Power Station

Elyssa Feder remembers the moment she became an organizer. She was watching a debate on C-Span about the proposed defunding of Planned Parenthood and government officials were spouting lies to bolster their positions. She realized that their power shielded them from consequences and that she was not satisfied being a young woman in a food court who knew better. She honed her organizing capacities...

Some organizations really do lead with love. When Jeanne Manford joined her gay son Morty at the 1972 Christopher Street Liberation Day March her handmade sign declared, Parents of Gays Unite in Support of our Children. That message moved many young people whose families were not there for them. Jeanne went on to become the mother of a movement, PFLAFG, that unites families, their LGBTQ loved ones...

If you want to know how to protect and advance the rights of Latinos in Texas, ask Eric Holguin. A native son of Corpus Christi and Texas State Director of UnidosUS, the nation's largest non-partisan champion of Hispanic civil rights, he starts with the facts. Without the state's 11.4 million Latinos, who are critical to the workforce and especially well-represented in the civil service, energy an...

Today's headline stories about jobs and the economy focus on remote workers facing a return to offices and thousands of professional hired by tech companies to deepen their capacities for artificial intelligence and machine learning. More commonplace injustices are being challenged by a growing movement for livable wages and paid family leave, against racial discrimination and immigrant exploitati...

  Niciah Mujahid wants you know that your city's budget is 100% your business. As the dynamic executive director of Fair Budget Coalition, she leads a cohort of community-based nonprofits in advocating for a budget that invests in human needs and advances racial justice. Every aspect of this complex process, from analyzing budget proposals to engaging residents in testifying at budget hearings to...

Tram Nguyen, co-executive director of New Virginia Majority, is reframing how to think about progressive change making in politically polarizing times. She pushes back against the deeply embedded belief that those working for social justice and racial equity are in a lonely uphill battle against a fierce anti-democratic majority in her state and throughout the nation. Tram believes that the multi-...

As Felipe Pinzon says, not enough Americans know how nonprofits change communities. His own organization, Hispanic Unity of Florida, provides a master class in how transformative change in marginalized communities is made. It started in 1982, when residents recognized that immigrants arriving in South Florida needed help to manage the many complex transitions they faced. Hispanic Unity became a sa...

There is intention and beauty in the naming of The Person Center. Its founder, Amelia Missielidies, wanted the women she served, survivors of domestic and sexual violence who were African immigrants and refugees to recognize the value of their personhood. As an Ethiopian and a social worker, Amelia understood what American service providers could not, that the experience these women shared: war, c...

  Are you, your nonprofit, and the community you serve being seen and heard? What if you could communicate the story of your nonprofit, the inequitable conditions you tackle, the public policies you advocate and your solutions for uplifting people and communities? In this episode of Power Station, I am joined by Oscar Zeballos, CEO of Podville Media, a fellow podcasting evangelizer whose partnersh...

Where are our nation's most effective and committed changemakers? You may expect them to be representing us on Capitol Hill or launching start-ups in Silicon Valley but the real champions of opportunity and equity, from poverty alleviation, upending the racial wealth gap and creating a pathway to generational wealth are nonprofit leaders. On this episode of Power Station, two exceptional leaders,...

  Public narrative is about the story of me and the story of us. This is how Sandy Dang, an expert and educator in the field describes its essence. On this episode of Power Station, we explore the power of public narrative to communicate our values and lived experience and to tell the collective stories of our communities. Sandy came to this field, which trains individuals in how to distill their...

If we have learned anything from the last several years, it is that while we have shared collective pain, a global health crisis, economic freefall, mass shootings, and political discourse so fractured we cannot agree that democracy is a core value, the impacts of these events have landed starkly unevenly. The data shows what progressive nonprofits know: low income, people of color, immigrants, an...

  At its core, the N Street Village story is one of humanity, resistance, and advancing racial and housing justice. It began in 1972, when Pastor John Steinbruck opened the doors of Lutheran Place Memorial Church, at the center of Washington DC's embattled 14 th street corridor, to women and children in need of shelter and care. It was 6 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, a de...

When you live with racial injustice as a child and have parents who encourage your intellectual curiosity and impulse to advocate and serve you know what it means to live your values. In this episode of Power Station, Ty Hobson Powell describes a childhood in Washington DC marked by the loss of close friends to gun violence, limited access to resources, from grocery stores and parks, and resilient...

The roots of racism in America run so deep they even determine who benefits from life extending clinical trials. This truth guides Dana Dornsife in advocating for equitable access to medical treatment, which should be but is not, a standard of care in our medical system. When Dana's brother-in-law Mike was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she immersed herself in enrolling him in a clinical trial....

If you are a nonprofit leader who thinks about fundraising with the same intensity that you bring to tackling your mission, this is your episode. Chances are you have been denied the level of funding needed to scale your most impactful strategies or turned down for general operating support, which enables you to deploy resources as needed. In this episode of Power Station, we explore what happens...

  The acrimony in Congress and across the country reflects competing visions for America's future. This is less a policy debate than a heated referendum on who is entitled to hold power in America. State legislatures are on a fast track to curtailing the rights of communities of color, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ people. Asian American Pacific Islanders, representing 50 ethnic groups, and speakin...

As a child born at the end of the 1960s, inspired by The Jetsons, Keith Jones dreamed of becoming an aeronautical engineer and taking vacations on the moon. He was part of the first generation to come up after the most powerful mass movement in American history led to passage of Civil Rights Acts prohibiting discrimination in voting, housing, education, and employment based on race, disability, re...

What happens when a well-resourced Community Development Financial Institution with a track record of $3B dollars in investments takes steps to become a measurably more racially equitable and power building nonprofit in the Black and Brown communities it serves? In Power Station's first episode of 2023 I explore that question with Lucy Arellano Baglieri, one of the community development sector's m...

How do you look back on 2022? It's been a year in which political, digital, and sometimes physical assaults on the civil and human rights of Americans by their fellow citizens have become commonplace. From book banning and public demonization of LGBTQ youth to partisan campaigns to undo voting rights in Black and Brown communities to criminalizing homelessness and protecting assault weapons over p...

Every civil rights law enacted in America is preceded by a past we have not fully reckoned with. The Civil Rights Act of 1968, following the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, was an antidote to the racism embedded in state and national policy making, from segregationist zoning laws to bank and insurance redlining. Known as the Fair Housing Act, it prohibits discrimination in housing bas...

If you have lived through the harrowing experience of eviction and the long slide or quick jolt into homelessness or advocated for those who have, this conversation with Marisol Bello is a tribute to you. It is critical listening for journalists who report on homelessness without fully grasping the nuances of the insurmountable gaps between low wages and spiraling rents. It is for politicians with...

What will you do when your community is under assault? In our increasingly fractured society, in which elected officials demonize marginalized people and threaten violence when elections don't go their way, this is a question based in reason, not hyperbole. Hate crimes in the form of mass shootings have become a regular feature of American life. For Nadine Bridges, executive director of One Colora...

It takes a powerful amalgam of dynamics to produce a groundbreaking book. This is what Brandi Collins Dexter, lawyer, researcher, activist, and stand-out nonprofit advocate has achieved with the publication of Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future. She takes on, with curiosity, deep personal investment, and an openness to views she may not share, the reasons for and con...

How is your mental health? Schroeder Stribling, President and CEO of Mental Health America, believes we should all live in the open about our stories and support one another when we are challenged. She is inspired by Clifford Beers who founded Mental Health America in 1909 to dismantle the system of institutionalization of those, like him, who suffered from mental illness. MHA embraced Clifford's...