Let’s Hear It

We’re back! It’s been an exhausting couple of weeks, and if you’re looking for a podcast to soothe your stressed-out soul, look no further than this episode featuring Daniel Lee, the Executive Director of the Levi Strauss Foundation. Daniel was raised in South Dakota, where his was only the second Korean family in the history of the state. His experience as an “insider and outsider” working with i...

We have a doozy for you this week. Kirk sits down with David Roberts, the outspoken energy and climate change writer for Vox, to talk about power, climate, and (Kirk’s favorite) conspiracy theories. David started writing in 2000 when he answered a Craigslist ad for a new environmental publication called Grist, and he has been blowing our minds ever since with his engaging writing on energy and cli...

If you missed ComnetworkV or if you would like to revisit that truly exciting week, you’re in luck. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting some of the highlights of the conference. We begin this week with a fascinating conversation with Alexis McGill Johnson, the President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Alexis sits down with Kristen Mack, Managing Communications Director a...

Susan Vandergriff walked away from a seventeen-year career as a banker because something was missing in her life. She went back to school, studied social work, and ended up with a part-time office manager job at a new organization called A Step Ahead Chattanooga, whose mission was to provide free reproductive health care to women who weren’t ready to become pregnant. In just a few years she was ru...

There are no excuses not to make it to ComNet this year – it’s free and it’s virtual. So you don’t have to leave the house and you can attend in your pajamas. Eric speaks with the Communications Network’s CEO Sean Gibbons about all the amazing keynotes, breakouts, and the annual Day of Service, which will give participants the opportunity to support a fair count of the US Census. And if you haven’...

Our cultural institutions shape how we view the world, and Javier Torres-Campos, the Director of the Thriving Cultures Program at the Surdna Foundation, is doing his part to help shape those cultural institutions for the better. Javier doesn’t just fund the arts, either. He is looking at how changes in city planning, design, and even architecture can help build a more equitable society. Javier and...

With so many people out of work and low on hope, we look to the leaders who are blazing new trails to success. Eric had the incredible luck to connect with Ruben Harris, co-founder of Career Karma, a startup that helps people network, learn, and find employment in tech. Ruben might as well be listed under the word “trailblazer” in the dictionary; in the wake of mass unemployment that has left this...

This week, Disinformation King Kirk Brown sits down with Renée DiResta, Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a multidisciplinary research center that works on understanding how information moves on the internet. Renée has written extensively on the topic of disinformation, much to the chagrin (or delight?) of comment trolls, and has recently done fascinating work on dis...

Sabeel Rahman is a leading progressive thinker, movement builder, convener, and collaborator whose specialty is linking big ideas to social change strategies.   Since 2018, he has been the president of Demos, an organization that was started in 2000 by progressive foundations that wanted to respond to right wing think tanks with a focus on progressive policy development and advocacy. One of its ea...

Unless you've been living under an extremely large rock for the past four years, by now you are well aware that the information we receive on a daily basis isn't always what it seems to be.   This week, Kirk interviews Nina Jankowicz, whose new book, How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict is a stark reminder that American democracy is under siege.   And if y...

In the past month, nonprofits and foundations across the country have made strong statements of commitment to racial justice, in particular to support the Movement for Black Lives. At the center of this work is an understanding that we need to create new narratives about what we want our future to look like and how we move forward. As we create these narratives, we will need to harness the power o...

We hope that you are staying well and healthy and safe. As we were thinking this week about what show to share with you, we kept returning to this conversation with Ben McBride that aired last year.   Ben is a pastor and activist who has devoted his career to healing and reconciliation. He lives in Oakland, California where he's the co-director of PICO California. We’ve been looking to Ben for wis...

Welcome to another episode of Let’s Hear It. We hope you are staying as physically distanced and emotionally connected as you can! This week, we had the honor of speaking with Dominique Derbigny, the Deputy Director of the Closing the Women’s Wealth Gap initiative and author of an extraordinary piece on the inequity of aid policy in the time of COVID. Dominique has previously worked with Prosperit...

