Nichole Argo, PhD is the Executive Director of the TogetherUp Institute, a think-and-do tank committed to growing a national movement of communities dedicated to connecting and collaborating across differences. Nichole also founded and co-directed the Needham Resilience Network, a municipal leadership model designed to bridge local silos, tool diverse leaders in skills to communicate across differences, and provide a process for co-creating inclusive solutions to local problems.

A social psychologist by training, Nichole’s recent writing includes: The Belonging Barometer: The State of Belonging in the US, The Science of Polarization and Insights for Bridgebuilding, and several essays on how to communicate across differences that involve sacred values. Nichole sits on the Permanent Monitoring Panel for Conflict and Polarization at the World Federation of Scientists. She has published in leading political science and psychology journals and holds degrees from Stanford, MIT, and the New School for Social Research.

Scott Hutcheson is the Executive Director of E Pluribus Unum, where he was part of the organization's founding team with former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. Scott previously served as Deputy Chief Administrative Officer and Director of Cultural Economy for the City of New Orleans. Prior to that he served as the State of Louisiana’s Assistant Secretary of Cultural Development and Founding Executive Director of the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation. Scott resides in New Orleans.

Learn more about the Reimagining Us podcast by visiting the show website.

Listen to Reimagining Us

Reimagining Us is an 8-part series that began airing right after the 2024 election. Had you all initially planned for this schedule?

Our original plans were to launch the podcast in October because we felt that the podcast topic and approach might be helpful for Americans both in the lead up to the election as well as after it. We strongly believed that our message would resonate for listeners no matter who won the election, that many Americans would feel unsettled and be seeking constructive frames. So we recorded the first episodes without knowing who had won. Then, we ended up postponing the launch due to logistics (e.g., calendaring conflicts when it came to booking studios and guests), and had to go back and edit those early episodes to speak more granularly to the results.

Affective polarization and misperception are two terms introduced in the first episode of the podcast. Everyone should listen to that episode, of course, but can you provide a summary of those two terms and how they explain the division we experience in the U.S. today?

The polarization of our recent past was largely ideological and healthy, even when disagreement was vehement. It revolved around differences in ideas and positions, and those differences often led to more innovative thinking, effective compromises, and/or better legislation.

Affective polarization seems to have started with the rise of cable news programs and radio talk shows, and is made worse by social media. Regardless, Americans today harbor strong dislike of members of the other party. This is a problem because when people dislike others just for being cross partisans, they cease to listen to or engage with them. Instead, they flatten positions/issues into binaries of “good/us” and “bad/them,” and no longer investigate the complexity of policy ideas and positions. They focus more on winning “us vs. them” battles than trying to solve problems for the larger “we,” our nation. All of this hurts democracy.

The perception gap refers to the fact that many Americans hold inaccurate beliefs about the other party’s preferences, which leads them to think they are further apart than they are. More in Common has done exceptional work on this, which can be found here. The perception gap is highest for the most partisan Americans, as well as those who are most educated. This is stunning because it means the people who are most involved in civic and political life hold the least accurate views of the other side’s beliefs – and because they are highly engaged and motivated, they are also most likely to be influencing others.

Taken together, affective polarization and the perception gap lead to a vicious cycle involving misperceptions of outgroup partisans, outrage towards outgroup partisans, “us vs. them” rhetoric and strategies by partisan extremes (instead of constructive problem solving for the common good), and exhaustion and disengagement for a majority of Americans. Jennifer McCoy calls this “pernicious polarization” because it incentivizes behavior that undermines democratic norms and institutions. But at the level of our own personal lives, it’s also pernicious – it can drive wedges between friends and family members, and can further the feeling of isolation and loneliness at a time when these things are already at pandemic levels.

The podcast is focused on highlighting the problems alongside sharing the solutions to toxic polarization. It’s so important that we be solutions-oriented so we can move forward as a country! I would argue that there is a greater urgency to move toward solutions given the recent executive orders that have passed.

How do you think those orders complicate the solutions Reimagining Us highlights and what do you all think is the most feasible solution to start stemming the tidal wave of hate and fear that has been unleashed?

There is no doubt that the flurry of recent executive orders raise the urgency for a focus on solutions. But other than the flood of emotions that these orders bring, they don’t really complicate the solutions that Reimagining Us puts forth for individuals and communities across the nation. We say this firstly because, when we interrogate the perception gap, we find that Republicans and Democrats overlap a great deal in their views about what Trump should do. According to a new report from More in Common, “74% of Americans, including 73% of Republicans, ​believe that he should “always follow the Constitution, even if it means he sometimes can’t get things done.”

Further, majorities across parties support goals such as honoring international alliances, staying out of wars, and protecting other countries from invasion. And lastly, as we talk about a lot in Reimagining Us, both Republicans and Democrats most desire the country to be “united,” they just don’t think it’s a priority for the opposing party.

What is the solution? Americans need first to realize that the other party is not light years away from them on how they view what’s happening in Washington. They need to spend less time listening to media pundits and extremist partisan leaders and spend more time connecting across differences with the people in their lives and their communities— seeking to understand perspectives that differ from them by listening to the values, emotions and stories at play more than the stance or policy view attached to it. In our view, these connections need to be made intentionally, and supported by local institutions or networks. By coming to know one another again as individuals with feelings and stories – all humans are complex! – we begin to understand the experiences that we have not lived, to hold the larger “we” in mind as we think about solutions, and to gain confidence in our ability to collaborate for change that can truly benefit all. As Monica Guzman says, “When people are underrepresented in your life, they are overrepresented in your mind.” Unfortunately, this is true, but the representation is inaccurate and often dehumanizing. To stem the tide of fear and hate that has been unleashed, we need to engage each other. Go towards, not away from. We need to become bridges, not bombs.

Let’s talk a bit more about local level belonging. On the podcast you all shared that one-third of respondents to the Belonging Barometer Survey felt local level belonging, meaning a majority of people in this country don’t feel like they belong in their local community.

Can you talk a bit about the episode that dives into this issue and what you both have personally done to increase belonging in your lives?

Sure. First, while local level belonging does appear low on average, it’s important to note that the data for the Belonging Barometer were collected during the Covid-19 pandemic when people were simply not engaging much in person. The Barometer was run in Colorado last year and they found slightly higher levels of local level belonging, which is heartening. Still, as Seth Kaplan, author of Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time, reminded us on the show, local and hyper-local connectivity is at an all-time low and is associated with a host of social, health-related and economic ills.

When I created the Belonging Barometer, the challenge was to create a conceptual framework that could incorporate findings from multiple disciplines.

The result was a multifaceted concept centered on three pillars: social connection (feeling emotionally connected to and included in a setting), psychological safety (feeling valued as one’s whole self, even if you disagree or make a mistake), and agency (or “co-creation,” which means being able to influence the setting you are in). That’s a high bar, even for families!

But that framework also provides a helpful diagnostic for me, in my relationships and in the way I think about my workplace, my community, etc. I can be high in connection but feel low in agency, which would tell me that either I or the setting needs to do something to help me use my voice effectively. Or, I might feel high in connection and agency but low in psychological safety, which would tell me that I or my setting needs to do something to make me less afraid to disagree with others. This framework has also changed how I think about the different groups living in my community. Some groups may score far lower than others on one or all of these categories…and the framework alone gives me a sense of how we can go about addressing the problem. So in my life today, I walk around thinking about how belonging—according to this framework—is or isn’t showing up, for me and for all the groups in the room, in each of the rooms I walk into.

Our belonging episode was a highlight in that it featured john a. powell, the Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at Berkeley and just a seminal thinker on this subject. We spent more time talking about bridging than belonging, because bridging is really the mechanism for creating belonging. But john is a special person and that conversation was definitely a bright spot—a bright spot amongst bright spots— in the making of this series!

Another statistic discussed was that two-thirds of Americans are exhausted by politics. Is there a way, or is it even possible, to de-politicize a lot of the issues that have been politicized in our current climate?

This question brings to mind something that Layla Zaidane, the CEO of Future Caucus, said in Episode 7: That when we think of politics, we feel stress and distaste. It feels like an ugly word, something you want to move away from. But in her work with young Republicans and Democrats entering politics at the state and national level—getting to know each other as individuals who care about their communities and want to solve problems—the word ‘politics’ feels beautiful, innovative, caring, and collaborative. Of course, that is happening by design. These leaders are gaining skills that enable those conversations, and they are supported by an institution that incentivizes connection and collaboration. It’s a real proof of concept, even within the political world that so many of us distrust today! Layla’s days are literally filled watching these young leaders listen for values, identify common ground, and build solutions for the bigger “we.”

And at the end of the day, this is the mindset and skillset that we feature in Episode 6: Part 1 and 2. It’s about curiosity—listening to person (not position) and values (not views). It rejects flattened, binary thinking…everything has context, and we don’t really understand an issue until we can tell a generous version of the argument against ours. My answer to this question really comes out in Episode 6, our “Be the Change Toolkit,” through the voices of john a powell, John Sarrouf, Melissa Weintraub, Scott Shigeoka, and Monica Guzman.

Earlier in our conversation you shared a quote that was also said on the show: “The more underrepresented someone is in your life, the more overrepresented they are in your mind”. It alludes to the fear people have of those not in their “in-group.” With race in particular, I remember there was a podcast I listened to some years ago that said that most White Americans do not have friends outside of their racial group. Now, there were a lot of policies that helped make that the case–Jim Crow, redlining, for example–which have impacted our neighborhoods and schools today. What would be Reimagining Us’ advice for folks to move beyond the structural impediments to start interacting with those outside their in-group?

Thank you for asking! This may be the most important question of our day, in my view. Let me start by saying that we *need* to do this, for our health, happiness and productivity—both at the individual and community or organizational level. Why do I say this? Because the finding you highlight, that most White Americans lack friendships across differences, is also associated with belonging.

Our podcast talks about how communities can go about doing this in Episodes 7 and 8. In Episode 7, Sam Pressler talks about various policy approaches for promoting resident connectivity as part of existing initiatives (e.g., housing planning) or as new initiatives (e.g., neighborhood grant programs, creating a “Department of Connection,” etc.). In Episode 8, myself and 6 members of the Needham Resilience Network (NRN) talk about the “whole of society” network that we built in our community. Because modern life is essentially siloed, even in terms of our geographical structure, the only way to bring people together across differences is to do so intentionally.

The NRN engages “hubs” from every major identity and stakeholder group in a community—including key public officials such as the Town Manager, Superintendent and Chief of Police—to build relationships, anchor in the concept of belonging, practice skills in communicating across differences, and co-create a solution to a local problem. Throughout the 1-2 year program, participants are sharing and receiving stories and feedback from their sub-communities…which means the network is engaging way more than the 30 people who sit around the table. In our case, it is engaging almost 7,000 residents who are directly connected to the hub leaders! That’s nearly one quarter of the town who are now exposed to deeper understanding of other groups, positive models of care and collaboration, etc. We are big believers in the need to institutionalize relationships across differences – because that is how you build reliable, long-term connections.

Before we wrap, I would love to talk more about your careers outside of the podcast.

Dr. Argo, what led you to found TogetherUp, a nonprofit that helps other organizations build cultures of belonging and localized democracy models? Also, what is the organization’s focus for 2025?

While leading the research effort on the Belonging Barometer, I learned about all the inspiring work taking place to build communities across differences in our country and elsewhere. And then I put that to practice locally when I founded the NRN. Seeing our local community transform was incredibly meaningful and rewarding — and as a proof of concept, it was simply a story that needed to be told, and it is a model that can change communities throughout America. And Americans of all partisan and demographic identities want and need that — it’s what they’re asking for in survey after survey, interview after interview! So the decision felt clear…I actually couldn’t imagine doing anything else for the next few years.

Our focus in 2025 will be to build and support a growing network of local communities dedicated to connecting and collaborating across differences, and to share a variety of resources that can be used by anybody seeking to engage in this work (e.g., an impact measure for community programs, a landscape scan of how philanthropy is supporting this work, a case study and playbook for building a local resilience network, etc.).

E Pluribus Unum Fund, the organization you lead Scott, is focused on advancing equity in the South. What are some of the challenges your region of the country faces on equity, and what is one initiative that your organization will be doubling down in this year?

The history of the South itself is a challenge. Those who are still are affected by the extant vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow, and those who think things have changed and everyone needs to “just move on.” Those are still challenges and opportunities. We will continue our work talking to a wide range of people across the South and then doubling down on creating messages and outlets (like Reimagining Us) that work to help people communicate across differences and looking to discover common ground on issues like fairness and justice.

If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Melissa Giraud and Andrew Grant-Thomas of Embrace Race podcast.

Emily R Williams (she/her) coaches women of color to accelerate positive change at work and in their personal lives. When they do, they help to create a better world for everyone. Emily has written policies to end sexual harassment and increase inclusion in workplaces nationally and globally, including at the United Nations. Emily has worked with national governments, institutions of higher education, companies, nonprofits and advocates in more than 20 countries to advance social justice. Emily provides consulting, speaking, leadership coaching and training to organizations. In her spare time, you can find Emily dancing to Chicago house music or checking out cute cafes.

Follow Emily’s work on LinkedIn.

Learn more about the Beyond Voting podcast by visiting the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership website. You can also follow the show on Instagram.

Listen to Beyond Voting

Can you start by telling us what the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership is and what drew you to leading the organization?

The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership (ACSJL) is a semi-autonomous social justice organization. We are affiliated with Kalamazoo College, a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. We exist to increase the capacity of social justice leaders. We do that in a variety of ways: through public education about the social justice issues unfolding right in front of our eyes and providing advocacy training to support radical social justice activism. Our reach is expansive, at this moment, we’re spending a lot of time working with students. We also work with human rights leaders globally and with local activists in the Midwest and nationally.

What drew me to leading the organization is a slightly complicated question. In short, I feel deeply called to support social justice leaders, of all kinds, and to support movement building. Building strong social justice movements is how we transform societies. We desperately need movements that bring people together and model a world that truly values everyone, all living things, the planet. And I’m doing my part right now by leading the Arcus Center.

Beyond Voting is not the first podcast affiliated with the Arcus Center. Radical Futures Now was a podcast from the organization from 2020-21. What was the aim of that podcast?

Radical Futures Now aimed to support listeners in connecting with activists around the world who were engaging radical social justice ideas and work. The episodes delved into topics such as community care, the impact of colonization on spirituality and family structure, women’s resistance movements…super interesting topics, all in an effort to help people build radical futures.

And what made you all decide to return to podcasting three years later?

Three years later, we realized we needed to have another in-depth conversation about social justice and reach our audience in a critical period before the 2024 elections. Podcasting is such an effective way to reach people and cultivate an ongoing conversation about social justice.

At the time of this interview, the 2024 U.S. election has already occurred and we have a new President-elect. I felt it was still appropriate to do this interview after the fact, given the title Beyond Voting. What was the genesis of this podcast and what were you all hoping to accomplish?

The 2024 elections were a really big deal. There was so much to say about what people were thinking, how they were regarding voting, taking for granted the guarantee of our rights, the benevolence of politicians and powerful people, and ultimately misunderstanding their own power… It seemed absolutely critical to address these things and to have conversations about the big questions in people’s minds. We hoped that our reflections and our guests could really help to provide some guidance and perspective.

This is still what we want. We want to be able to provide some perspective and guidance that allows people to channel their anxieties, misgivings, and disillusionment with our society into something constructive centered on community-building, and activism.

The first season of Beyond Voting was the conversation we needed to have. And it is still totally relevant after the election. If people are still wondering what happened or feel convinced that we need a third party, or if you are wondering how to strengthen our movements to meet this moment…If you still don’t fully understand what fascism is...you should definitely listen to Season 1. We had some really insightful and informative conversations about all of these topics.

There are people that feel demoralized in this moment, for various reasons, such as those related to their concerns about protecting immigrants and asylum seekers; accessing abortion; combating climate change; avoiding discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality; or all the above. What are you telling folks who feel like the electoral system has let them down?

I affirm them. The electoral system has let us all down, but that doesn’t mean we just throw our hands up and do nothing. Our disenchantment with the electoral system is our call to action. It’s our sign to get involved.

I am telling people to get organized and to pay attention. We all have to pay attention to what is happening in electoral politics because as we’ve learned acutely over the last decade, the policies and practices of our elected officials impact our lives immensely. So, while I understand that it can be overwhelming to constantly hear about the whims of the incoming administration, we have to assume responsibility for creating a better world and for protecting each other.

If we’re going to resist the harmful policies espoused by the incoming administration, we’re going to have to stand in solidarity with people in identity groups we may not belong to. Solidarity is going to be required to protect the rights of others. By doing so, we are protecting everyone’s human rights.So I am telling people to stand in solidarity with the communities being targeted.

I’m also telling people to stay optimistic. The reason why we are in a moment where politicians and others in our society can get ahead by espousing hateful rhetoric and harmful agendas is because our social justice movements have been successful. Starting with the Civil Rights movement and anti-discrimination laws, movements for transgender rights and visibility, women’s movements, DACA and immigrants rights movements, the labor movement is making a resurgence. There is such backlash because our social justice movements built a lot of power. All that power doesn't go away in just 4 years. It will help us stand strong against the attacks the administration has vowed to bring.

Activism can feel overwhelming, especially when you are new to it. What advice would you offer to folks who are ready to fight for what they believe in, but aren’t sure where to start?

