Power Station

There is a sea change underway in the social change and political activism arenas, and it is led by a burgeoning network of girls and women. A major force behind this transformation is Her Rising Initiative, a nonprofit founded by Cherie Animashaun who, as a teenager, was inspired to create a space for girls with aspirations to become changemakers. Its mission, to close the opportunity gap for gir...

I love speaking with leaders whose innate capacity for engaging communities and influencing progress in politics, policy and culture comes from their character and not just their title. Rafael Collazo, executive director of the UnidosUS Action Fund, the 501c4 sister organization of UnidosUS, our nation's largest Latino civil rights organization, is that leader. UnidosUS, the organizational champio...

This moment in America is living proof that the path to a just society requires the shedding of false narratives that demonize people and communities for social currency and political gain. These narratives influence how elected officials expend fiscal resources and which policies and regulations they enact. And it takes education, organizing and relationship building by nonprofits and people with...

Charlie Birney was way ahead of the curve when he became an early adopter of podcasting in 2012. His love of listening to and telling stories through this platform made the years of explaining to friends and family how to access them on an iPhone worthwhile. He started Launch Podcasts in 2014, and its purpose was not what you might expect. He was not interested in growing the audience or monetizin...

For Sophie Miyoshi and Helen Abraha, advocating for the rights of restaurant workers reflects their values and is also highly personal. Both started working in restaurants as teens and over time they experienced the isms and injustices that define the industry, from sexism and racism to immigrant exploitation and wage theft. They found a home at the Restaurant Organizing Collective DC where Sophie...

This president and his minions in Congress are relentless in their messaging about who counts as an American and what government owes to its people. And their narrative is rationalizing the elimination of policies and programs that we once embraced as being quintessentially American, in particular the education the education of our children. U.S. Department of Education Commissioner Linda MacMahon...

Despite all efforts to whitewash our nation's history, the truth cannot be erased. Case in point: In 1906, the first generation after slavery, African Americans created an extraordinary cultural, economic and entrepreneurial hub, dubbed Black Wall Street, in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. This thriving center of enterprise, where dollars spent circulated 9 to 30 times before leaving th...

When someone tells you their story, listening is an honor. It is an opportunity to connect to someone else's life experience, to recognize that we are all shaped by the inequities and privileges we are born into and that the consequences of both reverberate through families, communities and public systems. In the case of Courtney Stewart, my guest on this week's episode of Power Station, his story...

The story of Washington DC's Ward 8, Ward 7 and Anacostia specifically is often told, largely by people who don't live there, in terms of deficits, both in resources and the community itself. The truth is entirely different. It was home to the Nacotchtank's indigenous settlements in the 1700s, white Navy Yard workers in the late 1800s, when Black people were barred from living there, and became a...

Carlos Toledo, executive director of the Wanda Alston Foundation knows that the organization he leads, and the community it serves, are on the federal government's target list, but he will not allow the opposition to steal his joy. Instead, he stays laser focused on advancing his nonprofit's mission: providing housing, social services and a pathway to financial independence for homeless youth, pri...

The dizzying assault by this administration on our constitutional right to vote is memorialized in The Save Act, which has so-far failed in the Senate, and in state houses bent on disenfranchising Black Americans. My guest this week, Alex Ault, Senior Policy Council at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, expects to see more versions of legislation marketed by the White House and memb...

A conversation with John Yang, President and Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice reverberates with facts and feelings. To start, we talk about the recent Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship, an outcome of President Trump's preoccupation with erasing this foundational constitutional right. As John explains on this episode of Power Station, this impulse is rooted in t...

The data is unimpeachable. Homelessness is a national crisis and the numbers of people struggling to live without permanent housing is growing. The latest (2024) data from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) finds that 771, 480 people are currently unhoused, and 17,500 more are joining those ranks each week. As decades of research and people with lived experience tell us, endi...

There is a paradigm shift underway in how nonprofits are advocating for and with people diagnosed with shattering neurogenerative conditions. It starts with treating patients as experts, identifying their priorities for research and leveraging their abilities to forge powerful relationships in Congress, with federal agencies and at all decision-making tables. I AM ALS, a nonprofit founded by Brian...

We have reached a hopeful moment in the decades-long and hard-fought campaign for a housing policy framework that acknowledges the need for all Americans to have a safe and affordable place to call home. The national conversation about the housing affordability crisis is finally catching up to the mission that the National Low Income Housing Coalition was founded, in 1974, to advance. The Coalitio...

  A conversation with Dr. Tiffany Manuel, is illuminating, gripping and if you are engaged in meeting material human needs and advancing social justice, it is an instructive and energizing call to action. In this episode of Power Station, Dr. T shares how the practice she founded, TheCaseMade, empowers nonprofit leaders to reimagine how to be impactful changemakers in a profoundly divided America...

It speaks volumes when an urban planner, an expert in housing, community and economic development who has served in leadership positions in the federal government, national nonprofit intermediaries, and in a community-based Latino serving organization decides that his passion lies in working at the hyper-local level with communities that are often underserved and underestimated. Manuel Ochoa, my g...

We are all shaped by the neighborhoods we grew up in, from the cost and conditions of our housing to the bonds we formed within them and whether we had access to parks and grocery stores. And the data bears out that zip codes are more effective predictors of our well-being than our own genetic code. Improving neighborhoods that have been battered by extractive public policies, poverty and unsound...

What does it take to generate transformative changes to a criminal justice system that targets, harms and disempowers Black people? DC Justice Lab was founded to answer this question, to generate transparency and accountably in a city, our nation's capital, which relies on over-policing and surveillance to control its citizenry. Our Metropolitan Police Department, which is deployed at a cost of ov...

Rev. Christopher Zacharias is a powerful example of what it means, as Walt Whitman described, to contain multitudes. It starts with his religious calling and belief in engaging across faith traditions to advance equity and justice in communities where they have been denied. He uses his voice to call out policy decisions and corporate practices that harm communities of color and identifies the acti...

How do we maintain our well-being and motivation when our government is targeting entire populations for deportation and also the nonprofits that protect their civil and human rights? For Naznin Saifi, my guest this week on Power Station, the answer is clear. Her self-care is getting up every day and going to work. As executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center, Naznin l...

It may seem inconceivable given all that is happening in our nation but yes, tax season is here again. And while that is stressful and complex, particularly for those who have lost their jobs, from federal employees to nonprofit professionals and journalists, for lowest income Americans, filing taxes is a singular opportunity for financial empowerment. That is because of the Earned Income Tax Cred...

When a small group of incarcerated men within California's prison system decided to use their lives to uplift fellow prisoners, they launched what is known nationally as C.R.O.P., Creating Restorative Programs and Opportunities. They knew that 54% of those who are released from California prisons encounter a world they barely recognize and without adequate support and resources, will reoffend with...

In 2001, in the nascent days of the internet, activists came together to wrestle with a growing challenge, the impacts of an increasingly corporatized media ecosystem on communities of color. They set out to intervene in media and tech practices that harm people of color and reimagined how these sectors could better represent the aspirations of local communities. This led to the founding, in 2009,...

  We are experiencing an increasingly rapid erosion of civil and human rights in America. People with disabilities are one improbable yet frontline target. Their decades-long campaign to win protections in housing, employment and healthcare is now facing a shocking reversal of hard-won legal rights. As Theo Braddy executive director of the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL) says on this...