs with more than 400 employers, including tour managers, venues and live event giants like LiveNation and AEG.
“The success to date shows me that the timing was right and that Giggs was a solution that both sides of the marketplace were waiting for,” Sanz says.
Revenue started flowing in May, primarily from job postings. Gig workers can create their profiles for free, but a new feature allows them to “boost” their presence.
In addition to updating how live events are staffed, Giggs also addresses the clunky nature of a gig worker’s resume. Sanz points to her
LinkedIn profile and the dozens of jobs she appears to have had — some lasting just one month. These are all gigs, of course, and not a sign of flakiness.
“One gig I worked for just a week, but it was CMA Fest, so it was critical that I highlight it in my experience,” she said. “LinkedIn doesn’t really know what to do with something like that.”
She’s been a founder for two years now, and already she has learned many lessonssome harder than others.
“I’m beginning to think everyone who starts a tech platform has to have a bad experience with a digital agency,” Sanz says. “In my case, it was two bad experiences.”
After two false starts with offshore developers, she connected with Taylor Preston, formerly a front-end developer at
Touring professional turned tech founder to modernize hiring process in live event staffing
Nikki Sanz
Soundstripe, who has served as Giggs CTO since the beginning of the year.
As the revenue starts flowing, Giggs is gearing up for growth. They hosted their first IRL networking event, with more to follow nationwide.
“It was extremely successful, and we saw people get jobs from it. Users soon will have the option to earn a verification checkmark, similar to that offered by X and Instagram.”
Sanz also plans to roll out advertising and affiliate partnerships later this year.
“Gig work is the point of Giggs, but we also want it to be a community for this industry,” Sanz says. “Live event workers are so scattered that there’s no central hub where we can share news and resources. We hope Giggs will be a connector for the people who serve in this industry to all the amazing resources that already exist to support them.”
Sanz also continues to raise money for the venture. She will appear on season 11 of Elevator Pitch, a Shark Tank-esque pitch show from Entrepreneur Media. She expects to need to raise
Series A funding by the end of the year to add features and grow the platform beyond live music events.
“I see growth opportunities everywhere,” she says. “Not only can we go global, because live events happen everywhere, but we can also expand into different areas of the industry, like marathons and corporate events. I’m learning that being a tech founder is a lot like being a tour worker - there are crazy hours and nonstop stress. It’s so hard, but I’m loving it so much.”
THE JOURNEY
Adam Sansiveri
A Renaissance man in the Athens of the South
BY JANET KURTZ
To say that Adam Sansiveri has made some pivots in his career would be an understatement. From his early dreams of becoming a doctor, Sansiveri’s career has turned, doubled back and shifted extensively all to create something special and better his community.
Sansiveri is the senior managing director, colead of sports and entertainment at Bernstein Private Wealth Management, the private wealth division of AllianceBernstein. He has traveled the world as an opera singer, successfully produced shows on Broadway, launched his own tech and design company and moved to Nashville as a leader within the new AllianceBernstein headquarters. Additionally, Sansiveri spends an extensive amount of his time giving back to the community.
From the age of 3, Sansiveri wanted to be a doctor. While there were no doctors in his family, his father was a serious athlete who, like all athletes, experienced injuries. Doctors healed the elder Sansiveri, which left an impression on his son. At the other end of the spectrum, Sansiveri’s mother is an artist and educator who nurtured an appreciation of the arts in Adam and his twin brother, Sean.
Sansiveri and his brother went to Cornell University, where they excelled at sports. After graduation, Adam made the first of many changes in direction.
“When I graduated from university, I decided to put a career in medicine on pause to pursue the arts,” he says.
He began a career as an opera singer, which led to him performing at the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall and the Verbier Festival in Switzerland.
At age 24, after creating an arts-oriented website and design firm, Sansiveri realized his passion for entrepreneurship. He swiveled again, began producing Broadway shows, and became one of the youngest Broadway producers ever with shows like Guys and Dolls and Speed-The-Plow. While producing on Broadway, Sansiveri attended graduate school to get an MBA in media management and economics. After graduating at the top of his class, Sansiveri was courted by top Wall Street firms, including AllianceBernstein.
“AB stood out for so many reasons,” Sansiveri says. “Bernstein gave me the opportunity to make a complete pivot into a new business with an already world-renowned company.”
Having been with AllianceBernstein for almost 14 years and as the only global asset manager headquartered in Tennessee, much about his work excites Sansiveri the growth of a new business, the establishment of the fastest-growing wealth management company in Tennessee and more.
“We advise and invest for the most successful business owners, nonprofits, athletes and entertainers and families across the globe, Sansiveri explains. “Seeing how Nashville has embraced our work has been incredibly rewarding,”
His work often balances finding and developing the best talent and finding innovative ways to create more value for clients and the community.
Philanthropy and giving back is an important part of the culture at AB.
“In under six years, our employees have
served on over 100 nonprofit boards in Nashville. I get most excited by the impact we are able to make as a company and as a collective group of individuals that truly care about this city,” says Sansiveri, who also sits on several nonprofit boards and otherwise contributes to organizations that strive to strengthen the community fabric that makes up Nashville.
While a Nashville resident, he is still an ardent supporter and board member of the New York-based Broadway Dreams Foundation, which provides youth and young adults of all socioeconomic backgrounds with performance training, life skills, and mentorship opportunities. Locally, Sansiveri is serving his second term on the board of directors for the Tennessee Performing Arts Center and is helping lead their current capital campaign for a new theater on the East Bank. He also sits on the board of directors of Studio Tenn in Franklin, where he worked on the capital campaign committee to raise funds to build the new Turner Theater at The Factory at Franklin. Sansiveri is also an active board member of OZ Arts and The Heritage Foundation of Williamson County.
When asked what his next reinvention will look like, he says, “I think we’re always growing, and sometimes that leads to a new chapter, which can look like a complete reinvention to someone on the outside. All I know is that the next reinvention will somehow continue to build on everything that has come before and will continue to focus on having a greater impact.”
FEATURING IN CHARGE 2024 LEADERS LEADERS
RENAISSANCE NASHVILLE HOTEL | MARCH 26
Thank you to all who joined us at our Leaders luncheon which featured an insightful discussion from The Mentors, a breakout group of honorees from our 15th annual In Charge recognitions.