Definitely start by learning about the groups that are already doing work on the issues you care about. Connect with them in person, go to their events, their rallies, their meetings, get to know people and learn about the work from them. Then, when you’ve built relationships and have an in-depth understanding of the work and what should be your role in it, get active. Start leading the work in community with others.

And what about advice for folks who know what they are interested in, but are afraid of burning out?

Burnout is real, but it shouldn’t be the reason why people don’t engage at all. So, my advice is to build in super healthy self-sustaining practices into your day and get so committed to your well-being (so that you can show up for our social justice movements) that no matter what comes, you can meet it with integrity and strength. When we sustain our bodies, minds, health, finances and spirits, it reminds us why we fight for social justice at all. It’s because we all deserve to thrive in this country and in this world.

Also, don’t hate me, but you might want to limit your social media intake. If you do, it’ll likely have a positive impact on your energy and outlook on life.

Will there be a second season of this podcast, and if so, what would be the focus?

More than likely there will be a second season. We’re still working through the particulars. If we’ve learned anything from season 1, it’s that many people want to get involved in social justice activism and we can reach them as we grow the podcast.

Aside from listening to Beyond Voting, what is at least one thing that everyone should and can do after reading this interview?

Follow us on instagram @arcuscenter and make a personal plan to stay engaged with what’s unfolding in the news, while also maintaining healthy boundaries with social media. You can also join our mailing list to learn about our events, calls to action and opportunities.

Definitely connect with the organizations and activists in your community doing work on the issues threatening peoples’ rights and ability to live decently on this planet. We are also looking to connect with social justice activists, artists, teachers, faculty, community organizers, facilitators. So reach out, we’re Ready to Build!

If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Jenna Spinelle of When the People Decide podcast.

Maren Machles (she/her) is an investigative producer at the Project On Government Oversight, where she hosts and produces the organization’s first-ever investigative podcast, Bad Watchdog. Before joining POGO, Maren was an investigative journalist with the Scripps Washington Bureau where she covered the U.S. immigration system, criminal justice, tribal justice issues, gender violence, and influential political figures. She has spent her career digging into the finances and backgrounds of powerful political figures, and into the systemic oppression of marginalized communities. Maren’s work has received several awards and has appeared on NPR, PBS NewsHour, Twin Cities PBS, USA Today, Newsy/Scripps News, DecodeDC, Long Beach Post, and across Scripps’ local television stations.

Learn more about the Bad Watchdog podcast by visiting the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) website.

Listen to Bad Watchdog

Bad Watchdog – the podcast we are going to discuss – comes from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). Can you give us a quick intro to this organization?

The Project On Government Oversight is a nonpartisan independent federal government watchdog that investigates and exposes corruption and abuse of power. In addition to our investigations and research, the organization advocates for reforms to achieve a more accountable government. 

As a journalist, you have made a career out of holding powerful organizations and people accountable, while also making sure that you uplift marginalized voices. What drew you to this journalism focus?

I’ve always been curious to learn how and why the systems we’ve created and rely on ignore or even harm people. Sometimes it can be as simple as a statute or law needs to be changed, sometimes it’s a bad apple abusing the system, but what interests me most is when we, as a society, have a misunderstanding or a misframing about a system. That’s why season 2 of Bad Watchdog is one of my favorite projects I’ve ever worked on, because this season we really question the way we address and think about terrorism in our country and how we might be getting it wrong, over and over again.

Over two seasons, Bad Watchdog has looked into the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In a few sentences can you summarize what DHS does for our audience members who may not be familiar with the agency?

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created after 9/11 in order to bring different agencies that had previously been dispersed throughout the government under one department to address national security threats. Under DHS there’s more than 20 agencies including Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Transportation Security Administrations (TSA), Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), and many more.

Why has POGO, through this podcast, chosen to focus on this agency?

Bad Watchdog is not necessarily tied to focusing on DHS, however the agency is massive and my colleagues have uncovered a lot throughout the years. DHS is incredibly powerful, with the largest federal law enforcement agency, CBP, in the country. This means that in addition to its incredible power, it has incredible access to the general public. DHS touches our lives in daily ways, when we pass through airport security or cross a US border, but also during some of the most pivotal moments in recent history, like the 2020 George Floyd protests or the January 6th insurrection. This agency needs a lot of oversight considering how sprawling and powerful it is.

Transparently, I haven’t listened to all of season one yet, but I did listen to all of the latest season, which focuses on the outsized attention paid to “securing the Southern border” while ignoring the ever growing domestic terrorism threat created by white supremacist organizations. DHS is a massive agency with many functions, so why was this the story that needed to be told right now?

Throughout the run up to the election, immigration came up again and again as a threat, as something we need to be focused on. DHS is the main department in the federal government that handles immigration and more generally national security threats, and we talk in detail in this season about the statistics about immigration as a national security threat. While it’s true that more people are coming over the border than ever, it’s also true that more far-right violent extremists have been responsible for the majority of terrorist attacks over the last several decades. Experts told us this group is being emboldened with a President-elect who has failed on several occasions to condemn their actions. Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oathkeepers, a far-right violent extremist group, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his involvement in the January 6th insurrection. One of our investigations found that more than 300 Oathkeepers have worked or are currently working at DHS. Even the agency charged with protecting us from these violent actors has issues keeping them out of its own ranks.This threat isn’t going away, it’s only growing. 

This season also spends a substantial portion of it discussing the process of conducting the investigation into abuses Immigration and Customs Enforcement “ICE” facilities. I have never heard so much about Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, particularly on a podcast. Why did the podcast team decide to bring the FOIA process to the forefront?

The public has a right to this information. It has a right to know how its tax dollars are being spent and how our democracy is working for us. FOIA is one of the few ways we get to peek behind the curtain to see how our government is working for us, and a lot of people don’t even know how FOIA works. The episode where we really dive into the battle we had with the federal government over these records is one of my favorites because it really highlights the lengths my colleagues and I have to go through in order to access this information. My colleague, Lance Sims said it best in this episode when he said, “to have the government fight tooth and nail to keep this information hidden is offensive.” I think this rings true for a lot of folks working on FOIA requests every day.

Fortunately, the last two episodes of Bad Watchdog really highlight people advocating for solutions to the lack of accountability for DHS. What solutions stand out to you as being the most important for folks to pay attention to?

It’s hard to say what’s most important when it comes to solutions, because my job is to shine a light on the problems. But I think it’s really important to focus on the solutions presented by the people who are most impacted by the system and are working to address the problem. Listening to people like Berto or Daryl is really important when we think about how to move forward in addressing national security.

And are we moving forward since the show wrapped in July?

Our investigative team continues to look at DHS and is hoping to dig in even further into the accountability failures and impunity these agencies have under this department.

What's at stake now that Trump has been reelected with respect to DHS, and what could be done to pre-empt or manage the fallout that is going to result from his administration’s leadership?

Accountability failures have been pervasive at DHS under both the Trump and Biden administrations. An independent watchdog at the agency who has trust and credibility across both sides of the aisle could help with this, but unfortunately, as we covered in our first season, the current watchdog - Joseph Cuffari - has faced serious allegations of misconduct and has sat on, heavily redacted, or flat out refused to investigate allegations of misconduct or abuse of power at DHS. He’s stayed in his position in both administrations even though some in Congress have called for his removal and the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency has released a scathing probe into Cuffari’s conduct that found he “abused his authority” by wasting 1.4 million taxpayer dollars launching a “retaliatory investigation” against whistleblowers in his office. It's also going to be crucial for people across the country to continue to speak up about abuse and misconduct at DHS when it occurs. We are so thankful for those who have shared their stories to help shine a light on this in both seasons of Bad Watchdog. 

Before we close, I want to share that one of the cool things about Bad Watchdog is that it is part of The Democracy Group consortium, which is described as “A network of podcasts dedicated to engaging in civil discourse, inspiring civic engagement, and exploring the future of our democracy.” What have the benefits been, either for the show or for you personally, since joining The Democracy Group?

Since joining The Democracy Group we’ve been able to work with other podcasts, swapping episodes and promotions. We’ve been able to strengthen the podcast through information sharing with others in the network and work with a new generation of journalists through its fellowship program. It’s been really incredible to be a part of a network that is mission driven and that the mission aligns with POGO’s.

Is there any new or upcoming work that you would like to share with us?

Yes! We are in the early stages of development for season 3 and we are really excited about coming to our listeners with a new story, and we are even focusing on a new department.

If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with David Sirota of Master Plan podcast.

David Sirota is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter based in Denver, Colorado. He is the founder and editor of The Lever. He previously served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter and is the creator of Audible’s acclaimed financial crisis podcast series Meltdown.

Learn more about the Master Plan podcast by visiting the website.

Listen to Master Plan

I am going to start this interview a bit differently, by asking a controversial question: Is the concept of checks and balances dead within the U.S. government? Master Plan spends a great deal of time explaining how enmeshed congressional partisan politics are with our judicial branch, that I couldn’t help but feel we are without hope in that sense. What’s your interpretation of the events you detail?

One of the master planners’ key revelations was that in a country where their self-enriching policies are unpopular, they’d need to focus on the least democratically accountable branch of government - the judiciary. It’s a branch that’s not subject to elections and that’s filled with people who enjoy lifetime appointments. They understood that if they could take that branch over, and turn it into a super-legislature that actually makes laws, they wouldn’t have to worry as much about the desires of the general public. 

The system of checks and balances has subsequently broken down both because of the judiciary turning itself from a law-interpreting branch into a law-making branch - and because the other branches have basically accepted that with little push back. Congress has plenty of ways it could reassert its power, and the executive branch could certainly work to reorganize or expand the courts. But that hasn’t happened.

The one line that keeps echoing in my head from Master Plan is the legal argument underpinning all of the legalized corruption we have today: “Money is free speech.” This is unfortunate because I had already begrudgingly acclimated to–not accepted–“Corporations are people.” I am no lawyer, but I wonder, if the former statement is true, and the second is true, is there not an argument to be made about fairness? Is all free speech equal? That can’t be true if some have more money than others to exercise speech, to the point where they can stifle others speech. Has that been argued? Or is it naive to believe that our elected officials and courts care about fairness?

Legally-speaking, there used to be a distinction between citizens’ speech and commercial speech. However, in practice, that distinction has largely evaporated, giving corporations the right to use money as a constitutionally protected form of unlimited speech - which translates into corporations and their owners using massive amounts of money to control the entire political process. The system is totally out of balance because equating money with speech effectively allows the speech of those with lots of money to completely drown out the speech of everyone else. Those who created and now preserve this system clearly aren’t interested in anything resembling “fairness.”

It becomes clear, though Republicans or Conservatives have really benefited from these intentional cracks in our campaign finance system, that Democrats have also benefited and have aided in upholding some of the judicial confirmations and legislation that have weakened campaign finance reform. I mean, I was surprised to learn that late Republican Senator John McCain led the charge on reform and that a Democrat controlled Senate confirmed Justice Clarence Thomas. Who today, in any party, is trying to call out legalized corruption and where are they in addressing the issue?

There are people who call it out - Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse come to mind. And even Joe Biden has periodically lamented the domination of big money in politics. But one takeaway from Master Plan is that without a popular uprising demanding real reforms, any allies inside the system simply will not be able to make change.

I recognize that as a journalist you may not want to share your opinion on this, but what are those you’ve interviewed saying needs to happen now that we know how pervasive legalized corruption is, and what is actually realistic given our political climate?

So why haven’t they happened? Part of it is that the master planners have the raw political power right now to obstruct reform. But the main thing preventing reform is the public simply accepting the status quo as some immovable permanent reality.

I would like to talk about the podcast medium for a bit. What benefits–if any–have you found to reaching audiences through audio versus print?

I will always be first and foremost a writer, but I believe audio is probably the most intimate medium for storytelling. I worked in radio for a while, and a friend of mine in that industry once said to me that the best kind of radio is the kind where the host remembers that he/she isn’t talking to thousands or millions of people, but is actually talking to one person - that person sitting in their car, or taking a walk. So we’ve tried to honor that intimacy in the kind of storytelling we’re doing. Our scripting has tried to be deliberately informal and conversational, as well as respectful of the listener’s time. We’ve also tried to use archival footage to really show evidence and not just tell the audience what’s happening and expect they’ll take our word for it. 

Investigative journalism is tedious work, and there are so many details that you wade through as a reporter that you then have to determine how to communicate to the audience. Sometimes those details can be boring or complex. Humor is a rhetorical device you employ often throughout the show. You also reference a lot of pop culture. I found myself engaged at times by both. Can you talk about these scripting choices and their purpose?

I fundamentally reject the idea that a serious investigation of a serious topic has to be a boring experience. Master Plan is about very serious topics. We’re asking a lot of the audience. So our thinking was, if we’re going to ask listeners to eat their broccoli, we should probably pour some cheese on that broccoli to make it a delicious experience. So we did our best to make the story as fun and compelling as possible - but in a way that didn’t frivolize or undermine the gravity of the facts we are reporting. 

To wrap up, what do you hope comes of your team’s reporting? Admittedly, I felt pretty hopeless while listening to the first 8 (of 10) episodes. Is there anything U.S. citizens can do for such a systemic issue that has beneficiaries across both the major political parties?

Corruption is so immersive and ubiquitous these days that it can feel less like a fixable problem, and more like air or water - a force of nature and inevitability.

Thank you for your time and this incredibly important reporting! Before we end, is there any new or upcoming work that you would like to share with us?

Master Plan is an outgrowth of the audio work we do each week at Lever Time - which is our weekly reported audio show. I hope everyone will subscribe to both Master Plan at MasterPlanPodcast.com and to Lever Time at LeverTimePod.com.

If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact guest curation called “Democracy at Stake” from Mila Atmos of Future Hindsight podcast.

Journalist and author Eric Marcus (he/him) is the founder and host of the award-winning Making Gay History podcast, which mines his decades-old audio archive of rare interviews to bring LGBTQ history to life through the voices of the people who lived it.  Eric is also co-producer of Those Who Were There, a podcast drawn from Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. And he is the author and co-author of a dozen books, including Is It A Choice?, Why Suicide?, and Breaking the Surface, the #1 New York Times bestselling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis. Eric is a founding board member of the American LGBTQ+ Museum. For more information on Eric and his work on Making Gay History, click here to watch a brief NBC News profile.

Learn more about the Making Gay History podcast by visiting the website. You can also follow the show on Twitter/X, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Making Gay History

When did you know that you wanted to document LGBT history? What did you feel was missing from the mainstream conversation?

This work wasn’t my idea!  I will take credit for coming up with the idea for my first book, The Male Couple’s Guide to Living Together, which was published in 1988.  That book was my excuse to research all the questions I had about how to have a relationship with another man at  a time in history when everyone said it couldn’t possibly last. (When I started work on the book I’d been together with my first partner for three years and was pretty clueless. We lasted another six years. My current partner and I just celebrated our 30th anniversary.)

My history book, which was originally published in 1992 under the title Making History, was commissioned by an editor at Harper & Row (now HarperCollins). It was his idea to document the history of our movement in the form of an oral history book patterned after the work of the great oral historian Studs Terkel. I was at a moment in my career as a journalist when it had become clear that I would not get to do what I wanted to do, which was to be an on-air correspondent at CBS News, where I was working on their morning show as a segment producer. I was told point blank that they would never put an openly gay person on camera on national news. It was around the same time that I was offered the opportunity to write Making History. So I made the leap and left CBS to write the book.

It was once I started my research that my passion for our history was kindled. I had no idea that we had such a rich and proud history of activism dating back to the middle of the 20th century in the U.S.  And the people I got to meet and interview were extraordinarily interesting and inspiring.  Sitting with them and hearing about their lives and adventures was the best kind of time travel.  

The Making Gay History podcast came decades later, but because I had recorded my interviews using broadcast quality equipment and had donated my archive to the New York Public Library with an agreement that they digitize my collection, I was well-positioned to mine my own archive for the podcast, which we launched in 2016.  I really can’t take credit for the podcast idea, which was our founding producer’s idea—Sara Burningham, who now produces the Amicus podcast for Slate.  The impetus for revisiting the archive came after I was fired from my job at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, but that’s a story for another time.

Most of your books were published in the between the late 80s and early 2000s. What was it like during those times, writing about LGBT history?

In the late 1980s when my first book was published, we were in the middle of the AIDS crisis, so there was a lot of misinformation and prejudice regarding LGBTQ people, gay men in particular.  There were no out celebrities speaking up for us and no one who was out in mainstream media.  When I was interviewed about The Male Couple’s Guide I found that the journalists were much more nervous than I was talking about homosexuality and rarely, if ever, asked anything beyond the most basic questions: When did you know? How did your parents react? Who plays the husband and who plays the wife? I often felt like I was the representative of people from another planet and there was often the assumption that I represented all gay people, which was certainly not the case.  

In many ways it was extremely exciting and a privilege to share the truth about our history and my own life. The most fun I had was going up against the right wing nuts, like Bill O’Reilly (on his Fox show) and Paul Cameron from the Family Research Council (on an episode of the “Donahue” show). 

Now that you have been podcasting about LGBT history since 2016, have you noticed a shift in interest in this topic from when you were publishing books?

Such a dramatic difference! When the book was first published in 1992, our history wasn’t considered an integral part of the American story. There weren’t out teachers and professors teaching this history. There were very few other books about our history that had been published (two that I recall). And virtually no LGBTQ people (who weren’t called LGBTQ people back then) knew anything about the history of our movement. I was one of those ignorant people—back before I started work on my book—who thought it all started with the Stonewall uprising in 1969.

