Power Station

Have you been to the 14th street corridor of Washington DC lately? It is a destination spot for upscale restaurants, furniture stores, galleries and newly constructed apartment buildings. If you venture to a leafy side street you will find a courtyard that leads to N Street Village, a local nonprofit whose programs and advocacy serve 2000 homeless and low-income women annually year. Many of these...

In 1980, James Abourezk, US Senator from South Dakota and the first Arab-American elected to Congress, founded the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. It is now the nation's largest grassroots nonprofit advocating for the civil and human rights of Arab Americans. With a small staff of lawyers, and community-based supporters in 50 states, ADC, under the leadership of Samer Khalef, represen...

An innovative nonprofit is requiring us to rethink our assumptions about who works in the digital economy. Byte Back, a DC based training organization led by the dynamic Elizabeth Lindsey, is shaking up the workforce and technology sectors by bringing non-traditional workers into the sectors. In many cases, these students have never used a computer or even had broadband access. So it follows that...

When Ali Noorani visited Honduras, he met migrants desperate to escape poverty and violence for presumed safety and opportunity in the United States. As Ali sees it, this administration's hateful rhetoric and treatment of immigrants is robbing our entire nation of its dignity. The Forum was launched in 1982 to coalesce civil rights organizations in advocating for a just immigration system. After P...

Do you envision think tanks to be old-school institutions far-removed from real life community experiences? Solomon Greene, Senior Fellow at The Urban Institute, will make you reconsider those assumptions. The Urban Institute was founded in 1968 by President Johnson to generate evidence-based strategies for ending urban poverty. It has evolved into an organization that partners with diverse stakeh...

As Sookyung Oh explains, Annandale, Virginia is much more than a destination spot for Korean BBQ and Pho. It is home to Korean and Vietnamese Americans and a new wave of Caribbean and African immigrants. Sookyung leads NAKASEC (National Korean American Service and Education Consortium) a grassroots organization with affiliate offices in Los Angeles, Orange County and Chicago. Its power building mi...

Eshauna Smith knows first-hand what it takes to break through barriers and achieve success. The eldest child in a family struggling with poverty, she forged a different future. This experience informs her leadership of Urban Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to helping young people from challenging backgrounds attain economic success. As Eshauna learned, having adults stand up for her was transforma...

The numbers are staggering: 70% of American college graduates carry student debt and our outstanding national student debt level now exceeds $1.5 trillion. A new report, Quicksand: Borrowers of Color and the Student Debt Crisis, authored by Center for Responsible Lending CRL) and the NAACP describes the scope of the problem, identifies which communities are most impacted and recommends systemic re...

Have you ever wished that a public agency official understood the problem you are trying to solve as a nonprofit leader? Tameka Montgomery, appointed by President Obama as Associate Administrator to the Small Business Administration's Office of Entrepreneurial Development, understands. She came to the position after creating a business incubator in Denver and leading its award-winning Small Busine...

Domestic violence, as Karma Cottman explains, is motivated by a drive to maintain power and control within an intimate partner relationship. It is abuse of power that is conveyed in many forms: physical, psychological, economic and coercion. Domestic upends families and traumatizes victims, including children who witness violence within their own households. And It is pervasive across boundaries o...

What does it take to eliminate housing discrimination and ensure equal housing opportunity? According to Lisa Rice, President of the National Fair Housing Alliance, (NHFA) it starts with recognizing that discrimination and inequity are rooted in federal policies, most fundamentally, residential segregation. The legacy of racist policies, from redlining to unequal access to credit, persists in comm...

Sunrise Movement is changing the conversation about this nation's climate crisis and what can be done to turn it around. It builds on the work of scientists and advocates who have long warned about the consequences of our reliance on fossil fuels, the inevitability of environmental degradation, and the influence of industry lobbyists on our elected representatives. And a surge of devastating wildf...

