Common Grounds: Conversations from The Roasting Room

Dr. John Skretta, Superintendent of Lincoln Public Schools, joins Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore in the Roasting Room for a conversation about mentoring, neighborhood schools, and what it means for a growing city to share a single school district. Skretta began his career teaching reading and English at Lincoln Northeast High School in 1995. He went on to lead Norris Public Schools and Educa...

Lisa Guill is Director of Communications and Development at the Asian Community & Cultural Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, and one of five editors of "The Lives of Immigrants and Refugees: Tales of Migration, Hope, Grief, and Finding Home in Nebraska," published by the University of Nebraska Press. The book collects thirty-one first-person essays by immigrants and refugees who now call...

He was eighteen when he stepped off the train in Lincoln in 1957, recruited out of Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis to play for Jerry Bush. His new wife took one look at the stagecoach parked in the depot and asked what he had gotten them into. Albert Maxey never left. He flunked out, walked across the street to the police department because he needed a job, and stayed more than two dec...

Toni Rupe is President and CEO of Junior Achievement of Lincoln, a nonprofit that brings financial literacy, work readiness, and entrepreneurship programs into K-12 classrooms through volunteers from the business community. In this conversation with Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore, Toni talks about the decision to extend Junior Achievement's reach across the rest of Nebraska rather than c...

Steve Joel served as superintendent of Lincoln Public Schools from 2010 to 2022, the last twelve years of a 37-year superintendency that began in Kansas and ran through Beatrice and Grand Island. He is now Regional Director for the Central Region at the executive search firm McPherson & Jacobson. He came to Nebraska from Long Island in 1972 to play football at Doane, homesick enough that first...

Liz Ring Carlson has spent nearly thirty years in corporate communications, most of it in Lincoln. She is vice president of corporate communications and community relations at Ameritas, a founding board member of ECHO Collective, and a Kansas State history major who found her way into public relations more or less sideways. In this conversation with Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore, she talks...

Sarah Spitsen has started five companies, lived out of her car for eight months to keep one of them alive, and later built a first-of-its-kind innovation and entrepreneurship degree from the ground up at Nebraska Wesleyan University. In this conversation, she talks with Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn Moore about founding Feya Candle Company, bringing TEDx to campus, her work with Make-A-Wish Nebraska...

Rick Alloway has spent more than forty years teaching broadcasting at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and managing 90.3 KRNU, the university's student radio station — and this summer he is retiring. He joins Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn Moore to trace a career that started in a high school radio program at KFOR and carried him through the ad world and back to the university, where he signed...

Mark Larson is the principal of Lincoln High School, a school in the core of the city with students from more than fifty countries and one of Nebraska's three International Baccalaureate programs. He joins Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn Moore to talk about what makes Lincoln High distinctive, the community partners who help meet students' needs, and the story behind the school's mascot, t...

What does it take to hold a community together? In this episode of Common Grounds, Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore sit down with Amanda Barker, head of community engagement at the Lincoln Community Foundation, to talk about the everyday work of connection. Amanda has spent her career as a connector across Nebraska tourism, Civic Nebraska, Beehive Industries, and the Mayor's office, and sh...

Andy Seiler never set out to become a storyteller. He arrived in Lincoln from Texas to attend Union College, briefly chased a dream of flying search-and-rescue helicopters, taught English in Prague, and found his real calling almost by accident — re-editing a lost Valentine's video for his brother and realizing he'd found the thing he loved to do. Today, Andy is the founder of the Good Lif...

Maggie Stuckey-Ross leads one of Lincoln's most visible public departments — Parks and Recreation — but her path there ran through Capitol Hill, the Arbor Day Foundation, and a childhood spent on the playground at Irvingdale Park. In this conversation, she walks Randy and Marilyn through the philosophy behind a parks system designed so that nearly every household in Lincoln sits within a ten-m...

Todd Ogden, better known around Lincoln as "Downtown Todd", joins Randy and Marilyn in the roasting room for a conversation about the city's most visible, and most ambitious, neighborhood. As President and CEO of the Downtown Lincoln Association, Todd has a hand in nearly every major project shaping the city's core: the O Street streetscape rebuild now underway, the long-planned...

What does it take to turn a moment of wonder into a life's work? For Gaylene Steinbach, it started with a box of chocolates her mother gave her — the most beautiful she had ever seen. She and her family of four cut each piece into quarters just to make them last. The flavors stayed with her. The curiosity never left. In this conversation recorded inside the roasting room at The Coffee Roaster,...

Bo Jones has spent more than 25 years building things in Lincoln, Nebraska. He founded True Built Construction and helped create Career Pathway, a platform now connecting students and employers in 49 states. Find every episode and experience The Coffee Roaster at coffeeroasterlnk.comIn this first episode of Common Ground, hosts Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore sit down with Bo for a conversati...