How has Making Gay History evolved? You’ve done thirteen seasons now, including a half-dozen bonus episodes, which is pretty incredible!

I could never have imagined! The podcast started out as a small education project where we were going to provide short clips from my archive to a new nonprofit organization called History UnErased. They were going to develop lessons and other educational resources about LGBTQ history for K-12 teachers. It was when Sara Burningham started cutting tape for that project that she said, “This sounds like a podcast.”  

There were many angels along the way who took us under their wings and helped get the podcast launched, including Jenna Weiss-Berman from Pineapple Street Studios. We had very modest expectations and were told we should be happy if we had 500 downloads per episode.  At the end of the first season of ten episodes we’d had 25,000 downloads in 200+ countries and territories around the world, which blew our minds! Since then, we’ve produced 100+ episodes and have had 6 million downloads. Turns out that there’s great hunger for LGBTQ history as told through the voices of the people who lived it. We also have a fully fledged website where we provide full transcripts, extensive episode notes with links to additional resources, and archival photos.

What was it like to spend a season sharing your personal history and reflecting on the historical events you experienced?

We’ve produced two seasons where we decided to use my own personal history as the backdrop for audio documentaries about a particular era. The first one, Season 9, was “Coming of Age During the AIDS Crisis,” which was very emotionally challenging given how painful that period of history was for me when I was quite young. It was Sara Burningham’s idea to make my personal history the thread and backdrop for that series. It was also Sara’s idea to use my own coming of age story to explore the 1970s, which was the explosive and very dynamic period of our movement that followed the Stonewall uprising. 

I’m much more comfortable being in the position of asking the questions, rather than being the interviewee. But I was very lucky that one of my friends and colleagues, Shane O’Neill, who writes the “Style” newsletter for the Washington Post, agreed to be my inquisitor.  I felt very comfortable in Shane’s hands as he took me through my own history. And as reluctant as I had been to share my own history, I had to remind myself that this is what I’d asked of all the people I’d interviewed for the original Making Gay History book. But it was a bit strange to realize that I’d lived enough life to be someone who had a relevant history of his own to share.

What is next for Making Gay History? What are histories that you have not covered yet that you would like to?

Two things. First, right now we’re deep into production on a 10-part series (Season 14) that explores the experiences of LGBTQ people during the Nazi regime and through the Holocaust.  It’s been a very time consuming and expensive project because of the extensive research that was necessary in order to uncover and gather enough material to produce an entire series. The middle eight episodes feature individual stories that were recorded in other languages, so we’re having to work with actors to record English translations of the archival testimony.  

We recently recorded voice over with Bianca Leigh, one of the stars of the Broadway hit “Oh, Mary!”  Bianca voiced testimony from Luci Salani, an Italian trans woman who had an extraordinary story of survival to tell. We’ll begin releasing that series in late January to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Second, we’re working in partnership with the National Education Association (NEA) to create lessons for middle and high school teachers anchored by Making Gay History podcast episodes. The lessons have been created by a dozen teachers from across the country and we anticipate releasing the lessons later this year or early next. The lessons and accompanying materials will be made available on Making Gay History’s website and through the NEA to educators everywhere for free.

I want to note that Making Gay History is also registered as a nonprofit. Which came first, nonprofit status or the show? And if the show came first, what was the rationale behind turning this audio venture into a nonprofit? How does nonprofit status help further the mission of your show? 

We were a nonprofit from the very beginning. We never had any expectations that a podcast with a relatively small audience would have enough commercial support to make it viable. And to accept the initial grant that got us off the ground (from the Arcus Foundation through its then executive director Kevin Jennings, who is now the chair of our board), we had to be a nonprofit organization. Our nonprofit status allows us to raise funds through foundation grants and individual tax deductible donations. 

We now consider ourselves an educational nonprofit whose mission is to bring LGBTQ history to life through the voices who lived it—through the podcast, presentations, and our soon-to-be available educational materials.

Speaking of nonprofits, you served on the board for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). We know that LGBTQ+ young people are more than four times likely to attempt suicide than their peers (Trevor Project). I don’t want to assume that a figure such as this is the reason you got involved with the AFSP, but can you speak to how we can better support LGBTQ+ people, and perhaps how visibility through storytelling is part of building that support?

My initial interest in suicide loss had nothing to do with the horrific reality of high suicide rates and suicidal ideation among LGBTQ youth. I was twelve years old when my father killed himself, which blew up my family and changed the trajectory of my life. I spent years (decades, actually) coming to terms with what my father did and its impact on my family and it remains a painful part of my personal history.  

My father’s suicide inspired me to write a book about suicide called Why Suicide? It’s a question and answer book patterned after my gay book, Is It A Choice? It’s principally for people who have lived through the suicide of a loved one. Why Suicide? is the book that I wish had been on the shelves when I was a child so the adults in my life would have known how to help me.  Suicide was, and remains, an even more taboo subject than homosexuality, although things have changed in recent years with younger generations who are more comfortable speaking out about mental health and the subject of suicide.

When it comes to LGBTQ youth and helping LGBTQ young people feel less alone and hopeless (both are big contributors to suicidal ideation and suicide attempts), hearing the stories of our ancestors in their own voices and learning about our proud history has the potential to make a difference. At least that’s what we’ve heard back from many of our young listeners, who have written to say that after listening to the podcast they feel like they have grandparents, that they never knew that they had a proud history, that they feel inspired by their ancestors to be themselves and to make a difference. We hadn’t set out to launch the Making Gay History podcast with that specific goal in mind, but it’s very heartening to know that these stories that I recorded so long ago have the potential to make a powerfully positive difference in the lives of young LGBTQ people today and for generations to come.

If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with the team behind Cruising podcast.

Emily Reeves (she/her) is an award-winning audio producer, podcaster, and storyteller based in Brooklyn, NY. Emily brings her experiences as a former performer and theater artist to craft sound-rich and engaging audio pieces about big ideas. Her work can be heard on the LinkedIn News’ Podcasts, Queens Memory Project, The Vital Voices Podcast, and Aisha, the Tribeca Festival’s 2023 Independent Audio Fiction Award Winner.

Emily is a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, where she produced a documentary about a Moby Dick-inspired blues opera about heroin addiction. The piece won a Silver Award, the highest for the category, for Best Student Documentary at the 2023 New York Festivals Radio Awards.

Follow Emily on LinkedIn and Instagram. You can also keep up with her work through her website.

In East Lansing, Michigan, an outburst of violence at the local high school, and the discovery of a gun, leads to a community reckoning over school safety, racial equity, and the role of police in schools.

This four-part documentary series asks big questions about school safety, policing, racial equity, and what it’s like to be a teenager in an era of school shootings.

Listen to Violence Week

Your podcast, Violence Week, takes us to your old high school in East Lansing, Michigan. What was high school Emily most worried about when she attended high school?

Oh my god… If you could meet High School Me, I would probably be stressing about meeting our yearbook deadlines. I was Editor in Chief my senior year and took it far too seriously. My high school friends (who were also all on staff) and I all laugh about it now, but I often wish I could go back in time and scream at myself to go have some fun.

One upside of creating Violence Week was that it encouraged me to pick up my old yearbook, and you know what? It was pretty good! So at least there’s that…

And for current students and more recent graduates–what are the things they told you they are most worried about as a high schooler in America?

The students I talked to were in 8th or 9th grade when COVID hit, so their formative years were really defined by isolation and social unrest. As these students are thinking about their futures, they’re surrounded by this sense that the country is just falling apart around them.

And of course, as this story has to deal with gun violence, the fact that the fear of school shootings is such a part of their lives struck me. When I was in school, we had lockdown drills, but I almost never thought about school shootings. These students told me that even before a gun was seen at their school, they always thought about what they’d do if a shooting started. It’s a really potent fear for them and it was really heartbreaking to me.

You just mentioned global COVID-19 pandemic, and there was also the George Floyd / Black Lives Matter protests during this time. Both of these cultural moments come up throughout the podcast, but can you summarize the ways in which these events have impacted school violence and safety conversations?

We’ve all seen the ways that these events have heightened America’s polarization. In turn, that polarization has impacted school policy through debates over book bans or critical race theory. Often, we’re hearing about how conservative fears are impacting policy, but this story was interesting to me because it was almost like the other side of that coin.

Here’s what happened in East Lansing that I think highlights some tensions that are happening in schools across the country: two weeks after George Floyd’s murder, administrators of East Lansing’s schools announced a series of equity commitments. These included a commitment to using restorative justice sessions instead of expulsions and suspensions whenever possible, and most importantly, the decision to no longer employ a School Resource Officer (a School Resource Officer, or SRO, is a police officer who is stationed within a school). East Lansing is just one of dozens of schools across the country that decided to remove SROs around this time.

But then, when students finally returned from lockdowns, teachers and administrators started to notice a rise in violence in student misbehavior. This post-pandemic rise in violence was happening across the country but in East Lansing, it all centered around these two groups of boys who were consistently getting into really violent fights; teachers kept having to intervene, sometimes getting injured in the process. Some people felt frustrated with the new disciplinary policies, which they felt like weren’t tough enough to deter the fighting.

But everything boiled over when, after an evening basketball game, a fight broke out in the school’s parking lot and a teacher saw a gun fall out of a student’s backpack.

The community absolutely loses their mind and for the first time, the decision the school made two and half years before to remove police suddenly gets thrown into the spotlight. Some people feel like not having police in the schools put kids at greater risk of gun violence while others feel like bringing police back would harm students of color.

So the school is trying to improve racial equity by eliminating police and changing disciplinary policies, but these efforts clash with this post-Covid rise in violence and the sheer terror that the threat of a school shooting evokes in people. It’s so crazy complicated and completely fascinating to me.

From a racial equity perspective, conversations about the school-to-prison pipeline preceded the events of 2020, but seemed to have gotten greater attention in 2020, and then have waned again as there has been a backlash to DEI. You took great care to provide a lot of historical context about how we got to racial inequity in school policing, and I think the most surprising analysis was sharing how George W. Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy factors into all of this. What were your thoughts when you came across this finding?

When you hear the history of policing in schools, it’s so unsurprising that it’s depressing: police were first put into schools to oversee desegregation and their presence was justified throughout the decades since with moral panics over youth drug use and ‘superpredators.’ Then, of course, there was a huge boom in SROs after Columbine as people wanted to prevent school shootings.

This also felt surprising to me because I went to school in this era and it never occurred to me that schools could operate in a different way. Like, I remember thinking that it was weird that someone who was, let’s say, skipping class would get suspended. Like, the punishment for missing class is to miss more class? But I never thought about what schools could do instead.

In a lot of ways, Violence Week is about the messy middle of shifting away from the Zero Tolerance era. We know why Zero Tolerance was harmful but we haven’t figured out exactly how to move forward.

Taking a step back from the historical context, can you lay out who currently are the primary stakeholders in determining school safety policy and action?

Every school district is going to have different safety policies and ways that their school boards and superintendents determine what those policies are. However, many of those decisions are going to be determined by state law (for example, how many safety drills they have to do each year and which types) and then schools can often apply for school safety grants from their state.

Decisions around policing in schools are made by the administration and local school boards, but the position of an SRO is typically created in collaboration between the local police department and the school. But, we are seeing examples of this decision being taken away from schools—after the Uvalde shooting, Texas passed a law that requires each school to have an armed security officer. Then of course, a lot of schools also hire security guards through third-party contractors.

Parents and students heavily blamed the East Lansing school board for not doing enough on school violence prevention. What power do school boards actually have to make the changes regarding school safety?

There’s really two camps when it comes to violence prevention: pay for more security measures or pay for more support systems. When it comes to security measures, school boards and administrators have the power to do things like make kids use clear backpacks or bring in metal detectors or hire security guards or make new policies about locked doors and safety drills.

One of things I was curious about in my reporting was whether or not any policy can actually prevent school shootings. I met with a school safety expert who told me about how some schools are even getting gun sniffing dogs or buying bullet proof blinds for every classroom. There’s so many tradeoffs with school funding and there’s only so much to go around—does it make sense to devote so many resources to this when school shootings are so statistically rare?

I was also curious if this was a reasonable expectation to put on a school board. Like, in the world’s most heavily-armed country, is it reasonable to expect a school board to be able to prevent something this chaotic and statistically rare? It’s a heavy burden to put on them.

Another thing that I was surprised by, is that the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) positions SROs as informal counselors and educators. I went to schools in Florida with SROs and although I didn’t see too many issues with them personally, I don’t ever think I would’ve gone to them for “counseling”. In fact, one of the things you noted is that the role of police in schools varies by state, even by district. 

Can you talk a bit more about this “informal counselor” narrative and how it may or may not be reshaping conversations around school safety in some places?

Yeah, the informal counselor thing is perhaps a strange positioning, but it makes sense from a PR standpoint if school policing is under threat because of concerns about the School-to-Prison Pipeline. This framing positions officers as not just being there to react to crime, but instead to prevent it through connecting with students.

But of course, it raises concerns when so many schools don’t have an adequate number of counselors or social workers. And there are also privacy concerns here that may not be obvious to students—police aren’t bound by the same ethical standards as counselors. There have been instances where school police officers reported undocumented students to immigration agencies or shared private information about ‘troubled’ students with their departments.

When it comes to the School-to-Prison Pipeline, people will often say the solution is to have the “right” officer in a school—an officer who cares about kids and wants to make a difference in their lives. And I’m sure there are a lot of SROs who genuinely feel like that.

An aspect of this that I wish we had more time to get into in the podcast though was that this is inherently contradictory to the justification that SROs need to be in schools to stop school shootings. There’s an interesting Atlantic article about the trial of the Parkland SRO that was one of the only other recent longform reporting on this topic that I could find. The article makes the argument that the “right” officer to prevent the School-to-Prison Pipeline isn’t also going to be the officer who can stop a school shooting on their own—that’s like a highly trained SWAT team member. The officer who has a counselor mindset and loves kids probably isn’t also going to be a ruthless sniper/action hero who can keep their cool in the most stressful situation you can imagine and take down a school shooter with just their handgun.

I guess at the end of all of this, is what now? Violence Week did a great job of talking about differing approaches to school safety throughout communities, such as employing restorative justice and conflict resolution techniques, the efficacy of SROs in preventing mass shootings, as well as talking through the tensions with some of those approaches. Where does the community of East Lansing plan to go from here, and where do you think we need to restart conversations on school violence as a country?

Even though this is a conversation and a tension that is playing out all over the country, I really focused it on East Lansing because ultimately, this decision around policing became connected with their identity as a community: what did they want to prioritize most and what did that say about who they are? Luckily, things in East Lansing have calmed down and I think this crisis was a moment for the community to reflect on their priorities.

There’s always going to be this fundamental tension between punishment and offering support; between putting resources into reacting to crime versus preventing it. I mean, we’ve seen this same conversation in prison reform and so many other social issues, so I think that whenever we can engage with and critically think about this, that will have ripple effects throughout all sorts of policy. 

My second big takeaway is that guns are not going away. Especially for people who want gun control, there is an impulse to just be like ‘well, none of this would happen if there weren’t guns!’ True! I also want to live in that alternate reality! But the Second Amendment is not going away, so we have to get more creative and realistic. I think that also means focusing more on community-oriented solutions to address the ways most people in this country die of gun violence, which is not through mass shootings. One of the most eye-opening interviews I had was with community organizers in Lansing who facilitated conflict resolution with the fighting boys at the high school. They talked to me about how gun violence is so often driven by fear—by the fear that other people have guns and so people feel they also need to be armed—and how they’re using harm reduction techniques to tackle it.

Is there any new or upcoming work that you would like to share with us?
I’m really excited for the Silver Podcast Network’s (who I collaborated with on the production of this series) next project, My Phantom Memory. It’s created by Mark Blumberg and the story follows a cast member of Broadway’s Phantom of the Opera in the show’s final days. I think theater fans will especially love it, so look out for that!

If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Jessica Terrell of Left Over podcast.

Melissa Giraud (she/her) ​is co-founder and co-director of ​EmbraceRace, an organization that curates and creates tools, community spaces and networks for adults to raise kids (of all colors) who are thoughtful, informed and brave about race. 

Melissa has spent a lifetime trying to center the voices, experiences and concerns of children and families - with a particular interest in immigrant kids of color and first-generation children - through her work as a 4th grade teacher, an NPR radio producer, an education equity consultant, and now with EmbraceRace.  Melissa is multiracial (Black/White) daughter of immigrants from Dominica and Quebec. She is raising two amazing kids with her EmbraceRace co-founder and life partner, Andrew Grant-Thomas.

Andrew Grant-Thomas (he/him) co-founded and co-directs EmbraceRace. He is a long-time racial and social justice researcher and advocate who has worked on issues from mass incarceration to PK-12 educational segregation, immigration to death penalty abolition, race and redistricting to structural racialization. Through it all, and now at EmbraceRace, he champions efforts he believes can make a meaningful difference for real people and communities - not 100 years from now, but in his lifetime and the lifetimes of his two tween children.

Andrew is dad to two amazing kids, a partner to Melissa, an only child, a long-time racial justice guy, a Black man of Jamaican origins in the United States, born on the 4th of July.

Learn more about the The EmbraceRace Podcast by visiting their website. You can also keep up with the organization and show via Instagram @embracerace.

Listen to Embrace Race

What made you all decide to start the organization EmbraceRace?

