I had the distinct pleasure to sit down with two leading voices from the Congress for New Urbanism this past spring for a frank conversation on our current housing crisis. Their different ages and life experiences offer us a wealth of perspective to learn from and leverage. Let’s dive right in to learn together in order to better each of our efforts to solve the issues of housing in America. Todd Zimmerman and his partner Laurie Volk founded Zimmerman/Volk Associates four decades ago, to address...
Jul 09, 2025•50 min•Season 12Ep. 192
Are We Here Yet? Host Scott Graves chosen profession was as a performing artist. In this episode he pays tribute to two of his idols who recently passed away, Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone fame and Brian Wilson, songwriter and member of the California iconic Beach Boys.
Jul 03, 2025•12 min
When you connect with a born to be entrepreneur you know it. In our experience we place all creatives; the artists, the dreamers, the community builders in this category of human experience. Our guest for this two part episode exemplifies what we’re talking about. In a little more than an hour, Ron Rivers and co-hosts Scott Graves and Ryan Munn explored Ron’s development of digital solutions for aiding mission-driven organizations, really community building in Web3 that is meaningful to the huma...
Jun 24, 2025•52 min•Season 12Ep. 191
When you connect with a born to be entrepreneur you know it. In our experience we place all creatives; the artists, the dreamers, the community builders in this category of human experience. Our guest for this two part episode exemplifies what we’re talking about. In a little more than an hour, Ron Rivers and co-hosts Scott Graves and Ryan Munn explored Ron’s development of digital solutions for aiding mission-driven organizations, really community building in Web3 that is meaningful to the huma...
Jun 24, 2025•31 min•Season 12Ep. 190
It was a high point for co-hosts Ryan Munn and Scott M. Graves when they were joined last week by AIGO.AI founder Peter Voss. Peter’s a long-time innovator, founder, advocate and thinker concerning Artificial Intelligence(he coined the term artificial general intelligence) whose insights shared with us are making us think further, dig deeper into our own advocacy for the best use of AI in order to realize a benefit to a maximum spectrum of the worlds’ population. This is your opportunity to inve...
Jun 18, 2025•58 min•Season 12Ep. 189
Host Scott Graves is once again joined by Stephen Box, Scott’s partner in Partners in Housing, small scale housing developments in Vermont and columnist under the column header, the accidental activist. Stephen is also our co-host for The Housers Podcast. Stephen and Scott explain for listeners how a more aggressive approach to building market rate housing in the US could benefit the affordable housing market. Our ideas are backed by research including the data we offered in the UpJohn Institute...
Jun 05, 2025•53 min•Season 12Ep. 188
Vermont isn't just shrinking in population, its aging. The state has 30,000 fewer working age citizens between 25-40 then it did 25 years ago. This, while modest population gains during the Covid-19 pandemic has reversed. For those of us at the Innova802 Crew, we see the effects every day. Many citizens on fixed incomes, who represent a larger share of the population, cannot afford increases to taxes for education, infrastructure and public healthcare subsidies. For many, the gut reaction is to ...
May 08, 2025•51 min•Season 11Ep. 187
Open Innovation has become essential to good science being completed by our institutions. Our guest this week, Steve Rader speaks with experience on how open innovation, rather crowdsourcing has and will shape good science work moving forward. Steven recently retired from NASA and is an expert in open innovation after 36 years with NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX. We discussed his experiences leveraging crowdsourcing and open innovation to achieve significant cost savings and acc...
Apr 29, 2025•49 min•Season 11Ep. 186
Sharing the mic with Interchain.Live and fellow Innova802 crew member Ryan Munn brought Richard Lowe to our virtual studios for a discussion regarding Rich’s experience as a ghostwriter and author in his own right. The discussion quickly deepened to include his perspective on building the bionic worker: getting business to leverage tech to support workers as opposed to leveraging tech to replace them. The importance of leveraging older workers who are living longer and what experienced professio...
Apr 22, 2025•49 min•Season 11Ep. 185
Host and founder Scott Graves is asking some tough questions for all of us to ask in our own communities. How do we get beyond a place of manufactured scarcity and support all forms of private and public housing development to meet our middle market needs? Find Scott’s Latest Essays from An Artist Audio recording on The Housers Podcast and the Are We Here Yet? Podcast . Find his housing advocacy work, along with Housers Stephen Box and Mike Waugh at partnersinhousingvt.com....
