PathBreakers

The office of Deputy Mayor of Health and Human Services sat empty for 8 years in New Orleans, until Mayor Helena Moreno reinstated the role when she took the Mayoral office in January of 2026. The person for the job? One of the most prominent New Orleans voices in public health: long-time emergency medicine practitioner, and previous Health Department Director, Dr. Jennifer Avegno.  Dr. Jennifer A...

When Vietnamese families resettled in the US after the war, many came to New Orleans with the idea that its subtropical delta climate, French influence, and sizable Roman Catholic community would feel familiar. Housing was primarily offered in Village De L’est and Algiers, two neighborhoods divided by the Mississippi River. The separation led to social isolation, and their urban coastal locations...

Food access is an on-going challenge in New Orleans – a city mapped by a history of segregation, and a city with a track record of inconsistent re-investment since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Aside from issues like “food deserts” and “food swamps,” another question arises: When climate disaster strikes, and transportation infrastructure goes down, how do you get food for your family or community? M...

Cities across the country are confronting one of the defining questions of our era: Who has the power to decide how a city prepares for – and survives – climate change? And New Orleans is a city that lives on the direct shoreline of that question. It is a waterfront city below sea level, ringed by industrial corridors, and still managing the health and economic ripple effects of Hurricane Katrina...

Danielle Bergstrom began her career as a city planner. That work, which she did in Fresno for 10 years, put her up close and personal with the goings-ons of City Hall. And seeing the “sausage making” there, as she says, convinced her that city residents needed the same insider understanding of what was happening in local government. That is when she started Fresnoland – a nonprofit, paywall-free i...

More than 200,000 immigrant farmworkers power Central California's agricultural industry, including over 60,000 people from many diverse and distinct Indigenous Mexican communities. Across those communities, more than 16 unique Indigenous Mexican languages are spoken, bringing issues of access and translation to the front and center of daily life – navigating work, civic engagement, and social...

Hugo Morales grew up picking produce in the farm fields of Fresno with his family. When he returned to Fresno after college, he saw that his community – the Central Valley’s half-million Latino farmworkers – barely had radio in their own language, much less a radio station controlled by their own community. In 1976, Hugo and a group of activists and artists set out to change that. And by 1980, Rad...

Fresno, California is smack-dab in the middle of the state, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, a city surrounded by farmland. But Fresno is the 9th most diverse city in the nation . And its population and history is deeply shaped by Indigenous communities like Mixtecs and Zapotecs, Chicano farmworkers, and large Southeast Asian communities too.  Fresno has historically been a city whos...

Anna McQuiston says the MidSouth is at a tipping point. While the region – which comprises 6 counties and 38 cities across West Tennessee, East Arkansas, and North Mississippi – has been facing population loss, it also has potential for upwards of 100,000 new jobs in the next 10 years. How do you ensure that those jobs go to locals who have been sticking it out in leaner times? And how do you buil...

Most real estate developers have dollar signs in their eyes. But in the rare instance when the developers actually come from the communities being redeveloped, they are able to see the equations very differently. This is the case for father-daughter real estate development duo Archie Willis and Alex Willis-Boddie at ComCap Partners, a South Memphis-based real estate development and public finance...

There’s a two-mile corridor along Walker Avenue in South Memphis that Marlon Foster calls The Knowledge Quest Kid Zone. It’s a multi-site neighborhood campus dedicated to holistically and measurably improving the lives of South Memphis kids and the parents and adults around them. In a zip-code where the statistics reveal a history of severe disinvestment, Marlon Foster’s Knowledge Quest is helping...

Memphis is a city with serious momentum and serious ambition. Neighborhoods that were written off are being reinvested. Families who have been here for generations are choosing to stay and build. Leaders across sectors are making long-term bets on the city’s future — not just on downtown, but on the communities that have always been the real foundation of Memphis.  Memphis is growing. But who gets...

When a $6 billion bridge comes to your neighborhood, who decides what the residents get in return? Simone Sagovac and the community-elected Southwest Detroit Community Benefits Coalition have spent nearly 20 years ensuring that the answer is written by residents, not imposed by developers or government.  Southwest Detroit sits at one of the busiest freight crossings in North America. The Ambassado...