Having kids! When we started EmbraceRace in 2016, support for caregivers who wanted to be intentional about raising kids around race, especially for parents like us raising kids of color, were few. It was a major gap in racial justice work in general where we often focus solely on structural impediments to racial justice - segregation, systemic job discrimination, the way we fund our schools, etc. Of course, changing racialized and unfair systems and structures is critical. But in order to change structures we need to raise better agents of change! That’s why raising kids who are thoughtful, informed and brave about race is so important. 

How do you think the EmbraceRace podcast has helped with the mission and/or vision of the organization?

One of the obstacles to racial justice is misleading information and myths that predominate about race and kids. Myths like, “young kids don’t see race,” or “talking about race makes you racist.” We were excited to start the podcast with Season 1 where we took down some of those myths and talked about how kids ACTUALLY learn about race. Countering false or misleading notions with research-backed information, and making clear what we know and don’t know, is critical to doing this and any race work in a country where the counter narrative runs so deep. 

Also, because race is complicated and racial experience is extremely varied, we like to bring in the voices of community members and collaborators who together bring us diverse perspectives, advice and research-backed interventions. We were able to do that with the podcast. 

Lastly, our community asked for a podcast!  That’s how many of them like to consume information, that’s how they fit it in. A busy pastor and mom told us, “I just want to be able to listen to your content while I’m cutting vegetables.” We wanted to increase access with the podcast. 

What advice would you give to other organizations that are thinking about starting a podcast?

Podcasts, like radio shows, always take more work than the uninitiated think it will. So get good, experienced people to think that through with you. We had a fantastic production team. 

What is the most common question you get from parents / caregivers about navigating the topic of race with children?

Caregivers most often ask, “how do I talk to (young) kids about race? Hiding in that question for some is the belief that kids can’t perceive racial differences until they are able to have full conversations about it. But research shows that kids start developing their understanding of race very early - as early as 3 months old they are perceiving racial differences. In Season 1, we start with an episode about when the youngest kids are perceiving race, what that even means, and what it means for our parenting. (See: Myth #1: Young kids (especially babies) don't see race.) We also have a great episode about talking to kids about race. (See: Myth #4: Talking about race makes you racist.)

Back to school is upon us. How do you think teachers can play a role in helping children be race conscious in a respectful way?

We must underline that EmbraceRace has A LOT of resources on race and kids aimed at caregivers with kids 0 to 13, which is our target audience. We have a huge webinar repository of interviews with experts and practitioners and many additional resources. For early childhood, see Teaching and Learning About Race: Fantastic Practice in Early Childhood. For later elementary, see Teaching and Learning About Race: Fantastic Practice in Late Elementary. 

With an election coming up in the U.S. and the racial tension that surrounds it, what advice do you have for parents or caregivers to navigate this time?

Ooo boy! We’ve not been here before (the matchup was unexpected) but we’ve also been here before! What’s key is not to avoid the topic with kids. They understand when someone is being fair or unfair and have experienced that themselves. It’s unfair to call someone unqualified to be president because they are a woman or because they are Black and Asian, for example. For a quick overview:  4 Starting Points for Conversations About Race with Kids. Also check out this conversation with the amazing Dr. Briscoe-Smith, Parenting in the Age of Trump - she got very specific! There are also many resources on supporting kids in moments of racialized violence and on multiracial identity at embracerace.org. 

Are there plans for a future season of EmbraceRace podcast?

Yes! We’re still planning Season 2. We’re very happy with our first season AND we know Season 2 will be even better (because the hosts will be more … seasoned!). 

Is there any new or upcoming work that you would like to share with us?

Thanks for asking! We have so much new work we’re proud of so we’ll put forth two. First, our framework and practices for raising kids to EmbraceRace. Second, our Drawing Differences art lessons for kids and families to encourage kids to draw diversely and talk about what they see and make. The best way to find out about upcoming events or the upcoming podcast season (when we can tell you more) is to subscribe to our newsletter. 

If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Adell Coleman and Chris Colbert of Say Their Name podcast.

Laurel Morales (she/her) created the award-winning podcast 2 LIVES after two decades of reporting for National Public Radio. 2 LIVES is one of several podcasts she has produced or helped launch. She’s had many 2 LIVES stories of her own, so her interviews are grounded in a lot of love and empathy. She’s won multiple awards for her reporting, writing, and podcast production including a Signal Award for best indie podcast. She is currently revising her debut novel.

Learn more about the 2 LIVES podcast by visiting the 2 LIVES website. You can also follow the show on Instagram, Facebook and X @2livespodcast. To send inquiries / feedback, email 2livespodcast@gmail.com.

Listen to 2 LIVES

In no more than five words (excluding articles / prepositions), describe 2 LIVES.  

Prior to starting the show you were working as a journalist. What were some of the topics that you focused on? 

I’ve reported on a lot of disasters — both manmade and natural — wildfires, drought, climate change, uranium contamination. Because of my proximity to the Navajo Nation and other tribes I often covered issues affecting Native people. In all I looked for the people most impacted, or the untold stories, like Michelle Sherman’s.

Michelle attempted suicide as an 11-year-old. Navajo LGBTQ youth are three times as likely to attempt suicide as their white counterparts, according to a Diné Policy Institute study. She found an unlikely champion in her grandmother and is now dedicated to helping kids like her.

What is the story that you are most proud of?

In 2013 when the Yarnell Hill Fire killed 19 firefighters outside Prescott, a media circus descended on the town. I didn’t feel comfortable approaching people who were in such profound shock and grief. Someone told me the men who died were never left alone. It’s called honor watch and began that Sunday when the Prescott fire crew stayed with the men through the night until the bodies were taken to the medical examiner's office. 

Days later they lined the streets holding flags during the procession of 19 white hearses. Inside each of the hearses another honor guard member sat vigil. Eric Caputo, the commander of the Flagstaff honor guard, who was also a firefighter, told me we do this so that they are never alone. 

That story and my coverage of the wildfire earned me a national Edward R. Murrow Award.

What is a story that you know had a big impact?

The average household in the United States uses 100 gallons of water everyday to cook, clean, and drink. On the Navajo Nation they use seven. They have to make what little water they have last. Forty percent of the tribe has to haul their water or wait for a water truck to deliver it. This story focused on one tiny community on the Navajo Nation that relies on Darlene Arviso, otherwise known as the “water lady.”

As a result of this story the tribe got a new water truck and an organization called DIG DEEP that digs wells and pipes clean water to people’s homes in developing parts of the world received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

In 2020 when the pandemic and the White House’s response consumed the news cycle, I turned off the radio. I had very little desire to report on what was happening. The only thing keeping me going was the knowledge that reporting on the pandemic’s impact on the Navajo Nation might bring them the help they so desperately needed.

I’d had my own 2 LIVES moments and knew how powerful they could be. That’s how I came up with 2 LIVES - stories of people who have faced darkness and how those moments transformed them.

Marquerita’s story became one of my first episodes.

Reflecting on over 4 years publishing, do you think you’ve accomplished what you set out to do with the show?

Yes, when I receive feedback like, I was going through a really hard time and then I found your podcast and I started feeling more hopeful, that’s more than I ever thought I could do. 

2 LIVES has won awards and it has been featured as a “show we love” on Apple Podcasts. But it’s really what I hear from listeners that keeps me going. Here are a few reviews:

“Every episode I’m in tears. I learn something about myself and how I want to show up in the world.”

“Listening to this podcast lifts me up in a way that is inaccessible most of the time. Other people sharing their stories of pain and their subsequent ladder through and above it is some kind of metaphysical tether that works as a ladder for us all.”

“It’s so authentic and heartfelt I can feel it opening me up to a world I’ve always been closed to.”

Over the last three years 2 LIVES has been funded by grants, patrons, and sponsors, but it’s a lot of work to keep that up. I would love to find a home for the show and let someone else take care of the marketing and funding, so I can focus solely on the stories.

How has 2 LIVES evolved now that it is in its 10th season, and do you think there is a way to take it further?

Since 2 LIVES is about making a change, how we climb out of the dark, I’m often asking people to revisit the worst day of their lives. After producing Lisa Cooper Ellison’s episode, she asked me if I’d like to debrief with her about the experience. Through our conversation I learned that our interview had been triggering for her. 

With her knowledge as a writer, a psychologist, and a teacher, she taught me how to prepare someone before signing up to be interviewed, how to ask questions that may be triggering, and how to involve the storyteller in the storytelling process. 

We’ve done a couple seasons that were focused on a theme, like we did a season on burnout because that seemed to be a common theme we kept coming across. And I had experienced it personally, so it really resonated.

Valerie Shively, the assistant producer, does an amazing job thinking outside the box. We’re constantly brainstorming ways to do this better. One of her ideas: asking listeners to call or send a recording about an episode that was meaningful to them in a way to help build community among the 2 LIVES listeners or 2 LIVES Crew. She’s put it into action and it’s been amazing.

When I started the show I had a pocketful of storytellers from my years of reporting whose stories went beyond the 4-minute feature. Today people reach out to us with their stories and that is such a gift.

The stories your guests share likely have a deep impact on some listeners given the nature of some of the stories. Are there any stories you can share of responses you have gotten from listeners?

Many people have said that 2 LIVES is proof again and again of the strength of the human spirit like with Josh “the Jedi” Loya.

In addition listeners have connected with Darcy Alexandra’s story of domestic violence or Duane Koyawena’s story of alcoholism or Lisa Sorrell’s story of being an Ex-Vangelical. I believe their stories help people feel less alone. 

Not too long ago I ran into the family of Dre Adauto at the grocery store. They were just so grateful, not just for sharing his story, but for the way I shared it. They said they learned things about him and his experience that they did not know and it helped them better understand what he went through when he lost his leg. That meant a lot to me. 

In closing, what is a lesson that has stayed with you from one of your show guests?

I’ve learned from so many storytellers, and sat and cried with so many people in interviews. The one that hits home the most today is Wenche Fredriksen, who is a recovering perfectionist. She wound up in the hospital several times with chronic pain and illness and she can trace it all back to her burn out. 

Her therapist told her to celebrate mistakes so she did things like dropping her kids off at school in her pajamas and allowing them to wear clothes with stains on them and sending work emails with grammar errors. Another exercise she did was list all of the things she did in addition to her paid full-time job, all of the invisible work, as its been called, raising two kids, keeping a clean house. When she saw it all on paper she realized this was the work of three people. It was no wonder she had made herself sick when she realized all she had accomplished. 

Then this wonderful therapist suggested she do something a bit morbid and write her own obituary so she could see how she’d like to be remembered. Turns out she wanted to be remembered as a mom who smiled and enjoyed playing with her kids. 

I could definitely relate to her experience.

Is there any new or upcoming work that you would like to share with us?

We are wrapping up season 10 with two incredibly powerful episodes — one about what happens when we don’t deal with small t traumas in our life, and the other about how one woman learned to recalibrate hope after a devastating loss. 

Also, I’m teaching a workshop through AIR Media and Sound Path called From Idea To Launch: How To Create A Sustainable Podcast.

There may be 2.5 million podcasts in the world, but the majority haven't dropped more than ten episodes. And only a handful have grown their audience consistently. Even fewer have won awards for their efforts. 

In this intermediate-level workshop taught by an award-winning podcast creator, learn the essential steps to take before you drop the first episode that will help you sustain a show you actually want to keep making.  

Through listening sessions, discussions, and writing prompts, you will finish the course equipped to launch your own sustainable podcast.

Class dates: September 17, 19, 24, & 26

Class time: 2-3:30 PM PT / 5-6:30 PM ET

Registration Link: www.soundpath.co/course/sustainable-podcast 

If this show’s format / topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Darrren Calhoun of Second Sunday podcast.

Darren Calhoun (he/him) is a justice advocate, worship leader, and artist based out of Chicago. He works to bridge connections between people of differing perspectives through story and relationship. He’s an associate fellow at Christians for Social Action and sings with a progressive band called The Many. He’s facilitated workshops and lead worship for local and national gatherings and events. He's a co-host on the Second Sunday podcast and producer for online shows that are reaching BIPOC Queer audiences with messages of support and healing. 

Darren brings with him an intentional focus on communities being inclusive as an authentic reflection of God’s love and justice.

Learn more about the Second Sunday podcast by visiting the show website.

Listen to Second Sunday

How did the idea for Second Sunday come about? 

Our co-host, Esther, came up with the idea of creating a space for conversations about the experiences of black queer individuals with church and spirituality. This idea was initially realized as a brunch with her pastor at the time, Rev. Dr. Pamela Lightsey, who then introduced Esther to our executive producer, Anna DeShawn. Anna was in the process of launching The Qube, the first black queer online radio app, and she was interested in creating a show centered around these specific stories. I have known Anna for a number of years and we have been wanting to collaborate for some time. When the concept of the show started to take shape, Anna introduced Esther and me, and that's how the show was born. The title is a nod to the church tradition of having special traditions on different Sundays of the month, such as youth service on the 5th Sunday or communion on the first. "Second Sunday" reflects that tradition as we also take a second look at what faith and spirituality mean to us as black queer individuals. 

Second Sunday, although in name is affiliated with Christianity, is a show that talks to people from various faiths. Why was it important for you to take that approach?

We knew from the start that as black queer people our experiences and our stories are diverse and unique, even though they do have some similarities. We’re also clear that many of our friends and family have found peace in other spiritual systems and sometimes without spirituality at all. We’re rooting for everybody black… and we wanted a space that centers us without getting distracted by qualifying who’s in and who’s out like many of our Christian churches did. 

You launched the second season of the show in April. How does the focus of this season compare to your first?

In season one, the first people that came to mind for us to interview happened to be people who are deeply engaged in the work of the church. In season two, we saw an opportunity to spend more time with those who’s stories are more outside the church.  I’ve affectionately called this season “We Outside!” - playing on the Black American cultural phrase of enjoying being outside and enjoying oneself. In season two, we’ve focused in on the stories of people sometimes leaving faith or finding significant experiences outside of typical Christian church spaces and institutions. 

It’s no secret that spirituality can be especially difficult for those in the LGBTQ+ community, mostly due to how others within the same religious communities react, which has a real impact on LGBTQ+ rights and mental health. How have you held this as a queer person, and what advice would you give to those struggling with a lack of acceptance–at least in the public sphere?

This is so important to me. The world needs us, our gifts, our unique perspectives, and our love. So first and foremost is doing what you need to be safe and healthy. Get the mental health support, mutual aid, and family of choice that you need. After that, it’s about figuring out where you can be celebrated in this season. Maybe it’s outside of the church in a community center or a queer sports league. Maybe it’s an online community group or book club. Feel free to check out resources like QChristian.org for ideas as well.

Of course there is a long history of people of faith leading and being involved in social movements. You yourself are involved with Christians for Social Action. Can you talk a bit about the community-oriented work you do and why it is important to you as a person of faith? 

I’ve been involved with grass-roots community organizing since my college years. For me, the role of the church as a part of social progress comes from looking back at things like the civil rights movement where churches and church leaders were often providing gathering space, shelter, and leadership in the movement. In my own life, I saw how though my church at the time was toxic, we made amazing strides in changing unjust laws and leaders who had a direct impact in our neighborhood. We were motivated by our faith to make the community better for everyone - including people who were returning from prison. If things couldn’t improve for them, they couldn’t improve for the rest of us. This along with later in life learning of the counter-cultural ways that Jesus showed up in his time motivated me to use my voice like he used his: To create a beautiful world AND to stand up where there’s injustice. I too can flip some tables and make some church folk wanna toss me off a cliff when it’s for the right reasons. 

Which episodes of Second Sunday would you recommend for those interested in the intersection between faith and community care or civic action?

In season 2, we start with Bishop Yvette Flunder, who found her faith reignited by showing up for individuals during the AIDS crisis.

Also, the episode “Do We Need Everyone” has some poignant thoughts about working on change.

Who would be a dream guest for Second Sunday and what issue(s) would you talk about?

It would be awesome if we had a chance to talk with Janelle Monáe. Her early life was in church and she’s doing some amazing things in embracing her queerness and sexuality. I’d love to hear more about that journey. 

Is there any new or upcoming work that you would like to share with us?

The Qube has a new podcast dropping this summer called Joy in the Breakthrough. This podcast explores the peaks and valleys of life through cross-generational conversations with diverse leaders who have learned the power of being broken open to break through. It is hosted by Connie Lindsey and Anna Valencia. 

(For more about Second Sunday, check out this interview from our friends over at DCP Entertainment.)

After this interview, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Dr. Montinique “Money” McEachern of Rebound Revolution podcast.

Corryn Grace Freeman is a Florida-based social activist, political operative, and an accomplished social change agent.

She serves as the Executive Director of Future Coalition, an organization whose mission is to provide young changemakers with the resources they need to propel transformational change.

Corryn is the Co-founder and Vice President of Black Violin Foundation, an arts education foundation that is dedicated to empowering youth by working with them in their communities to provide access to quality music programs that encourage creativity and innovation.

Learn more about the Future Coalition Podcast by visiting the Future Coalition website.

Listen to Future Coalition

To start, please tell us a bit about the organization you run, Future Coalition. 

Future Coalition is an intergenerational organization dedicated to resourcing young changemakers and activists in a number of ways to propel transformational progressive change that contributes to building a world where collective liberation is possible.

Youth involvement and leadership has always been essential to social movements, yet we still see today that youth are underestimated when it comes to political organizing. Why do you think there is a disconnect with older generations realizing the impact of youth activism?