Apr 09, 2025•7 min•Season 11Ep. 184
Athens, GA is home to Building, Inc and founder Matthew Schneider. Matthew is no stranger to a multi-disciplinary approach to solving some of the toughest challenges for real estate developers and tech leaders alike. Our discussion hit upon some real-world solutions-oriented work he and his team has done and sage perspective on software use in real estate, on raising and using capital, on building your business to be truly market-responsive.
Mar 18, 2025•55 min•Season 11Ep. 183
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani has spent 20+ years working to understand what’s in a neighborhood by asking the question, ‘Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood?’ In her 2024 book, The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places Viani walks us through the tours she participated in from dozens of her neighbors in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn and Mosswood in Oakland, CA, two cities she and her family spent time getting to know intimately. As a photographer, urbanist a...
Mar 09, 2025•43 min•Season 11Ep. 182
Hosts Ryan Munn and Scott Graves are joined by Justin Loranger of web3iam in what we’re sure you’ll find to be an excellent primer on why blockchain is the key to transforming crypto into accepted currency, offering security and stability. Why should you anticipate the value of your name and that of your company in the digital realm? Lots to learn for building our rural economies (you don’t need to be in a city to leverage this tech to your benefit). In collaboration with Interchain Live and M t...
Feb 25, 2025•57 min•Season 11Ep. 181
Production notes: Please add the following voiceover to end: Do download your copy of ‘Pioneer Valley Knowledge Towns Strategy Proposal’ go to https://www.smgravesassociates.com§/whitepages/ Dominic Endicott joins us for a second time on the AWHY? Podcast to discuss a white paper co-published by Dominic and AWHY? Host Scott Graves, detailing a $100 billion dollar strategy for transforming the regional economy for Massachusetts, specifically the western third of the Commonwealth. By focusing on t...
Feb 06, 2025•44 min•Season 11Ep. 180
Host Scott Graves is joined by fellow Vermont houser Stephen Box of Rutland. Our discussion focused on both the local discussion and a more global look at how parking is affecting housing in all of our communities in the United States. Stephan, a loyal resident recently received a parking ticket in front of his own house due to a winter parking ban (we know you listeners in Florida are scratching your heads). And our city is in the midst of discussion around a greenway parking ban to keep the si...
Jan 24, 2025•52 min•Season 11Ep. 179
And in today's episode we show you some of the leading examples today. We end our season ten with host Joan Watson Jones look into some of Jazz’s unsung heroes. Women representing a wide range of ethnic and social backgrounds have always been vital to the jazz community. With that said, most folks focus on the jazz vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald , Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughn . In this Jazz Room we look to the women as instrumentalists and largely from current times including Carol Sudhalter ...
Dec 24, 2024•30 min•Season 10Ep. 178
As we enter the winter solstice, exploring the dark that inevitably comes before the light, we’re considering new ways to think about gifting, yes, and what of commerce? What of a community that reverses the epidemic of loneliness pervasive in our modern society? Can we do better? That’s up in the latest Are We Here Yet? Podcast to close season X and 2024. I’m joined by Veronica Mangio, founder of the Minneapolis-based Gifting Grove and once again by my good friend from Grand Isle County, Vermon...
Dec 19, 2024•53 min•Season 10Ep. 177
Neil Mylet is a do-er. He’s a farmer, a tech advocate and connecting rod. Neil is also putting his money and his talents where his mouth is, funding his own project, Camden Castle and ensuring a wide spectrum of top-tier programming and connections for his 600 neighbors in the village of Camden, Indiana. Neil sees great opportunity in a future rural economy leveraging AI, blockchain, among other tech and tech-enabled products and services yet to be developed. Students and their families from thi...
Dec 13, 2024•56 min•Season 10Ep. 176
We joined Ace McCarleton of Vermont-based New Frameworks to talk about their panelized building innovations for the housing marketplace. New Frameworks practices high performance natural building towards the construction of climate justice and regeneration. Innovation is expressed in their home construction products and processes, their sourcing of materials, for sure. But it’s also in their employee-ownership model, their steadfast dedication to inclusion and more. Learn in two episodes their o...
Dec 02, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 10Ep. 175
We joined Ace McCarleton of Vermont-based New Frameworks to talk about their panelized building innovations for the housing marketplace. New Frameworks practices high performance natural building towards the construction of climate justice and regeneration. Innovation is expressed in their home construction products and processes, their sourcing of materials, for sure. But it’s also in their employee-ownership model, their steadfast dedication to inclusion and more. Learn in two episodes their o...