A commercial corridor in Detroit went from 10% occupancy to a thriving neighborhood hub–and they’re just getting started. In this episode, co-hosts Tracey Pearson and Jamie Bennett talk to Caitlin Murphy about how one Northwest Detroit alliance is building opportunity block by block. Our Detroit arc continues with the long-term work of corridor revitalization. Murphy and Live6's work demonstra...

You can’t shape your neighborhood if you don’t know what’s happening to it.  In this episode, co-hosts Tracey Pearson and Jamie Bennett talk to Orlando Bailey about how he runs a newsroom to build infrastructure for neighborhood power. They discuss: *Outlier Media’s innovative reader engagement and lead generating strategies like TXT OUTLIER and Detroit Documenters. *How Outlier has created an inf...

Season 2 of PathBreakers opens in Detroit — Kresge's hometown and a city whose comeback story has been told for a decade. But as hosts Tracey Pearson and Jamie Bennett note, that story has largely been written through the lens of downtown. The real test of Detroit's revival is whether neighborhoods share in it. In November 2025, Detroit voters made a decisive choice: by the widest margin in the ci...

Four American cities. Sixteen people working to improve where they live. One central question: Who has power to shape what happens in their city? In Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis, and Fresno, we talk with community leaders building neighborhoods of opportunity, reclaiming narrative power, and creating the conditions for families to thrive. And we sit down with city leaders to ask what it looks lik...

In this special season finale episode, hosts Tracey Pearson and Jamie Bennet welcome Kresge Foundation President & CEO Rip Rapson back to reflect back on the stories heard throughout the series and to share an exciting announcement about the future of Kresge. In this conversation, Rip also looks back on his journey to Detroit, reflecting on formative experiences and the influences his architec...

What is the purpose of an economy? What if economies were centered on people instead of money? What if everyone had access to both income AND wealth? These are the questions Dr. Darrick Hamilton works to problem-solve at the Institute on Race, Power, And Political Economy – an academic center he founded and directs at the New School in New York City, where he and his colleagues work to create “kno...

Dr. Beverly Wright has been working in climate and environmental justice since before the movement had a name. After 30+ years of leading groundbreaking community-based participatory research in her hometown of New Orleans, Dr. Wright is a celebrated pioneer of the field. Since 1992 she has been the visionary executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, the organization w...

After a challenging experience of her own as a low-income, first-gen college student, Dr. Bridget Burns understood that higher education was not “user-friendly” for everyone. And from that, her career mission became clear: transform colleges and universities into places where low-income, first-generation and students of color could not just navigate, but thrive. Dr. Bridget Burns is the CEO of the...

Cardell Orrin spent years as a high-level IT strategist and engineer. Now, as the executive director of Stand for Children Tennessee, he is “debugging” the processes by which parents and community members in Tennessee engage with their local school boards and state representatives. It’s a debugging that’s needed across America’s school systems.  In this conversation, Cardell reflects on a childhoo...

The natural topography and the social geography of Springfield, Massachusetts make it a place especially vulnerable to climate change. Samantha Hamilton is bringing Springfield residents together to develop climate solutions for their city.  Samantha Hamilton is the Director of Coalition Building and Community Engagement at the Public Health Institute of Western Massachusetts in Springfield, MA. I...

Quetzal Flores is a Grammy-winning musician who combines his immense creative skillset and his deep knowledge of cultural traditions to ignite community participation in resistance and resilience.   In this conversation, Quetzal recounts growing up “in movement” with parents who were deeply involved in the civil rights organizing of the Chicano Movement. He describes East LA's historical signi...

As a kid, Richard Burrell lived in the motels along Parkway Drive in Fresno, California. As an adult he founded and runs an organization that supports the wellbeing of the kids who live there now.  Richard Burrell is the founder and executive director of Live Again Fresno, a nonprofit after-school and community support organization that “co-powers” children and families in Fresno’s most vulnerable...