As an aging millennial, I think young people get dismissed because the systems to build organizations and cultivate power and wealth have prioritized experience in an industry and waiting for your turn. 

It seems that older generations have some cognitive dissonance between the celebrated revolutionary movements of the past (for example, The American Revolution and The Boston Tea Party) that they view so favorably, with reform and revolutionary movements of the current time that are viewed much more as a nuisance and a power grab, and the power that young people are grabbing at is power that older generations have waited so patiently for.

The older generations have stood in line and waited their turn, like they were encouraged to do, and now here are these young energetic radical changemakers here infringing on the established order and calling out the privilege of Older generations. As the saying goes, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” The discomfort that older generations feel at the hands of younger generations seeking to level the playing field is necessary for a fair and more equitable society. 

The Future Coalition Podcast launched on June 11th, so you are at the beginning of your season. How do you see this podcast advancing the aims of the organization?

The Future Coalition Podcast aims to amplify the stories of young leaders, give voice to their causes, and shine a light on their leadership. We hope to use the platform to amplify young changemakers and their organizations and illuminate their visions for our future.

What type of guests can we expect this season?

We have some dynamic guests this season. Our first episode is with Congressman Maxwell Frost, the nation’s first Gen Z member of Congress. Then, we talk to young changemakers leading work across LGBTQIA+ activism, the climate crisis, and AI.

We are coming off of Pride month and it’s no secret that LGBTQIA+ rights are swept up in politics. Who are the youth activists we can look to for organizing on these issues and what are their primary concerns for this election cycle?

Our second podcast episode with Benjamin Coy (National LGBTQ+ Task Force) and Ranen Miao (OutVote, a fiscal project of Future Incubator) is perfect for you to listen to if you want an answer about this! Of course, I recommend you keep an eye out for these fantastic young changemakers and what they’re doing with their careers. For one, Ramen leads OutVote, a youth-focused, youth-led organization cultivating a network of young organizers to promote civic engagement and education in the LGBTQIA+ community. OutVote seeks to build a culture of civic participation within the LGBTQIA+ community to ensure that LGBTQIA+ voters are empowered and equipped to vote and participate in our democracy.

Let’s talk about your background a bit. You have had an incredible career so far, working on voting rights, Medicaid expansion, arts education access, reproductive health and more. At first glance, it may seem these issues are disconnected, but could you make arguments for how seemingly disparate issues are tied together?

First and foremost, thank you. I work on issues that I’m passionate about, which represent all of the different aspects and facets of my humanity. I believe deeply in the power of intersectionality and that all movements for change are connected. 

For instance, expanding voting rights to returning citizens (formerly incarcerated people) applies to over 20,000,000 Americans who have or have had felony convictions, according to the Joint Economic Committee. If every one of these people had access to the ballot box, it could significantly impact state ballot initiatives for access to reproductive health care. Having this population vote would dramatically expand the possibility of what change is possible because of their identities, their experiences, and now their access to the ballot box. 

As for arts education, we are witnessing a defunding of these programs in predominantly Black, Latinx, historically poor, and marginalized communities. We also see a direct correlation between these communities being underfunded and under-resourced in the school-to-prison pipeline, juxtaposed to the fact that less than 4% of all classical professional orchestral musicians are Black or Latinx. These issues are connected. 

How do you think your diverse work background has set you up to support youth leaders?

Because I have been them, one could argue that I am one. I’m 34 and Iead a national youth advocacy and resourcing organization along with an arts education foundation. I’ve made many mistakes and faced many of the challenges that youth leaders experience, including being dismissed, overlooked, and underestimated by established leaders. My experience has helped me understand the power of ambition and powerful visions regardless of age. I now have the ability and resources to amplify their voices, help guide them away from the same pitfalls I’ve experienced, refine them through training, and invest in promising ideas. 

Given Future Coalition’s focus on intergenerational organizing, what is the best way we can support young people right now?

I would like to highlight two ways that you can support young people:

1. Listen to them - I mean really hear them out, give them a seat at the table, ask them questions about their causes, and negotiate with them.

2. Invest in them - If there is a youth-led organization that you are impressed by, donate to it. Financially contribute to their cause and invest in their leadership. Youth organizing is vastly underfunded, and young people hold some of the most extraordinary visions.

If you could pass the mic to a Gen-Zer about one social issue you care about, who would it be and what would they talk about?

This is hard because there are so many phenomenal youth leaders out there! I would pass the mic to Wawa Gatheru of Black Girl Environmentalist. Wawa has created an organization that sits at the intersections of race, gender, and climate. She’s created space for Black women, girls, femmes, and gender nonconforming people to sit in a historically white, predominantly white-led space. Black Girl Environmentalist sits at an intersection to create equity, understanding that these issues impact us all.

If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Jenna Spinelle of When the People Decide podcast.

I’m Nate Hegyi (he/him), the host of Outside/In, a podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio that covers science and the outdoors. I’ve been a public radio journalist for almost a decade – mostly covering public lands, rural communities and tribal affairs in the Mountain West. As host of the show, I’ve gone dogsledding in Alaska, chased bats in Montana, and visited the site of the world’s first atomic bomb testing in New Mexico. I love stories with lots of moral quandaries and no perfect answers.

Learn more about the Outside/In podcast by visiting the Outside/In website.

Listen to Outside/In

To start, how did you come to focus on such diverse reporting areas such as “tribal issues, rural economies and culture, right-wing radicalization and the environment”?

I was lucky to get a job that let me chase all sorts of stories. I was a reporter for the Mountain West News Bureau, a consortium of NPR member stations covering the West, for about four years. The stories – just like our region – were varied and our editor was flexible enough to let me do stuff like riding a bicycle for 800 miles along the continental divide, interviewing rural voters about the political divide. It was a great job!

You actually won an award for reporting on tribal jails a couple of years ago for a story you did three years ago. How did this come to be a story of interest? And have you kept up with any developments since?

This story started with a phone call from a teacher on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. He mentioned that the son of a friend of his had died in the jail there. I made some phone calls and did some digging and discovered that Willy Pepion wasn’t the only person to die in that jail, or in the 72 other tribal detention centers overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. We got a grant from the Pulitzer Center and spent three months reporting out the story. We uncovered a pattern of mismanagement, negligence and a lack of medical care that led to at least 19 deaths in those centers. The story – which aired on NPR – led to congressional action and more than two dozen promised reforms for the jails. 

But those reforms haven’t stopped folks from dying. I try to keep up with developments and report those out for NPR – but I’ve lagged over the past year. This interview reminds me to check in on this!

In addition to tribal communities, rural communities not on tribal lands are often overlooked. Since you have spent a lot of time reporting on issues that affect these communities, what should we know about some of the current environmental issues in rural areas that ultimately will impact those in urban areas?

A lot of our communities are facing a housing crisis right now. Rent is too high, mortgage rates are out of reach, and there is simply not enough inventory to house everyone. But what happens when that housing crisis collides with climate change? That’s a story we recently pursued at Outside/In. We looked at Alaska’s capital city (not rural but definitely remote), where climate change is increasing the risk of severe landslides. 

When officials commissioned a set of updated hazard maps for the city, they thought the information would help save lives and spur new development. Instead, the new maps drew public outcry from people who woke up to discover their homes were at risk of being wiped out by landslides.

What followed was a multiyear project – not to address the challenges posed by climate-fueled landslides – but to alter, ignore, or otherwise shelve the maps that outline the threat in the first place.

It’s really a story about what happens when climate change comes knocking at your own door and how we don’t really have a solid government safety net to protect us when our homes are threatened. 

Of the mini-series you have gotten to work on for Outside/In, what was the most eye-opening for you? 

I really loved our producer Justine Paradis’ two-part series on the rise of anti-protest legislation and the group – the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – that’s proliferating it across the country. Justine grounded the story in great voices from the Oceti Sakowin nation and I think it was a great example of the kind of deep reporting that Outside/In excels at. 

What was a particularly impactful episode or series that a listener gave you feedback on? 

I’m really proud of the impact our episode, Oppenheimer’s Omission, had on the community of radiogenic cancer survivors in New Mexico. They have been fighting for years to get restitution from the federal government after it tested the world’s first atomic bomb back in 1945. I think the coverage they received from multiple media outlets after the film Oppenheimer was released helped amplify their cause in Congress, and I heard a lot of positive things from that community about our episode. 

Is there a topic that you would like to cover or dive deeper into on the show?

Nukes! Mainly, nuclear energy. Most climate scientists say nuclear power plants are a key component to arriving at a net zero future, but they come with a tragic history and some potentially catastrophic side effects. How safe is nuclear energy nowadays? Can we mine uranium in a way that doesn’t make miners sick? These are all fascinating questions. 

Can you give us a sneak peek of any topics you all will be airing this summer?

We have a two-part story coming out later this summer about the ethics of studying human remains that I think is going to be really challenging and fascinating. I’m not going to give too much away, though :)

Ultimately, I hope that listeners of social impact podcasts can take action after learning about an issue. What are two or three episodes from the Outside/In catalog that have some calls-to-action that can impact our global audience?

I think we’ve done a couple of episodes that help our listeners navigate how to live a more environmentally-friendly lifestyle. One investigates what the most sustainable diet is (hint: tofu tacos). Another looks at how to dress yourself in a more sustainable manner. And the third looks at what the “greenest” burial method is – and whether it even matters.

If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Sarah Christie of Earth Care podcast.

Daniel Alvarenga is a queer Salvadoran journalist based out of Washington, DC. He was born and raised in Southern California to refugee parents who fled the civil war in El Salvador. He covers issues pertaining to immigration, racial equity, and Latinx cultures – with a special emphasis on Central America and its diasporas. He previously worked for Al Jazeera and Telemundo and has written for Rolling Stone and the Washington Post.

Learn more about the Humo podcast by visiting the Humo website.

Listen to Humo

Can you first talk about the inclusion of the word “Humo” in the title. What does the word mean in this context?

Humo means smoke in Spanish. And this podcast is all about how El Salvador’s government creates a smokescreen of repression, corruption and lies that leads to disappeared people without justice or accountability. There’s so much misinformation about the country – people think it's a paradise with bitcoin as the national currency that’s vanquished gang violence. The truth of what’s really going is seemingly shrouded in smoke, or Humo.

When you started your career in journalism, you were told that there wasn’t an audience for these stories—ones about Salvadorans. Can you elaborate on that and whether you believe this has changed?

I was told there wasn’t an audience for Central American stories, period. Then when inhumane Trump-era policies mobilized Americans around children in cages, the same liberal newsroom exploited my area expertise on the region. But later immigration and Central America fell out of the news cycle and I felt like I was back at square one. I was later told by a Hispanic newsroom to make my Central American centered stories more broadly “Latino” to appeal to their audience. 

So, yeah I’d say nothing changed. The same human rights problems persist. El Salvador and its siblings fall in and out of the public interest because to really understand the root causes is to grapple with an unforgivable legacy of American imperialism. And like, we can’t have that!

In terms of storytelling, you connect your family history to the murders and disappearances at the center of this story. Why did you feel it was important to tie your stories together?

I’m not particularly unique among Salvadorans. We all have lost someone in our families, whether we’re aware of it or not, to disappearances at some point through U.S.-backed military dictatorships, the war in the 1980s or the gang war of the last three decades. Salvadorans are a very transnational people. 2 million Salvadorans live in the U.S. – an equivalent to a third of El Salvador’s current population. Salvadorans are displaced in large numbers, so I think it’s important to connect the dots and see each other in our stories. And also to remind American listeners that Salvadorans are the 3rd largest Latinx group in the U.S., we’re in your cities and we’re connected to all this stuff, this HUMO stuff. 

Your show touches on many different themes, but three of the biggest that stood out to me were: the long lasting trauma of the civil war in El Salvador, the safety issues experienced by journalists, and government corruption. 

I’d like to focus on the journalist safety issue because we seem to be seeing a rise of this problem globally. You talk about spyware being used to target journalists, government officials and others spreading rumors about journalists on social media, and also a law called “the state of exception” restricting coverage about gangs. So two questions:

• Have you observed journalists in the U.S. experiencing similar circumstances?

• How can the public—whether in El Salvador or other countries—support journalists facing these issues?

Freedom of the press in El Salvador is a big theme of the HUMO podcast. Criticizing El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele will make you a target of the government. I feel the closest parallel in the U.S. today is how journalists will get censored by big networks or harassed by genocide-deniers for reporting on Israel’s crimes in Gaza. Ironically, President Bukele is of Palestinian descent but uses Israeli spyware to spy on journalists in El Salvador.

I think we all need to actively seek out and support our local independent journalists and platforms, ones free from corporate and militaristic interests.

While I know every story we listen to doesn’t have to have a resolution that is positive, I would like to know if there has been any progress or positive outcome since the podcast ended?

We’re still going through it. Nayib Bukele is set to take a second consecutive five-year term as president, which is unconstitutional in El Salvador. But, the positive side is that more people are waking up to the reality of what is happening in El Salvador under President Bukele. People have come up to me saying that they knew El Salvador wasn’t all pupusas and rainbows but that listening to HUMO let them see the bigger picture. So that’s a win. That’s exactly why we tell these stories. 

If you are comfortable sharing, what are your hopes for your parents’ mother country as it navigates these times?

I hope more and more people wake up to the fact that Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador is setting the country back several decades when it comes to government repression and human rights. I hope people come together and organize. I hope people find strength and learn lessons from our very recent history of resistance in the 1970s and 80s. El Salvador has lived darker days and strewn way too much blood – that wasn’t in vain.

Is there any new or upcoming work that you would like to share with us?

I don’t have anything to announce at the moment. I’m incubating a few ideas but nothing ready to share. I’m still under-employed in the journalism industry and open to work!

If Latin American affairs interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Alexandra Rivera of United Stateless podcast.

Sarah Christie (she/her/hers), creator and host of Earth Care podcast and National Music Manager for Virgin Radio, launched Earth Care in 2021. Earth Care is a short-form interview series where Sarah engages with experts to explore actionable steps for saving the planet. Sarah's dedication to environmental advocacy and love for live music joined together with the 2023 launch of the #FansChooseToReuse pledge. Through Earth Care and the #FansChooseToReuse campaign, Sarah Christie is on a mission to empower individuals with practical and inclusive climate solutions, striving to make a tangible difference in protecting our planet.

Learn more about the Earth Care podcast by visiting the website and following the show on Instagram @earthcareshow.

Listen to Earth Care!

Congrats on five seasons of Earth Care! Take us back to the beginning. What motivated you to start this show?

Acknowledging that the helplessness and eco-anxiety I felt prior to taking action wasn’t helping. Day-after-day, we read new climate-related headlines that overwhelm you with doom. My professional background is in Top 40 radio, so the “trending topics” on my algorithm are a constant mishmash of the climate crisis and celebrity gossip. My goal was to find a way to combine those worlds — use the same upbeat, entertaining approach of communicating in Top 40 Radio to communicate climate issues that need more attention. 

It was Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s Climate Venn diagram that led me to creating an eco-focussed podcast. The diagram asks: What brings you joy? (Creating and meeting new people) What work needs doing? (Climate communication, climate crisis awareness) What are you good at? (Broadcast and creating) This tool allowed me to redirect the “I must do it all” approach that I imagine most folks feel at some point in their environmental journey to a focussed action that works for me. 

It’s clear you’ve taken some of the skills you’ve honed from studying and working in radio to build your podcast. I’m curious, have you found a way to integrate your interest in climate with your 9-5 yet? And if not, do you believe there is a way to make it happen?

Before Earth Care, I actually had a weekly on-air segment called “Eco-Friendly Friday.” This was a quick, planet-friendly tip that myself and listeners could try adopting in our day-to-day. 

Since then, we’ve started to have bigger conversations regarding systematic changes that can be made behind the scenes to reduce waste overall. I believe there’s a lot of exciting opportunities for what can be done moving forward to implement greener practices. One of my biggest ‘A-HA’ moments was realizing you don’t need to work at a stereotypical “green job,” to make a difference. You need to be the voice in your own circle that advocates for a livable future and help amplify other voices that need it. 

Since your primary education focus was not environmental studies, a couple of years ago you enrolled in certifications, such as “Sustainability Reporting” at University of Toronto. How did that educational experience prepare you for making this show?

The program teaches students to read and dissect sustainability reports. Professionally, it paved a new lane of conversation with future Earth Care guests. Sustainability Reports are typically quite long and full of information the average reader may not understand how to follow (myself included prior to taking the course). Additionally, so much of the information regarding the climate is shared through data and numbers which isn’t everyone’s learning style (myself included…again!). Taking this program quickly became an important tool to lean on while identifying significant information that can be brought up in the podcast in a digestible way. 

What is one area of climate / sustainability you still want to explore?

Choosing one area seems impossible because there is so much to learn and truly get excited about! However, I’m very eager to learn more about native gardening, soil preservation and tree conservation. One of my favourite pastimes is vegetable gardening. I’d love to level up and create a garden that is more sustainable and properly supports the local biodiversity!

What is one climate / sustainability fact that really surprised you from any of your seasons? 

In season 3, the Executive Director of Water Watchers, Arlene Slocombe, explained that water is traded on the stock market and I think about this multiple times a week. The exact quote is, “Now water is trading on the stock market much like other commodities. So, securing access to water is something that we all need to be very, very diligent about, paying close attention to and opposing wherever we can.”