Liberation in a Generation is a new organization that takes a fresh, laser-focused and unapologetic approach to breaking down systems that oppress people of color and building an economy that raises them up. It is co-directed by Jeremie Greer and Solana Rice, whose vision for change is informed by their collective experiences as community and political organizers, researchers and policy advocates....

Let's start with this statistic: One in five Americans lives in rural America. And these communities are far more diverse than the archetypical bucolic New England town. They include tribal lands, the Mississippi Delta, border Colonias, and Appalachia where the legacies of injustice include barriers to the capital needed to build homes and multi-family housing. As David Lipsetz, CEO of Housing Ass...

When Paty Funegra was on Power Station one year ago, she told La Cocina VA's founding story and promised to return with an update on a new capital campaign. La Cocina VA was already training and certifying unemployed Latino immigrants as food industry professionals. The next step was to scale up the model, teach entrepreneurship, and serve a growing refugee population. La Cocina VA is now recogniz...

What makes health equity, the opportunity for all people to be healthy and thrive, possible? According to Dr. Brian Smedley, it starts with recognizing our nation's profound health disparities and the role of place and race in determining health outcomes. Data shows higher rates of mortality in communities of color where food options, quality of air, soil and the physical state of schools and hous...

Two dynamic forces have come together to create opportunity and equity in Washington DC's historically underserved Black neighborhoods. One is Martha's Table, a nonprofit whose mission is to support strong children, strong families and strong communities. It transforms the lives of Ward 5, 6, 7 and 8 residents through high-quality education programs, access to healthy food, and family support serv...

What does it take to unapologetically and intentionally show up in the world as your authentic self? How do you generate the cultural shifts required for all people to be free? These are thoughts that motivate David Johns in his leadership of the National Black Justice Coalition. David lives and works at the intersection of the Black and LGBTQ experience where these questions are fundamental to th...

As executive director of Groundswell, Michelle Moore leads with a deep conviction that solar power is an abundant source of energy that should also be a source of economic empowerment. She wants all communities to have access to clean energy and has developed a model for supplying it that has taken root in 5 states and Washington DC. Groundswell's Empower program enables market rate subscribers to...

Chris Lu has spent the last 20 years at the hub of federal policy making, including as Deputy Secretary for the US Department of Labor, and he is still a champion of public service. As he says, government matters: it builds our roads and bridges, creates the laws that protect veterans, keeps our homeland secure and our air and water clean. He is guided by a belief in the capacity of government to...

In Native American communities, conversations about building local economies start with a shared belief in tribal sovereignty. This belief is foundational to the Native CDFI Network, whose 50 nonprofit members based in 23 states, provide financial education, credit building, and make loans for housing and small businesses where traditional banks are not engaged. Jackson Brossy brings his experienc...

When we hear about a natural disaster our first thoughts go to saving people and then to saving homes, roads and infrastructure. We expect a rapid response by government and relief agencies and, hopefully, we volunteer to help. Chef José Andrés launched World Central Kitchen in the wake of Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake. He found his way to the island, listened to people struggling to survive...

Restaurant Opportunities Center, a nonprofit that advocates for restaurant workers to receive equitable pay and treatment. was borne in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. On that horrific day, 73 workers from the Center's iconic restaurant, Windows on the World, were killed and their co-workers displaced. Sekou Siby, a Windows on the World cook from th...

If you think that young people are disconnected from public policymaking, you need to reconsider your assumptions. United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led nonprofit in the nation is on the frontlines of advocacy and activism for undocumented immigrants. Staff and members are youth for whom immigration, detention, deportation, enforcement and citizenship are both personal and political. Th...

The National Skills Coalition was launched twenty years ago when public support for job training was lagging and both labor and business leaders were concerned about the resulting lack of job opportunities and readiness. NSC's is now bolstered by 28,000 members representing industry, labor unions, community colleges and Chambers of Commerce. As Amanda Bergson-Shilcock, NSC's Director of Upskilling...