You know that old saying “see a problem, it’s yours”? Alexis Madrigal and his colleagues at The Atlantic have taken that to extremes. As the coronavirus story was developing in early March, Alexis, a staff writer at The Atlantic, had trouble getting good data about COVID-19, so he and a few colleagues started the COVID Tracking Project. Little did he know that it would become one of the most relia...

Ann Christiano, the Frank Karel Chair in Public Interest Communications at the University of Florida at Gainesville, did not set out to be an academic. Before she came to the University of Florida, Ann spent more than a decade as a senior communications officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. But she has now truly made her mark in academia. She has helped build a discipline in public intere...

For those folks who are fortunate enough to be able to work in these challenging times, much of their time is spent staring at a screen in “meetings.” Many of these “meetings” involve what we can charitably call “presentations.” The chilling fact is that far too many folks are forced to endure presentations that look as if they were designed by sadistic engineers in a bunker in Seattle. The poor s...

Eric sat down with Saru Jayaraman five weeks and a lifetime ago. Few of us fully appreciated the implications of the COVID crisis at the time, but the conversation centers on the very issues the crisis has raised around service workers and equity. Saru is an attorney and activist who is changing the way our country treats workers who are forced to rely on tips to make a living. Saru’s CV is about...

Joanne Krell is the kind of communications expert you want in your corner when it matters most. She has led communications at the WK Kellogg Foundation AND General Motors, and when she talks, we listen. Joanne, who is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Defy Communications in Ann Arbor, Michigan, led a webinar hosted by the Communications Network that should be its own college course on how you...

We hope that all of our Let’s Hear It listeners are staying safe and socially connected while heeding prudent calls from public health experts to practice physical distancing. With the rush of news related to COVID-19, we checked in with two experts who have tremendous experience communicating during epidemics - Dr. Barbara Reynolds and Thomson Prentice. Both have impressive public health communic...

If you are ready for just a minor departure from COVID-related communications, we offer an interview with Shanelle Matthews, the founder of the Radical Communicators Network. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Shanelle founded the Radical Communicators Network, an organization that connects progressive communicators with research, meetings, and even an old-school listserv. She is also in the p...

No matter what you think of Bernie Sanders, there’s no question that he has become a powerful force in American politics. Near the center of that juggernaut is Ben Tulchin, the President of Tulchin Research, and our guest on this week’s episode of Let’s Hear It. Ben felt the Bern early in 2016, helping to turn the Vermont Socialist by way of Brooklyn – who was given to 90-minute stemwinding speech...

Eric interviews a truly great interviewer: Cinny Kennard, Executive Director of the Annenberg Foundation in Los Angeles. Cinny has had a long and fascinating career in the world of radio and television journalism. Her work includes coverage of the Anita Hill - Clarence Thomas sexual harassment controversy, the 1992 U.S. presidential election, the Persian Gulf War, and hundreds upon hundreds of int...

There are people who come along who don’t just change the way you think or how you do your job, but who just change you – they change the chemical makeup of your body. Professor john a. powell is one of those people. john a. powell is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties and a wide range of issues including race, structural racism, ethnicity, housin...

Thank you so much for listening to Let's Hear It. It's been a wonderful year, and we're so excited to kick off our second season. In this special episode, Eric and Kirk sit down to talk about their favorite Let's Hear It moments in 2019, what they've learned hosting and recording, and what they're looking forward to in this next year of podcasting. If you've ever had any questions about the podcas...

After spending a number of years in Oakland as a pastor, Ben McBride decided to move his family into a part of Oakland that was known for its challenges in order to better understand the lives of the people he hoped to serve. What happened next, as Ben tells Eric in our latest episode of Let’s Hear It, is not just great storytelling, it’s what makes Ben such a powerful AND delightful advocate for...