There’s an emotional rollercoaster that is likely common across any activist’s journey –you allow room to celebrate and feel hopeful, then are hit with information that brings you right back down to reality – such as a basic human right,  water, being exploited for capital gain. However, like Alrene explained, this information should be used to drive us to continue to be aware and take action. 

Let’s talk about season five for a bit, your focus is the live music industry, whereas in previous seasons you focused on various topics. I know that singer Billie Eilish has made news in the past couple of years for bridging climate action and live music, though there are others that have come before her as you cover in episode 2. Why do you feel the relationship between live music and climate is an important topic to follow?

The music industry is truly one of the most influential, if not the most influential industry. Artists have access to platforms that the average person doesn’t, whether this is their online platform or the stage when everyone is listening. They have a superpower in communication. Both artists and creators know how to tell a story and bring people together with their art. Those two qualities create endless opportunity to foster awareness and influence positive change for the environment.

The available data on the state of our climate puts a major emphasis on the saying “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” We can’t continue the way we’ve been operating and expect the Earth to not fight back. Most industries are likely seeing a green shift in their operations. However, the music industry are the trendsetters who can both lead and steer important conversations about the climate. 

Music is also the great connector. To see that systems are already in motion, some for decades, offers hope and motivation for the fans!

And what would be your pitch, to performers and consumers alike, to care when greening may initially raise costs for this entertainment type that can already be quite costly? 

The short answer would be of course to quote Music Declares Emergency and say “there’s no music on a dead planet.” 

However, the sustainability in the live music industry series is only a taste of the resources that are available for artists to begin implementing greener practices. Wherever you are at in your sustainability journey, there is a resource that will be the right fit. The first episode of the series featured Filkin’s Drift, a folk duo who walked their 870-mile tour to promote sustainability. This in fact lowered their costs! They also shared advice for other musicians focussed on “don’t try to do it all at once, do what works for you.”

What Coldplay managed to do with their Music of Sphere’s tour is absolutely trailblazing and completely unique to what they can afford with their budget. For musicians in a different boat, there are also several non-profits with free tools and resources (REVERB, Music Declares Emergency, Julie’s Bicycle).

In this series, a number of guests have expressed that they’d like to explore working with artists on a more interactive level. They’d like to see the artist be more active on their platform to help communicate the systems that are already in place. In this case, greening can mean simply offering a bigger platform to a worthy cause. Creativity and collaboration can be effective in both sustainability and cost cutting.

Before we wrap, can you tell us about the #fanschoosetoreuse advocacy campaign you’ve created to align with this season?

The #FansChooseToReuse pledge is a rally call for music lovers and concerts goers to take climate action by bringing a reusable water bottle to live music events whenever the venue allows it. The pledge is about harnessing the unifying power of music to spread awareness about the encouraging power of individual climate action. 

The podcast series is largely from the professional, behind the scenes perspective but fans play a role in the live music industry as well. As a genuine music fan who has been to hundreds of concerts, this is the world I can speak to and I know best. I have seen the sea of plastic when you leave a concert and I’ve seen the overflowing, contaminated recycling bins. Participants who take the pledge are part of a movement that champions the preservation of our planet for future generations.

If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Ruxandra Guidi of The Catch podcast.

June Neely (she/her) is a writer/producer from Minnesota now based in Los Angeles. She is the EP/Host of Story for Good. She has worked on projects such as Queer Eye, Love is Blind, and They Cloned Tyrone. She has also written and produced short films and a web series. Her previous podcast work includes the Ambie and Webby-nominated Crossing the Line.

Follow June on Instagram @girlproducer.

Learn more about the Story for Good podcast by visiting the show website or following the show on Instagram @storyforgoodpod.

Listen to Story for Good

Before diving into the show you created, let’s talk about some of the work you’ve done on the podcasts Crossing the Line (CTL) and The State of Women (TSOW). Can you share about some of the impact campaign work you did to support these shows that relate to gender equity? What were some of the outcomes of these campaigns?

For each show, we had a different approach since the styles of the shows were different. CTL was a documentary-style podcast. Our main focus was to give a first-hand account of the fight for reproductive rights. Then our main impact goal was to create a robust website and social media that allowed activation for the listeners, this is mostly what I worked on impact-wise. Every episode had a page that highlighted the subjects mentioned (clinics, activists, and non-profits). Then we had a database of resources that listeners could access like non-profits, funds, providers, and ways to take action. We also partnered with other non-profit organizations like Planned Parenthood, Power to Decide, and Plan C Pills. 

For TSOW we partnered with Emerge America and How Women Lead to create an informative virtual live event to launch the show.TSOW was more focused on overall gender equality, highlighting the disparities in state laws. We also offered resources on the TSOW website. 

Some of the outcomes were we drove a good amount (thousands of clicks) of traffic to our partners like Emerge, Power to Decide, and Abortion Finder. And CTL brought a bigger awareness of reproductive rights with thousands of downloads with almost 25% of those activating to take action. 

So what led you to start your own podcast, Story for Good?

This is my second podcast. I had another called June Versus that was created during the pandemic at the height of the BLM protests. It was short-lived because I went back to working full-time on set. But it came out of frustration and wanting to be able to say something about it. Story for Good is similar in that aspect. I had learned the term Social Impact Entertainment and loved the idea and wish I had known about this earlier. There needed to be something that highlighted this part of the industry. So I decided to create it. 

When you began working in entertainment, how did you envision yourself working at the intersection of film/tv and social change? Has your vision become reality?

I’m not sure if I did. I started on this journey because I wanted to create stories. Stories about characters who looked like me, who cared about what I cared about, and stories that would express my experiences. But I didn’t have a term for this or know what it meant. I had never heard of Social Impact. I just wanted to see people like me on the screen. It wasn’t until later that I realized the intersection. 

Why do you believe entertainment is an important way to incite social change? Can you give an example of how this has been done successfully?

In one of the episodes, I talk to Carri Twigg, who used to work in the White House, on how storytelling can effect policy change. Stories are emotional and invoke feelings that didactic material can’t. Stories create a rallying point, they break things down and make them personal. One big example of this is the show, Will and Grace. It normalized the gay community to the point that when they repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell there wasn’t a big uproar, because prior to this so many military bases had been sent copies of the show. 

When it comes to your podcast, you interview different people throughout the ecosystem of social impact entertainment. What are some of the common sentiments they share about the future of entertainment and social impact?

Some of the common sentiments they share are:

1. Any story can include social impact. It doesn’t have to be as big as the whole premise of the story. It can just be a storyline or a character but every story can do it.

2. It’s profitable. Some of the biggest films, like Black Panther (positive representation of Black people and Black People in STEM) or Avatar (climate and environmentalism), had a social impact. 

3. Don’t recreate the wheel. Creating a social impact campaign doesn’t mean taking on all the work. So many non-profits and organizations do the work already. If you have a story about fracking or women in business, find a non-profit already working in that space. Ask them the best way to uplift their cause. 

4. No single film or show can create all the change. We need several films and shows talking about the same issues to really make a difference. 

What are some of your favorite shows, movies or documentaries that illustrate the power of content for social change?

• I mentioned Black Panther earlier but watching it in the theater full of other Black people gave me this feeling of power and possibility I never felt before. Usually, Black films are seeped with trauma but it was nice to feel uplifted for once. 

• Abbott Elementary is another great one, Quinta Brunson is great at incorporating the trouble teachers face working in the public school system and sprinkling environmental issues while making you laugh. 

• King Coal is a fantastic documentary that blends in moments of almost fiction in a way I’ve never seen before. Amazing storytelling about what it’s like to grow up in Coal Country and the trials those in the Appalachia face. 

Is there any new or upcoming work that you would like to share with us?

This podcast is just the start, I’m currently working on a fiction podcast that I’m looking to release later this year. 

If you are interested in learning more about the entertainment industry, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Avril Speaks of Distribution Advocates podcast.

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Rachel Karp (she/her, Story Producer/Marketing + Social Media Manager)

Rachel is a freelance producer, writer, and director. She has served as producer on the podcast "The Black Wine Guy Experience" (Necessary Media) and associate producer on various unscripted television projects including "Sometimes When We Touch" (Gunpowder + Sky/Paramount+) and "Customer Wars" (Meetinghouse TV/A+E).

Sarah Gabrielli (She/They, Host/Audio Engineer/Story Producer)

Sarah is a podcast producer and journalist. She also co-hosts and audio engineers “Chicken Shirt,” a Roseanne re-watch podcast. She has worked as an audio engineer and story editor for Well+Good podcasts, and has also edited the podcasts "Shame Spiral," "Sweetbitter," and "Cult America." Sarah holds a Master's degree from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Jen McGinity (she/her, Producer/Resident Road Trip Driver)

Jen is a NY-based line producer and production manager with 20 years of experience. She currently serves as production manager for Major League Baseball Network. Jen has worked on a multitude of projects spanning news, reality television, and digital media for networks such as Food Network, HGTV, VICE, TLC, A&E, Animal Planet, and ABC News.

Email the Cruising team at cruisingpod@gmail.com.

Learn more about the Cruising podcast by visiting the the website and following the show on TikTok and Instagram @cruisingpod. Also, want to support the show? Consider making a donation!

Cruising | A Queer Documentary Podcast

Where did the idea for Cruising come from?

In 2020, the fact that there were so few lesbian bars remaining in the U.S. started to get some press. NBC News said there were 16. Go Magazine said 15. On New Years Eve heading into 2021, I (Rachel) turned to Sarah (audio journalist and my best friend) and Jen (line producer and my then-girlfriend, now fiancé) and said “what if we visit every lesbian bar in the U.S. and make a podcast about it?” They were crazy enough to say yes, and the idea for Cruising Podcast was born!

The three of us had been wanting to collaborate on a podcast for some time; we thought it would be a great opportunity to combine all of our skill sets and make something really awesome. At first, the idea was somewhat of a pipe-dream. But nearly eight months later, we were hitting the road for a 30 day, 10,000 mile road trip to visit all 21 known, open and operating lesbian bars in the country.

You all started this podcast in year two of COVID, after vaccines were released and you could travel more safely. What was the impact of COVID that you were seeing on lesbian bars across the country? 

COVID definitely had a big impact on lesbian bars throughout the U.S., just as it impacted all small businesses. Most lesbian bars don’t actually own the spaces they occupy, so they had to contend with continuing to pay rent while they were closed and unable to bring in any income. Many bars started GoFundMes or applied for small business loans and grants to keep their spaces during the shutdown. As bars started to re-open, many instituted vaccination requirements, even in more conservative areas where this type of requirement was not a widespread practice.

I’m not familiar with too many podcasts where you are following along on a road trip. For the audio craft nerds among us, what were the logistics like for recording a show that’s on the move?

It wasn’t too logistically complicated! We only used one recording device for the entirety of season one while on the road. We were able to coordinate with *most* of the bars ahead of time and would typically set up times to do interviews inside the bars themselves on off (or less busy) hours. I (Sarah) would often try to do one interview over the phone ahead of time so as to get a sense for the bar/story we would be working with. Once in town, we’d basically spend the afternoon doing interviews at the bar, and then the evening hanging out there and getting a bit more tape. 

In your first episode (which was released in 2021), you all share that there were less than 25 lesbian bars in the United States, down from over 200 around the 1980s. And by the beginning of season two (2023) you said that 8 new bars had opened. You’ve speculated in previous interviews the possible reasons for the initial decline, but can you speak a little more about why that has been a little bit of a resurgence?

I think the resurgence of the lesbian bar is ultimately about pop culture and awareness. Culturally, we kind of forgot for a while, the value of the lesbian bar. And I’m sure many in the younger generation never really knew to begin with, because there are so many other bars and establishments you can frequent as an out gay person. That’s all amazing, but it doesn’t change this sort-of unmatched community and safety and shared experience that queer women can find at a lesbian bar. People needed a little kick in the butt a few years ago, when all of those articles came out about lesbian bar closures, to get back into their local lesbian bar and to start thinking about opening their own. Not to mention, it’s suddenly cool again to be a lesbian? That will do wonders for business. 

I previously interviewed Vanessa Maria Quirk, who works on the Urban Roots podcast, which is about historic preservation. While I have her perspective, I would love to know from you all why you believe it is important to document these spaces?

These spaces are not just bars, they’re community centers. At one point in time, they offered protection to the gay community when being gay itself was criminalized. Today and throughout history, they have served as venues for activism and political organizing. They are gathering places for chosen families, many even offering Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners. In documenting older bars, both those that have been around for decades and those that have since closed their doors, we’ve also found ourselves documenting local and national LGBTQ+ histories. 

If we want to talk about the impact of your show, one of the cool things is one of the newer lesbian bars–Femme Bar–claimed that your show helped to inspire the opening. Have you heard any more anecdotes about how your show has impacted folks on the individual level or on the business level?

We’ve definitely heard from a lot of individuals who have been impacted by the show. We’ve heard from individuals who have listened to “Cruising” as they discovered their sapphic or lesbian identities for the first time, folks who have listened to the podcast as they transitioned. We’ve had queer, sober folks reach out and say they’ve been moved by the stories of alcoholism, addiction, and sobriety that we’ve shared on the podcast. 

One of our goals in making “Cruising” was to reach folks who might not have access to queer space in real life, and we love hearing from people who feel like the show has offered them a sense of community!

One of the observations you all have made about the experience of traveling to these bars is that you see a lot of intergenerational community-building taking place. In your opinion, what is the value of growing these relationships–particularly as queer people?

Making intergenerational connections, particularly connecting with queer elders, has been the most rewarding part of creating this podcast and traveling to all of these spaces. LBGTQ+ rights and attitudes towards LGBTQ+ in the U.S. have changed immensely in the past 60ish years. We still have a long way to go, but it’s important to recognize where we’ve come from and what the generations before us have gone through so that we have the rights we have today. You can sit down next to someone at a lesbian bar and they will have lived so much of LGBTQ+ history firsthand. They might tell you about getting arrested for wearing masculine clothing, or having to sign a morals clause to teach in public schools, or about bar raids and it being against the law just to serve alcohol to a gay person.

What do you think is important for people to know about lesbian bars, especially if they are not from the queer community but want to support?

“Anyone’s welcome, just don’t be an a**hole!” We’ve heard this sentiment from bartenders, owners, and regulars at lesbian bars across the country. We can say confidently that every single one of these bars is welcoming to people that do not identify as lesbians, it’s just about being respectful of the space and the people in it. So if you have any interest in experiencing and/or supporting a lesbian bar - you should definitely go! There’s something really unique and special about spaces created by queer women. There’s warmth, and community, and an intentionality to be inclusive that’s a lot harder to find at other kinds of bars. 

Is there any new or upcoming work that you would like to share with us?

We have a few exciting things in the works for Cruising - but none we can talk about yet! On a very different note, our team recently launched a talk-style comedy podcast called “Chicken Shirt.” It’s a rewatch of the original sitcom “Roseanne,” also hosted by our very own Sarah Gabrielli. For our Cruising fans - there’s a lot of gay television history wrapped up in the show Roseanne! It’s not entirely unrelated!

If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Blake Pfeil of abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast podcast.

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Regina Mahone (she/her) is a writer and journalist covering reproductive health, rights, and justice issues. She currently serves as senior editor at The Nation magazine. Mahone and Bracey Sherman are co-authors of the forthcoming book Liberating Abortion from Amistad/HarperCollins and co-hosts of the podcast The A-Files: A Secret History of Abortion.

Follow Regina on Twitter & Instagram - @byreginamahone

Renee Bracey Sherman (she/her) is an abortion activist, writer, and founder and co-executive director of We Testify, an organization dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions. She is the co-author of Liberating Abortion: Our Legacy, Stories, and Vision for How We Save Us, co-host of The A Files: A Secret History of Abortion, a podcast from The Meteor, and executive producer of the award-winning documentary Ours To Tell about abortion experiences.

Follow Renee on Twitter - @rbraceysherman & Instagram - @reneebraceysherman

Learn more about the The A Files podcast by visiting The Meteor website. You can also keep up with The Meteor on Instagram and Twitter @themeteor.

The A Files

Both of you–to borrow the phrase–are not new to this, but are true to this when it comes to talking about abortion access. Why did you both decide that a podcast series was the next frontier when it came to your storytelling about abortion?

Regina: I remember seeing somewhere that podcasts are “out” in 2024, but I don’t agree! I love podcasts and so many of the folks I know listen to them religiously. So for us, it seemed like a natural next step. We had been doing a ton of research about abortion for our book, Liberating Abortion, which will be out in the fall from Amistad/HarperCollins, as we were watching state lawmakers and then the US Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade. As two Black women who have had abortions, we were tired of not seeing people who had abortions centered in the conversations around abortion access. Cindi Leive at The Meteor heard us talking about these issues and asked us if we had thought about creating a podcast, and the seed was planted. 

I feel like those hyper visible in the public conversations about abortion are white cis women. You both approach this issue as Black cis women. 

Fill in the blank: It’s critical that folks see abortion through an intersectional lens because…

Renee: that’s exactly what it is. The ability to decide if, when, and how you grow your family is impacted by who we are, where we live, what our bodies look like, and what we can afford. That decision impacts and is impacted by whether you have a place to live, food to eat, money to travel, time off of work, and feel safe and healthy at home and in your body. On a basic level, the majority of people who have abortions are people of color. To tell the story of abortion and only elevate the experiences of cis white women, is not only erasure of our lived experiences, it’s factually inaccurate.