Nov 27, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Season 10Ep. 174
Glavel is a construction materials company manufacturing foam glass gravel, or in company parlance GLAVEL. CEO Rob Conboy sat down with the Innova802 crew to discuss what it took to bring this technology to market in the US. How are they leading in recycling and carbon sequestration, excellence in innovative construction materials how they plan for growth and what effect they can have contributing to solve the housing crisis. We recently toured their facility and give credit to the Glavel team f...
Nov 21, 2024•50 min•Season 10Ep. 173
Lou Donaldson passed away on November 10, 2024. In a career spanning more than seven decades, the alto saxophonist began as a stylist devotee to the bop of Charlie Parker, quickly evolving into a soulful and bluesy player which became his signature. Joan Watson Jones, host of the AWHY? Music feature The Jazz Room sat down to interview Lou in 2020 at Studio 952 in Harlem, New York City. In Part 1 of their interview Lou tells us how he got started in the business and why he took up the Saxophone. ...
Nov 17, 2024•58 min•Season 10Ep. 172
Our music feature, The Jazz Room returns for a feature of the great American composer George Gershwin. Host Joan Watson Jones features many great musicians from a long list of recordings featuring the work of George Gershwin, one of the most prized composers of the American song book. For jazz musicians, Gershwin represents an endless source to be mined to create great improvisations and has been for over a century.
Nov 14, 2024•31 min•Season 10Ep. 171
Our guest is Noah Harper. I met Noah at the CNU New England conference in Providence, RI. We were tasked by the organization to debate whether the Congress is positioned well as a leading voice in the current housing challenge before us all. Thus sparked some great discussion. Explore Noah's Substack here Noah has been featured in Strong Towns. He is a community planner for the firm J.M. Goldson. Noah is a strong advocate for incremental development and we're sure you will find inspiration in hi...
Nov 06, 2024•53 min•Season 10Ep. 170
We’ve had the pleasure of featuring Baritone Saxophonist Claire Daly twice in the AWHY? Music feature, The Jazz Room. Host Joan Watson Jones first sat down with Clare at Studio 952 in New York City to talk about her CD "Baritone Monk", recorded at the North Coast Brewing Company. In our second interview Claire spoke to Joan regarding her recording, "The Mary Joyce Project-Nothing to Lose" which tells the story of her father's cousin Mary Joyce who crossed Alaska on dog sled alone in the mid 1920...
Oct 30, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 10Ep. 169
Our guest, Andrew Fitch is Communications Manager for Lever , a Venture Capital Source pioneered by founders and government in the city of North Adams, MA. The last decade or more has seen a resurgence in young professionals rediscovering opportunities in the western half of Massachusetts. Opportunities in housing, urban development, entrepreneurship and life crafting. Much of Andrew’s time is focused on developing the capacity of the Mass Founders Network , centered in North Adams. Along with o...
Oct 23, 2024•34 min•Season 10Ep. 168
Kendall Fortney is an artist and designer based in Vermont who is currently the Program Director for UVM's VERSO the open-source program centered at the University. Kendall spoke with the Innova802 crew on the power of the open-source community in shaping a society that delivers human-scaled, beneficial solutions in technology. Find out more regarding the resources and community at VERSO VERSO offers a vibrant community of problem solvers engaged in their accelerator. Find out more by clicking h...
Oct 17, 2024•47 min•Season 10Ep. 167
For our latest Are We Here yet? podcast we offer four perspectives sure to keep you contemplating on this upcoming Indigenous People’s Day. Our Season III guest Doug Harris, retired archivist for the Narragansett Tribe spoke to us regarding New England’s Ceremonial Stone Landscape for episodes 87 and 88 . We feature two clips here, the first focused on answering the question, ‘what is this place and who are we?’ The second which ends our podcast focuses on his groundbreaking work alongside Smith...
Oct 11, 2024•52 min•Season 10Ep. 166
CEO Kimmerly Nace is dedicated to changing the narrative on how we see our waste. She’s passionate about making this planet, or rather making its people work better for a sustainable planet for all of us, creatures large and small. Imagine a world where our toughest waste issues become some of our most profitable revenue centers? Literally turning problems into profit; using our existing financial incentives for good and not greed. We spoke about her team at Brightwater Tools of Brattleboro, VT ...
Sep 28, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Season 10Ep. 165
Startup founders: today’s audio plat savoureux from the Innova802 crew focused on our guest Matt Cropp, executive director of the Vermont Employee Ownership Center (VEOC). We discussed why you need to consider your future exit now at the onset of your enterprise and why you should take a serious look at forming an employee-owned enterprise and how. The history of tech and tech enabled companies since the post WWII years is a history of equity sharing so it’s often a short walk for companies to c...
Sep 25, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 10Ep. 164
