You may not envision the YWCA as fighting on the frontlines of racial and gender justice, but you should. For 162 years, the YWCA has advocated for women and children who are survivors of domestic and sexual violence. And it has lived its stated values. In 1946, the YWCA became the first fully racially integrated organization in the nation. 50 years ago, it adopted a mission statement as its beacon: Eliminating Racism, Empowering Women . Its network of 200 associations, rooted in cities, suburbs...
Oct 26, 2020•30 min
Words matter. We rely on them every day to express our thoughts and connect with others. And when our intent is to use our words to move people, in policy and political campaigns, how we construct them to create winning messages, is profoundly important. It obliges us to do more than echo out the urgency we feel based in years of work on issues from housing to immigration to health care, or for a candidate whose election we see as crucial. What resonates for us may have a distinctly different an...
Oct 19, 2020•44 min
How can a powerful organization deepen its impact? For the National Resources Defense Council, our planet’s protector and champion of clear air and water, it starts with looking inward. At a time of national reckoning with structural inequity, NRDC is reevaluating its own practices through a lens of race, equity and justice. As Angela Manso, National Outreach Director, explains, this is challenging and vital work. Communities of color are harmed at disproportionate rates by contamination, pollut...
Oct 12, 2020•36 min
Thirty days out from the 2020 election, America is grappling with the casting our vote and being counted in the most important election of our lifetime. COVID19 has made in-person voting possibly life-threatening and voting by mail is being manipulated by a president who is profoundly threatened by this democratic franchise. For many, however, barriers to voting go far deeper. Millions of returning citizens, Americans who have served time and come home, are now barred from the ballot box. In Flo...
Oct 05, 2020•40 min
If Americans learn any collective lesson in 2020, it should be that until we face our history of marginalizing whole populations, we will not be a true democracy. Social uprisings around the country demonstrate that racism is structural and is seared into our public systems. People with disabilities experience structural inequity daily. Until 1974, so-called “ugly laws” forced those perceived to be “maimed” to be removed from public view. It is moving to learn that the Americans with Disabilitie...
Sep 28, 2020•56 min
To see how deep the impacts of COVID19 and racial inequity go, take a look at Flushing, Queens. With a population that is 70% Asian, it is also New York City’s fourth most congested business district. It appeared, pre-pandemic, to be a bustling neighborhood of working people. In reality, incomes for many were so limited they relied on food pantries to feed their families. Many now have no incomes at all. The truth, as John Park, executive director of the MinKwon Center for Community Action expla...
Sep 21, 2020•32 min
It takes more than pundits and politicians to create a more just society. Change happens when those who have been hurt the most stand up to demand justice and craft solutions. And it takes nonprofits with courage and the infrastructure needed to leverage power. This is the formula embodied by Partnership for Southern Equity, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that is building an equity agenda for the American south. As PSE’s founder and Chief Equity Officer Nathaniel Smith sees it, the path to equity is...
Sep 14, 2020•34 min
Did you know that the Lower Ninth Ward had the highest rate of homeownership in New Orleans, pre-Hurricane Katrina? And that the devastation of those homes and displacement of their African American owners was caused by breeches in levees that are still in disrepair 15 years later? Or that tens of thousands of those owners remain displaced from their own city? Unlike most cities grappling with a housing crisis, there are 19,000 vacant units in New Orleans. The fact that landlords have withheld t...
Sep 10, 2020•37 min
As we navigate extraordinary challenges, from COVID19 to the implosion of our economy, we can see which of us are truly essential workers. We rely on doctors, nurses, mail carriers and grocery store workers, but do we recognize those whose labor literally sustains us? Farmworkers, working 12-14 hours a day, often in unsafe conditions, harvest the strawberries, blueberries, lettuce and other crops that, if we are fortunate, grace our tables. Many are immigrants who have been targeted by a relentl...
Aug 31, 2020•32 min
As the saying goes, when you need something done, ask a busy person. This is definitely the case with Gilda Cobb-Hunter, who represents Orangeburg County in the South Carolina State Legislature. She also directs a nonprofit serving victims of family violence. And she is president of the National Black Caucus of State Legislatures, which creates community among policy makers of color. Now she is advocating for legislation that, if adopted across state legislatures, could transform policing entire...