Regina: everyone is affected by abortion and the people who are hardest hit by restrictions and attempts to make it inaccessible sit at the intersections of multiple oppressions. And, those same folks have for decades been used as bargaining chips by elected officials from both parties. Often people think of the Hyde Amendment, and that is true that the Hyde Amendment has remained in effect for more than 45 years, not allowing people receiving government-sponsored insurance from using their coverage for abortion care. But there are also countless people who have needed later abortions who could not access that care or who suffered needlessly because later abortions are a lightning rod among the so-called pro-choice party. When we don’t center the people who are most devastated by bans, we all lose. 

I’ve already used the word abortion like five times. One of the points that the podcast really drives home is that we need to say the word abortion.  Language evolves and word choice is important, but what is the elevator pitch as to why–for folks who have been saying “reproductive rights”, “right to choose”, “bodily autonomy”–to transition back to saying abortion?.

Regina: Conservatives want us to NOT say the word “abortion,” because it adds to the shame and stigma people might feel. Now more than ever it is crucial to use the word “abortion” when that is what you mean. In using the word, it’s a way to destigmatize what is an incredibly common and sometimes even mundane experience for folks. Abortion has existed for centuries and will always exist whether or not it’s legal. Not to mention, as we point out in episode four on criminalization, Love Abortion? Don’t Talk to Cops, the issue of legality is a social construct. The laws exist to control if, when, and how we decide to grow our families. By saying the word abortion, we are reclaiming what has always been ours. 

I almost caught myself saying, it’s unfortunate that abortion has gotten so politicized. To an extent, that IS true. But in a way, I’m hopeful because it has raised the stakes for people to care about local policy. Your episode “You Can’t Fix Abortion Without Voting Rights!” talks about the impact of gerrymandering on abortion access, and you all rightfully call out that we are taught to be more concerned about Presidential elections than local or mid-term elections. 

What are some ways your relationship with local politics has changed since your advocacy for abortion began?

Renee: Well, as we break down in the first episode and the seventh, the one on gerrymandering that you mentioned, abortion wasn’t always a political issue. It was chosen as an issue to segregate voters in service of white supremacist ideology in the late 1970s and has been built up that way ever since. The right to an abortion isn’t a politically divisive issue, but it has been portrayed that way in the news and in our politics because politicians who have lied, cheated, and stolen their way into office make it a cornerstone of their campaign. Those politicians work overtime to ban abortion to the detriment of any and every other issue that would serve our communities, including issues that make pregnancy safer and ensure babies and children have food, housing, childcare, and education.

We think it’s absolutely important for people to stay engaged politically, but it’s critical that we all stay engaged between the ballot drop offs. Policies and budgets are moral documents. Talk to your local legislators and push for legislation to fund abortion care in your communities. Many cities have already done it! Help ensure abortion clinics are able to open in your neighborhood. Demand your local prosecutors stop prosecuting people for the outcomes of their pregnancies. As I mentioned in our fourth episode, I messaged my city council-member on Twitter about a gap in Washington DC’s protections for people who help someone self-managing an abortion, and she put her team on it and now the law has changed. Getting involved can make a huge difference.

Roe v. Wade. I think we all know the deal at this point–that the landmark Supreme Court ruling was overturned in 2022. However, many might be surprised to learn that abortion rights advocates are not advocating for the restoration of Roe. Why is that?

Renee: This is such a good question! I think it can be quite confusing. Roe v. Wade legalized abortion across the country, but over 50 years there were restrictions and barriers put in place to weaken that right. The Supreme Court upheld that Medicaid does not have to cover abortion coverage, banned certain abortion procedures, and didn’t intervene in Texas’ law allowing strangers to sue anyone helping to provide an abortion, therefore while someone may have the right to an abortion, the ability to afford that abortion or physically access it is not guaranteed. What we’re hoping is not just to rebuild the rough patchwork of access we had before, but this time ensure that we protect abortion for everyone, everywhere, no matter what insurance they have, how much money they have, how old they are, where they live, how far along they are in their pregnancy, or what their immigration status is. Roe wasn’t real for so many people who needed abortion access most, so saying we’ll ‘restore Roe’ means that we’ll restore access for some people and doesn’t offer a plan for the rest of us.

Each episode has guests share calls-to-action and you all even share your own in the form of book recommendations. Given that this newsletter is all about giving people ways to action based on the content they hear, I was delighted to hear these sections each episode. There are lots of great resources, but this topic can be overwhelming. 

What action do you both recommend folks start with?

Regina: On the most basic level, I think folks can look up their local elections and set a reminder to vote. Every single time. Look, I have two young kids and it can be tough to remember primaries and off-year elections amid all the things. Believe me. But as LaTosha Brown of the Black Voters Matter Fund explains on the podcast, voting is a harm reduction strategy. So start with voting, every single election. And then get five people you know to vote. You can also look up what restrictions your state has on abortion. We discuss in episode three, Good States, Bad States? Not So Fast, that there are no good states for abortion. Your state might have some surprising restrictions. Learn what they are and contact your local elected officials to see what might be done to decriminalize abortion, like Renee did in DC. Abortion is a local issue as much as it’s a national issue. And while we are limited in what steps we can take to change the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, we can take a strong stand in our communities to try to minimize the impact. 

Renee: There are so many different crises happening right now, and I know for some it can be hard to fit yet another action item into their daily life. So what I like to suggest is that everyone think about the actions that you already take every single day and think about how you can fit abortion access into it. Do you like to make donations? Perhaps you can add an abortion fund or local clinic to your list. Do you like to volunteer? See if your local abortion clinic takes volunteers or the abortion fund takes volunteers. When I can, I drive people to their appointments or give them a place to stay at my home. Maybe it’s a smaller action like saying the word abortion more, sharing your abortion stories, or reflecting on how you and your loved ones show up for pregnant people in your lives. Changed behavior is what will make a difference in the life of someone who needs an abortion and bring us closer towards liberating abortion.

Is there any new or upcoming work that you would like to share with us?

Regina: Yes! Thank you so much for asking. We have a book coming out in October from Amistad/HarperCollins, titled Liberating Abortion: Our Legacy, Stories, and Vision for How We Save Us. This book is the book both of us wish we’d had when we had our abortions. For far too long, people of color ​​have lacked two essential resources: back-to-basics sex education and knowledge of how other people of color manage their reproductive rights. Many of us weren’t taught the birds and the bees in medically accurate, sex-positive ways. In Liberating Abortion, we provide an in-depth history of how anti-abortion lawmakers have used restrictions on abortion to bar people of color from wielding their power and controlling their bodies and lives. And we provide a vision for a new, more encompassing future centered in reproductive justice. We want every person of color who has had or will have an abortion to know that they are not alone—they are probably not even the first person in their family to have an abortion. We have been silenced or made to feel ashamed about our reproductive decisions, but this has always been our movement and issue, and it’s time to reclaim our role in achieving reproductive freedom for future generations.

Renee: Yes! We’re super excited for our book to come out and for everyone to read it. I hope that everyone who has had abortions and wants to share their stories checks out We Testify, the organization I founded that works with people who’ve had abortions to share their stories. We have tons of leadership opportunities, storytelling and media trainings, and ways for you to get involved and connect with other people who’ve had abortions. We also have fabulous I Had An Abortion tee shirts and other items that will help you get the abortion conversation started!

If this show’s format / topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Ann Marie Awad and Kate O’Connell of National Emergency podcast.

Return to the 3/27 newsletter

Kevin Blackistone is a longtime national sports columnist now at The Washington Post, a panelist on ESPN’s Around the Horn, a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, an occasional contributor to NPR and PBS, co-producer and co-writer of Imagining the Indian, an award-winning 2022 documentary on the history of and fight against mascoting Native Americans, and co-author of A Gift for Ron, a memoir by former NFL star Everson Walls published in November 2009 that details his kidney donation to onetime teammate Ron Springs.

Robert Greene II is an Assistant Professor of History at Claflin University. He is also the Publications Chair of the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians and the President of the African American Intellectual History Society. Dr. Greene II has written extensively on the South, Black history and memory, and political history for publications such as Oxford American, The Nation, Dissent, Scalawag, and Jacobin, among others. Dr. Greene II is co-editor, along with Dr. Tyler D. Parry, of the edited volume Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina, and he is currently at work on a book titled The Newest South: African Americans and the Democratic Party, 1964-2000, about the relationship between Democratic Party leaders in the South and African American voters.

Learn more about the Our New South podcast by visiting the Museum of the New South website.

Our New South

To borrow a question you ask your show’s guests, what are your definitions of the “New South”?

Kevin: It is everything most people from beyond it think it is not. It is no longer, of course, the cauldron of racial violence that came to define it, while acknowledging the Mother Emanuel massacre and Charlottesville. But it is not a place people of color, in particular, are fleeing; instead, it is a place they not only are returning to but are running in myriad ways, as elected officials, appointed city managers, and business executives. Yet, it is still a place defined by the defiance of people of color, whether it is Bree Newsome snatching down the Confederate flag or Stacey Abrams organizing voters to elect a Black Democrat from Georgia to the Senate. It is almost as if it is under a new reconstruction.

Robert: For me, the “New South” is a South that is grappling with its long history of Indigenous displacement, slavery, and Jim Crow segregation. This is not–nor can it be–an easy process. But the “New South” also means being a welcoming place, and using the past to look positively to a future that includes everyone, regardless of race, color, gender, national origin, or sexual orientation. 

For many Americans, “the South” has a negative connotation. Much of that is, historically, deserved. But I hope listeners come away from our podcast understanding that many Southerners are trying to change the region for the better, while also keeping the best of Southern traditions–foodways, storytelling, music-making, and generosity–alive in the 21st century. 

This is a presidential election year here in the U.S. Was this top of mind when developing the show, and if so, what do you want the show to accomplish as it relates to this election and the state-wide/ local races that will also be decided in November?

Robert: It certainly played a role in our discussion of voting rights, education, and environmental justice. But it’s also important, as your question points out, to focus on local and state races as well. Most Southern legislatures have, in a generation, rapidly switched from Democratic to Republican control. This is going to have long-term effects on politics in the region and across the nation. Also, there is a great deal of exciting grassroots work on voting rights and access to the ballot being done in states such as Georgia and North Carolina–listeners across the nation should learn more about that, too. 

What would be your pitch to listen for those who live outside of the South, particularly if they don’t have any Southern roots?

Kevin: What I didn’t think about before delving into this podcast was how much the rest of this country was and continues to be heavily influenced by the South, arguably more so than any other region of the country impacts the rest of the country. Of late, we’ve seen it’s power at the ballot box with the election in Georgia of a Black Democrat and Jewish Democrat who flipped control of the U.S. Senate. While we’ve seen the demonization of immigrants at the Texas and Arizona borders by reactionary politicians, quietly the South has welcomed and integrated immigrants at numbers great enough to boost its economy. And the South continues to influence the rest of the country that imports its food and music and art. Is there a North American cuisine more ubiquitous than Southern cooking? A music more regionally identifiable than country, or New Orleans brass band jazz, or Dirty South rap? The South is all around us, if not in us, no matter where we are.

Robert: It’s critical for every American to understand a bit about the South. What happens in the South never stays here. So, to get a grasp on where the nation is going, you need to see what is happening in the South. Also, so many cultural, social, and political trends that originate in the South spread across the nation. Whether it’s the contemporary sound of hip hop, the Black support for the Democratic Party, or the continuing literary legacy of the region, the South continues to influence the nation and the world. 

If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Jenna Spinelle of When the People Decide podcast.

Avril Speaks is an award-winning Producer, Director and Showrunner based in Los Angeles. She has produced several award-winning films including Jinn, Dotty & Soul, and the South African film African America, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, four African Movie Academy Awards and streamed on Netflix. Most recently, Avril was the Showrunner for the docu-series Uprooted: The Untold Keith Warren Story, which is available on Max and was an Executive Producer for Files of the Unexplained, coming soon to Netflix. Avril was a 2020 Sundance Momentum Fellow, a 2022 recipient of the Dear Producer Award. She is also a co-founding member of Distribution Advocates and a board member for the Black TV and Film Collective.

Follow Avril’s work on Instagram @azuspeak and check out their website.

Distribution Advocates Presents

Before we get into the podcast, can you share with us what motivates you as a filmmaker?

Some important themes for me are race, gender and spirituality. Most of my projects have some element of one or both in them. What motivates me is telling stories that reflect the truth of the human experience in order to bring people together and spark change. 

Why did you help found ? Was there a particular barrier that you faced in getting your films sold?

A group of producers got together to discuss the challenges we had been facing with distribution–including lack of inclusion, dwindling opportunities for exhibition and recoupment, lack of education for first-time filmmakers on how to navigate distribution. We started these conversations in the midst of COVID, when people within the industry were rethinking systems and wondering how we could do things better. We believed we had an opportunity to reimagine what distribution could look like in the future and formed this collective to do research and create steps to filling in some of the gaps in education. 

So Distribution Advocates Presents, the podcast you’ve created, “demystifies the world of independent film distribution with honest insider stories.” What do you hope to accomplish with your show, and why was a podcast the best format to reach your goal?

One of the first things DA did when we formed was we created a Cheat Sheet for filmmakers to reference if they were entering distribution for the first time. We started doing teach-ins for various organizations and presenting information that way. A year or so after doing the teach-ins, we realized that although they were helpful, they were becoming monotonous and didn’t necessarily help move the needle in terms of the larger conversation we were trying to have with the whole film community. We figured a podcast would be a great way to educate but also to publicly acknowledge the issues and discuss ways we as an industry could imagine new models for success.

The primary audience of your podcast is filmmakers, but what is your pitch to those of us who are outside the industry? What might we learn by paying attention to what is happening with film distribution, and how can we help?

What is happening in distribution is the same thing that is happening in many industries in our country and in the world. Conglomerates are taking over and consolidating everyday, which reduces the accessibility of distribution access. We currently have a lot of channels (so many channels!) but most of them are owned by the same handful of companies. When this happens, there are less opportunities for diverse voices that might fit outside the mainstream, less opportunities for audiences to see some great films. Consumers can help by seeking out alternative distribution platforms and supporting the work of independent voices. 

Both your organization and podcast are about creating more equitable distribution systems. Do you have any concerns about the recent attacks on DEI related, or perceived to be DEI, initiatives and how that might affect the film industry?

Yes, this is related to the previous question. Many of the DEI initiatives that were implemented during the pandemic have been stripped away, which means there is less commitment to telling inclusive stories. Also, many of the DEI initiatives were performative in the first place but losing them shows the true intentions of conglomerates when it comes to showcasing diverse stories.

Director Ava DuVernay chose to finance her feature film Origin in an interesting way. While going through film studios will likely continue to be the primary vehicle to get films made for a while, what do you make of the philanthropy funded approach DuVernay employed? Do you think it’s a scalable model or rather, what do you think could make the model scalable?

I applaud this model and I know other filmmakers have also gone this route. I absolutely think it is scalable, but I also would love the industry to get to a place where we don’t have to rely on philanthropy, but could employ other avenues for making films and also find new definitions for success. 

Since Sounds Like Impact newsletter is social impact focused, could you recommend one social issue documentary and one non-documentary that you think approaches a social issue in an interesting way?

Documentary - Daughters

Non-documentary - Origin 😁

Is there any other work that you would like to share with us?

Uprooted (Hear Avril speak about the film here).

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Return to 2/14/24 newsletter

Vanessa Maria Quirk (she/her) was born in Spain to a Northern Irish father and a Peruvian mother, Vanessa begrudgingly grew up on Long Island, studied English literature in D.C. and Oxford, left the northern hemisphere to teach English and write about architecture in Chile, and then moved to New York City in 2014 to pursue an M.S. in Arts & Culture Journalism from Columbia University. 

You may have heard her as the co-host on a few podcasts: Urban Roots, where she and historic preservationist Deqah Hussein-Wetzel preserve place through story; Uncertain Things, where she and her journalist roommate Adaam James Levin-Areddy talk to the thinkers who are navigating us through this current, chaotic moment; and City of the Future, where she and fellow cities journalist Eric Jaffe explored the ideas and innovations that will transform cities. When she’s not making podcasts, she’s probably making music, failing to learn the ukulele, or squealing over adorable animals on Instagram.

Contact: vanessa@urbanistmedia.org | LinkedIn

Learn more about Urban Roots Podcast from Urbanist Media and make sure to follow on Instagram @urbanrootsculture. Also, feel free to get in touch at urbanrootspodcast@gmail.com.

To start, what is historic preservation?

When I started working on the Urban Roots podcast, I thought about historic preservation the way most laymen do: the field that takes old, historically significant buildings and does the physical work to save them for posterity.

It’s also important to note that, historically, physical historic preservation has been weaponized against marginalized communities. Places that were considered “significant” — likely because they had architectural merit — have been frozen in time. It can be illegal, or prohibitively expensive, to change these buildings in any way, and protected, historic districts — while wonderful things — can cause economic hardship to inhabitants; plus, “historic character” can attract gentrification and drive up rental prices. When we at Urbanist Media (the non-profit that support Urban Roots) think about historic preservation, we think about ways we can adapt historic buildings so they can continue to adapt to community members needs — and even bring wealth back to residents so they can stay long-term. This is what we refer to as “community preservation.”    

