Moral Courage Radio

The movement to Stop Cop City is what democracy looks like in motion. The version of democracy embodied by the Stop Cop City movement calls into existence a robust, deep, and profound system that centers on agency, participation, and self-determination. If it’s going to work, democracy must be responsive to the people’s needs, rather than elite interests. But, instead of creating channels to hear...

The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. It’s right there in the name: Public Safety. The facility known to its opponents as “Cop City” is pitched as an essential investment to train officers to better protect the public from harm. However, marginalized communities often experience policing as a threat to their safety and a source of harm. Which raises the question, whose safety do police office...

In Episode 2 of At the Root, we explore the environmental advocacy of the movement to Stop Cop City through the words of Dr. Jackie Echols of the South River Watershed Alliance, Matthew Johnson and the Forest Defenders, and Belkis Teran, the mother of Manuel Esteban "Tortuguita" Teran, the first environmental defender killed by law enforcement in United States history.

In Episode 1 of At the Root, we learn about the history of the forest and hear from Reverend Keyanna Jones and the ways in which Cop City presents a troubling set of threats: environmental harm, militarized policing, racial injustice, and the quality of democracy itself.

This is the trailer for the fifth season of Moral Courage Radio, At the Root: Policing and the Right to Protest.

In the final episode of the fourth season of Moral Courage Radio, we learn from Noni Session, third generation West Oaklander and founder of the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, who insists that we can reorient our relationship to market forces by building power together.

In a volatile housing market, lenders, investors, and landlords determine who can afford to live where. To counter instability and profit motives, some of Oakland’s local organizations take a permanent and communal approach to land and housing, using the community land trust model to keep land off the market and in community control in perpetuity. In this episode we hear from Shekinah Samaya-Thoma...

Forced from their homes and banned from the streets, Oaklanders are struggling to find a place to survive. In this episode, we hear from John, a resident of Cob on Wood, an unhoused encampment supported in part by a local organization, Artists Building Communities.

Gentrification is an act of erasure against the cultural character of a neighborhood. In this episode, we hear from people working to protect and preserve the historical legacies of places they hold dear.

In the first episode of our fourth season, we meet Oaklanders who teach us about how their communities are confronting the market forces that render housing security out of reach for so many.

This is the trailer for the fourth season of Moral Courage Radio, "UnHousing: Claiming the Human Right to Home"

In the epilogue to Season Three, we hold space for the life and memory of student team member, Jillian Parker.

In the season finale, Water Warriors show us the way forward: by challenging power, building together, and fighting for democracy.

The stories we have told so far obviously ignore the first nations of these territories, the first stewards of the rivers, the lakes, the forests, and the mountains. As the original Water Warriors, indigenous people remain active in the struggle for environmental protection.

Women have always lead the way on environmental issues, including in the fight for water in Flint, Detroit, and Appalachia, because of the inherent connection between care for family, for community, and for the natural world.

How do we talk about the way that race and class shape access to water in the United States? Our storytellers in this episode illuminate this question by detailing how their personal and cultural histories drive their work for clean and affordable water.

In the second episode of the season, we share the timeline of events that lead to the water crises in Flint, Michigan and Martin County, Kentucky. One central through-line in both stories points to how science and knowledge were manipulated and ignored at the outset, but were harnessed by citizens in defense of their own well-being.

This episode connects environmental health to human health through an introduction to several key voices from the frontlines of the fight for water in Flint, Detroit, and Appalachia.

This is the trailer for the third season of Moral Courage Radio, "Poison and Power: The Fight for Water."

In the final episode of our season, we hear from fronterizas who show us the way forward -- as a nation -- by committing to what's right, fighting for what they believe in, and making a difference in their community.

As we lurch from crisis to crisis and headline to headline, organizers and activists on the US-Mexico border dig in with a long-term strategy to build a foundation that supports the dignity and consciousness of immigrant communities.

At Hugs Not Walls, families separated by border policies get three minutes to reunite, embrace, and then return to their sides and their lives apart.

In this episode, we learn from community leaders on the US-Mexico border who express their faith in public by living in solidarity with the poor and the migrant.

This episode documents ways in which the border interrupts love and human connection, while also making it necessary for people to rethink and reform what it means to be a part of a family.

Episode one of "America the Borderland" focuses on the struggle to obtain a quality education on the border, particularly for students who are immigrants and children of immigrants.