Also let’s consider what has traditionally been considered “significant” in historic preservation and what has been considered “insignificant.” Any building with “architectural merit” was the result of people with resources putting money and time into the design and construction of a building. It’s rarer for people without money and resources to have those types of buildings in their communities, or, if they have them, to have the money and resources to maintain them over time. So, even when a place is beloved or critical to a community, it is vulnerable to being knocked down — and its histories erased — when city planners, developers, or other actors are looking to “revitalize” an area. With the Urban Roots podcast, we try to raise awareness around buildings, often endangered buildings, that are significant to marginalized groups; however, it’s also incredibly important to us to tell the stories of the buildings — and the people and communities that once inhabited/surrounded them — that no longer exist. 

You are the producer and journalist of Urban Roots podcast, while your co-host Deqah Hussein is the historic preservationist and urban planner. What sparked your interest in the show’s topic and collaborating with Deqah?

I’ve been interested in urbanism and topics of spatial justice since I got my first journalism job out of college, at a popular architecture website called ArchDaily. I started my first podcast, City of the Future, in 2017, which was all about the ideas and innovations that could transform cities. Our third season was our most tech-centric yet, and I was already feeling unsatisfied with the potential of tech to really make a difference in people’s lives, particularly those in low-income communities. 

And then 2020 happened, and with the onset of the pandemic and then George Floyd’s murder, I began to reflect: I needed my work to matter more. Deqah was a college friend of my partner’s; I knew she was a historic preservationist and was trying to start a podcast of her own. I reached out to her to offer my pro bono services as a story editor (I wanted more experience in this any way), and she countered with an offer: What if we started a podcast of our own? And so Urban Roots was born. 

While I was working on Urban Roots, I also started developing season four of my City of the Future podcast, with one question in mind: what ideas could make cities more equitable and inclusive? I traveled across the country talking to developers, investors, and community groups who were doing real estate differently — for example, allowing community members to invest in shares of a development project that would give them dividends, or creating a tech incubator where a certain percentage of applicants came from the local, low-income housing complex; or raising funds to transform a historically Black neighborhood suffering from erasure and pollution into a safe, healthy waterfront community where Black residents could thrive.  

This topic of real estate development — and how to make it more equitable and inclusive — was endlessly fascinating to me. At first, I thought it was separate from the topic of historic preservation. But, over time working on Urban Roots, I’ve realized that historic preservation and development are intertwined: to create more equitable places, places that acknowledge and redress the historic inequities of our built environment, we must preserve and develop differently.

The first series from your show, which was released in 2021, was called Communities of Color: Lost Voices of Cincinnati. Can you talk a little bit about how that came to be the focus of the first season?

Our first season came about because my co-host Deqah was doing historic preservation work in African American neighborhoods in Cincinnati. As she was surveying these neighborhoods, she realized that not only were many of the important buildings gone, but there was hardly any information about these places in historical archives. To learn about them, she had to talk to primary sources: long-time residents or descendants of long-time residents who could speak to the people and places of significance to their community. After recording these conversations, she realized they would form the basis of a powerful podcast, which in and of itself would serve as a form of preservation. She brought me on to the team, applied for an artist’s grant from ArtsWave, and the first season was born.  

In a previous interview with Cincinnati’s The Enquirer, it was mentioned that finding people to interview for this show was difficult in the beginning. Can you elaborate on that and what solutions you came up with?

When we started Urban Roots, we knew we wanted to center community voices, but it was hard to know where to start. We began reaching out to local organizations — namely neighborhood councils, economic development nonprofits, and other community groups —  and asking them who they thought we should talk to, who were the keepers of their community’s history? They often pointed us both to elders and people active in preserving/protecting their community. This has now become part of our approach for any Urban Roots project; we reach out to local organizations to connect us with community members who then connect us to more community members, and so on. 

Do you have any stories about the impact of the series on the communities highlighted in the season? Or any anecdotes about how these stories were received by other communities?

After our Cincinnati series aired, my co-host Deqah went to a Community Taskforce meeting in Avondale (one of the three neighborhoods we spotlighted in the season). The members had been given the homework assignment of listening to the episode. When Deqah walked in, she was overwhelmed with positive feedback. For them, it was not only so great to hear the voices of people they knew telling the history of their home, they also appreciated how we had crafted the episode to be a truthful representation of the good and bad of their community — how it went far beyond the limited, stereotypical narratives about crime/safety in their neighborhood that they’re so used to hearing. That kind of feedback means the world to us!

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Since that season there have been a few multipart stories about communities in LA, Indianapolis and Brooklyn. But in addition to this type of storytelling, you all introduced a BONUS series where there were interviews with different professionals in the preservation and planning fields. What are two or three interesting facts you learned about preservation work?

Before I answer this question, since I’m talking to other audio makers, I do want to take a moment to reflect on why we started the BONUS interviews — and why we’re still producing them. 

It should be stated clearly that the kind of work we do — community-oriented, narrative, nonfiction, documentary-style, sound-rich podcasts — takes A LOT of time, effort, and money. We started the nonprofit, in part, to help us find a way to fund these types of episodes, which we believe are powerful, meaningful ways to elevate underrepresented voices and preserve their histories. 

Because the funding and production of these seasons is so expensive and time consuming, we realized our feed was “dying” for months at a time. We wanted a low-lift way to keep the feed alive in a more consistent manner — hence, interview episodes. However, as soon as we started them, we realized that we were actually providing a valuable resource to our listeners.

What have I learned from these interviews? So much! From Vishaan Chakrabarti, I developed a further understanding of the meaning of “community preservation” — i.e. helping community members to stay-in-place and thrive for the long-term. From Zahra Ebrahim, I learned that “moving at the speed of trust” is paramount to community engagement and development work — and, despite popular opinion, the fastest way to operate. And from Rukaiyah Adams, I learned the importance of saying no, of keeping your integrity, of building a big “boat” of people rowing in the same direction, and of proudly putting on your middle-aged bossy pants.  

This interview is publishing during Black History Month in the United States. Before we go, would you like to speak to why the type of documentary work Urbanist Media does is particularly important for the aims of this cultural month and beyond?

Only two percent of places in the National Register of Historic Places represent Black spaces; fewer than one percent represent LGBTQ+ sites; under 10 percent of nominations highlight women and people of color broadly. When development happens, the places significant to these groups are almost always destroyed. But even when physical places are erased, their stories persist — and need to be preserved. 

Through our Urban Roots podcast, educational resources, and more, Urbanist Media uses storytelling to preserve the places significant to underrepresented groups. These overlooked stories are critical to surface — and not only during Heritage Months — because they are an important, endangered part of our American history. We hope that, by sharing them, we cannot only raise awareness but also inspire those working in the built environment toward more inclusive forms of planning, development, and preservation. We hope or work could lead to a more equitable world.

Is there any new or upcoming work that you would like to share with us?

Yes! I’m so excited about our upcoming series on the “Lost City of Vanport.” 

Located between Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon, Vanport was a city built during World War II to house working-class people who came from across the country to work at the shipyards. At its peak it was the second largest city in Oregon and, unusually for the time (especially in Oregon), it was fairly integrated. However, it was also built quickly on a floodplain; in 1948 a flood wiped out the city in less than an hour, leaving survivors devastated, possessionless, and displaced.

For almost a decade, Laura Lo Forti of Vanport Mosaic has been working with folks in Portland to gather oral histories, in particular from African, Indigenous and Japanese American survivors and descendants, about Vanport. I’ve been combing through this incredible tape and, truly, there are so many beautiful stories and details I am learning — they could never fit into one episode.

We’re currently looking for sponsors for the Vanport series, so if you know of a person or entity that would like to sponsor the Vanport series, email us at urbanrootspodcast@gmail.com.

If this show’s topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Blake Pfeil of abandoned: The All American Ruins podcast.

Return to 2/7/24 newsletter

Stephanie Marudas

Stephanie (she/her) is the founder of Kouvenda Media and co-creator of Obscured. Prior to founding Kouvenda Media, she reported for WYPR in Baltimore and WHYY in Philadelphia. At WHYY, as a reporter, she covered subjects like education, healthcare, and immigration, while also working on the "Impact of War" series, a collaboration with NPR and went on to become a producer at the station in various roles. As executive producer of the award-winning podcast Grapple, she collaborated with Obscured co-creator Emily Previti during their time working together for Keystone Crossroads.

Emily Previti

Emily (she/her) is executive editor and co-creator of Obscured. Before joining Kouvenda Media, she covered voting rights and election administration for NPR affiliate WITF and The GroundTruth Project during 2019-2021. Emily was the senior reporter for statewide public media collaboration Keystone Crossroads – where, in addition to collaborating with Stephanie on Grapple, she led data-driven projects and reported overlooked stories about government dysfunction, refugee resettlement, criminal justice and other challenges facing communities across Pennsylvania. Her work – including from staff reporting for print-based outlets earlier on – has been recognized by PMJA, PAPME, RTDNA’s Edward R. Murrow Awards and the New Jersey and Illinois press associations. 

You can reach Emily at emily@kouvendamedia.com or via Twitter @emily_previti.

Obscured is a production of Kouvenda Media, and you can find it wherever you listen by clicking here. Make sure to follow Obscured on social media, Twitter or Instagram, at @KouvendaMedia.

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Stephanie, you are the founder of Kouvenda Media, the company that produces Obscured. Before we dive into the show, can you tell us why you founded Kouvenda? 

Stephanie: Sure. There’s a backstory to tell first.  

I never intended to have a career in audio, let alone start a podcast production house. In college, I happened to work on an audio documentary about The Biosphere 2 where I studied for a semester. After college, I worked as an environmental educator and consultant and volunteered with COSMOS FM-Hellenic Public Radio to report, host and produce a Greek diaspora community affairs show. 

Soon after, I decided to make the switch and pursue public radio as a career. It wasn't an easy start. There were various ups and downs between station-based reporting, freelance assignments and whatever I could do to learn and hone the craft.  

A decade later, there came a point when public radio didn’t feel like the right fit anymore. During that time, I took a break and immersed myself in the study and craft of oral history. It energized me and led to the idea for Kouvenda Media to produce narratives for social change. In Greek, Kouvenda means “talk, chat or conversation.” 

One of the things I love about Kouvenda Media is that your storytelling seems to be rooted in Philadelphia. In fact, your company’s About Us says you are Pennsylvania-based. First, are you originally from the area? And if not, what draws you to creating stories that center the city or state of PA?

Stephanie: I grew up in Baltimore but have spent nearly half my adult life living and working in Philadelphia. It happened organically that Kouvenda Media’s storytelling has been based here. Being local has also meant being able to meet sources and/or clients in-person and building relationships in the community. While most of our projects have been local, some of our projects have zoomed out beyond Pennsylvania and have had a broader focus. We’re open to both and don’t limit ourselves. Seems like the best of both worlds. 

Emily: I’m from southern New Jersey, went to college in Philadelphia and have spent the past decade reporting in Pennsylvania. Like Stephanie, I don’t limit myself to reporting solely in our city or state. It’s also part of my process to at least research issues and policies in other states to bring scope and context to journalism that’s largely otherwise focused in a particular place.  

Please give us a quick overview of what the podcast Obscured is about. What do you all want to accomplish with the show? 

Stephanie: Obscured is Emily’s and my response to seeing too many issues and stories remain unknown to the public due to underreporting. The show focuses on critical issues that are often missed in the daily news cycle. It blends in-depth journalism with enlightening conversations featuring policy professionals, researchers and journalists. We combine formats including deeply reported limited series and conversational episodes. 

This season of Obscured “From Words to Weapons (FWTW)” is about trauma inflicted by law enforcement and the systems/policies/laws that enable this continuation. How did the idea for this season come about? 

Emily: It had been years since I’d reported on criminal justice accountability and excessive force, but I still followed those issues and wanted to get back to them in my reporting. Then, I was researching an episode for At the Core of Care about standardizing sexual assault exam procedures, one of a few Kouvenda’s produced in recent years about sexual assault survivors and the nurses who care for them. I came across Maija Anderson’s name on a forensic nursing conference schedule where she was presenting on developing a medical protocol for caring for people after an altercation with law enforcement. Our conversation ended up focusing on her research. It was clear that Maija's story and work could be part of Obscured’s first season. Given all of that (and Obscured’s mission to elevate unheard stories and/or pursue relevant unexamined angles), we decided to focus on supporting survivors of law enforcement trauma. 

This is not the first time you all tackled a topic related to mass incarceration. Your previous limited series Restricted Reading is about the lack of intellectual freedom in prison. What particular training or reporting experience has helped you to cover these stories that impact a vulnerable and often overlooked segment of our society? 

Stephanie: In my early reporting career, I had several editors who assigned me to cover how public policy affects people’s lives. They mentored me and were excellent thought partners about how to approach this type of reporting. I also spent time consuming first-person accounts and/or oral histories that I found helpful in learning how to think about question development outside a news framework and how to be in conversation with people about their lives. My most transformative experience was having been selected as a summer institute fellow at the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research at INCITE, with a focus on Narrating Population Health: Oral History, Disparity, and Social Change. This experience really has shaped my reporting and production work ever since.  

Before this interview, I listened to the first five episodes of this season. Truly excellent and engaging work! I don’t want to spoil anything, but I do want to bring up two things that I found very interesting.  

Episode 1 focuses in great detail on a court ruling that overturned the conviction of a young man named Jimmy Warren. Take us through the decision-making behind starting the season here.  

Emily: Thank you for the kind words about the work! While doing pre-reporting/early research for the series, I asked a capital defense attorney whether she could point me to any cases that dealt principally with questions of emotional or psychological effects of policing and didn't stem from an incident involving physical injury. She mentioned Jimmy's case. We started with his story in part because the final ruling on it got national attention and saw that as a strong potential entry point for listeners. But more importantly, the case/episode’s focus on over-policing, the anticipation of police encounters and resulting effects on people establishes (we hope) the ubiquity of law enforcement trauma and the true, high relevance of the issue as explored in subsequent episodes in a way that isn’t frequently represented in the news.  

Episode 3 establishes something that I am still baffled by: not all wrongful convictions lead to compensation for these victims of injustice. And options to even bring a case in the first place may vary based on a number of different factors.  What was your personal reaction to learning this?  

Emily: Like you, I was baffled and outraged and wondered why Pennsylvania, where we live, was among a dozen or so states that doesn't provide a path to compensation aside from litigation. I had the same reaction upon finding out state lawmakers had been introducing bills for at least 20 years with, literally, zero movement. Even after reporting the episode and seeing a bit of movement in the statehouse this fall, I still feel that way, to be honest.  

So as a journalist, how did you channel your feelings into a narrative supported by facts?

Emily: I just tried to pull together as much information as possible to provide as much context and depth as possible with the time that we had. The related bill discussed in the episode is a moving target in the Pennsylvania legislature and we’ll continue to follow it with the first update to come early next year.  

While I don’t know how you two racially identify, from pictures I’ve seen, you both pass as white women. Jimmy Warren and Chester Holman III (ep 3), whose stories I was very moved by, are both Black men. How do you racially identify? And do you think about your racial identity as you approach telling stories about communities that are not your own?

Emily: Yes, I identify as white and do think about my racial identity when approaching people to talk, preparing for interviews, sourcing research materials and otherwise reporting on issues that have a disproportionate effect on communities of color. In particular, bearing in mind (1) that my role and goal here as a reporter and storyteller is to listen, amplify Jimmy and Chester’s experiences and contextualize for listeners without over-intellectualizing and (2) the principles of trauma-informed reporting generally (in this case, traumatic experiences inextricably linked to race).   

What are some things you all do–if any–to make sure your storytelling approach is appropriate for the communities you are focusing on? 

Emily: As a matter of course, we consume media produced by and collaborate on projects with people of diverse backgrounds, identities and communities – including this limited series/first season, where the production team also includes people with lived experience, and the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative where the group regularly engages in training about best practices and thoughtful discussions about how to best apply them as we work.  

Before we wrap, Emily, I want to ask you about your background as a data journalist. A lot of people…their eyes can glaze over when you start talking about data or looking at numbers. What are some tips you’d give others without your training or experience when it comes to informing the public about data that’s critical to your story? 

Emily: Slow down. Keep a data diary (every step you take should be noted here). Get a partner you trust to check your work, whenever possible. And less is more, especially in audio versus text. 

Is there any new or upcoming work that you all would like to share with us? 

Stephanie: On Being Biracial is a ten-episode podcast series featuring conversations with more than 30 multiracial individuals interviewed by co-hosts Daralyse Lyons and Malcolm Burnley. The podcast, which started rolling out in October, was mixed by Paul Kondo and edited and fact-checked by Emily. In addition to Kouvenda Media, On Being Biracial partners include WURD Radio, the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative, the National Association of Black Journalists, Philadelphia Neighborhoods, Technical.ly, PGN and G-town Radio. 

Please see below for organizations that Stephanie and Emily recommend if you want to learn more about their show’s topic:

Witness to Innocence, Pennsylvania Innocence Project, Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, The Center for Policing Equity, Do No Harm Coalition, National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement.  

🎤 Pass the Mic

If you could pass the mic to someone about a social issue you care about, who would it be and what would they talk about? 
We’d pass the mic to The Georgetown University Health Justice Alliance’s Working Group on Policing and Patient Rights to talk about protecting patient privacy, addressing patient mistrust in institutions and navigating institutional obstacles to implementing new and necessary policies and procedures.  

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If this show’s format / topic interests you, you might also want to check out the Sounds Like Impact interview with Adell Coleman and Stephen Colbert of Say Their Name podcast.

Return to 12/6/23 edition