Aug 24, 2020•50 min
Food insecurity is our government’s somewhat clinical term for hunger, or in bureaucratese, a lack of access to the food needed for a full and active life. Hunger is an everyday reality for poor and working families in the nation’s capital and its surrounding suburbs, one of the wealthiest regions in the country. And in the shadows of COVID19 and a staggering loss of jobs and income, hunger is growing exponentially. Imagine what it takes for the Capital Area Food Bank to provide 30 million meals...
Aug 17, 2020•38 min
Eddy Morales has an amazing story to tell and he wants it to be your call to action. The last of 9 children and the first born in the United States to a single mother from Mexico, he has faced hardship first hand. He was influenced by his mother’s fearlessness and compassion, values that guide him now. In college, he made the connection between his childhood and systemic injustices that oppress people of color. In his next chapter, he was recruited to Washington DC to lead the US Student Associa...
Aug 10, 2020•43 min
It should not take a pandemic and an uprising spurred by police violence against Black men and women to generate a national reckoning with racism, but here we are. If we want this moment to spark transformation, we need to crack open the full body of evidence about how non-White people are perceived and treated in America. And we need organizations like the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, that build power in communities made invisible by bias. Jennifer Wang, lawyer, strategist and...
Aug 03, 2020•45 min
In this moment of national reckoning with racism, important truths are unfolding. For those who resist the reckoning, the truth starts with recognizing that since America’s founding, our leaders, from the White House to Congress, have passed laws to benefit them at the expense of African Americans and other people of color. By enacting segregationist housing policies, excluding Black veterans from the benefits of the GI Bill, and denying mortgage loans in communities of color, the nation’s racia...
Jul 27, 2020•38 min
Ten years ago, a group of friends, young professionals of color, began to incubate ideas to improve the lives of low-income people in Los Angeles. As the children of immigrant parents who worked hard only to subsist on the economic margins, they knew that systemic barriers to opportunity had to be dismantled. From the criminalization of being undocumented to the lack of access to bank loans, the proverbial American Dream left their communities out. They launched a nonprofit, Inclusive Action, th...
Jul 20, 2020•33 min
I like to think that I choose my words carefully. I use terms like community organizing and movement building to describe a set of actions taken to meet social goals. But I realize that language that speaks to my own experience may ring hollow for others. Enter Mark Winston Griffith, who embraces the challenges of language and the hard, nuanced and unrelenting work of organizing and movement building in Central Brooklyn. He formed the Brooklyn Movement Center 10 years ago to reinvigorate what ha...
Jul 13, 2020•39 min
A conversation with Steve Choi begins with his upending of assumptions about which immigrants and refugees live in New York State and where. It provides a view into how the New York Immigration Coalition, the nonprofit he leads, mobilizes 200 member organizations to influence local and state policy making. And it includes a review of the toll these tumultuous times are taking on immigrant communities. We associate immigrants with New York City, which remains a constant, but there are over 1 mill...
Jul 06, 2020•30 min
The best nonprofits tackle what lies beneath the economic and social wrongs that rock= our nation. They organize, litigate and advocate to undo discriminatory policies based on race, immigration status and sexual orientation. More recently, nonprofits, including The National LGBTQ Task Force, are using an intersectional prism to guide their advocacy. Intersectionality, a concept developed by scholar Kimberlee Crenshaw, refers to our overlapping identities, which shape how we view the world and h...
Jun 29, 2020•29 min
How are young people processing the chaos of the current moment and how can we support them? We are all confronted by circumstances we did not foresee and cannot control. COVID19 has pummeled this nation, robbing low-wage workers of their jobs and far too many, of their lives. And the killing of George Floyd, a Black man at the hands of police officers, catapulted us into protests that continue today. The sense of uncertainty is palpable. But we are adults and have at least some agency over our ...
Jun 22, 2020•35 min
It took years of activism by community leaders before Congress enacted the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977. This legislation was meant to undo decades of discrimination by banks against African Americans, Latinx and other non-white people seeking mortgages and small business loans. It required banks to lend and made them accountable to community interests. As Paulina Gonzalez-Brito explains, redlining create the predatory lending industry, which continues today. As executive director of the C...
Jun 15, 2020•27 min
Self-determination is a deeply embedded value within the National American Indian Housing Council. It is the driving force for its members, leaders from 570 tribes who advocate for the housing needs of American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians in 32 states. The shortage of affordable housing is a national crisis and is even more nuanced in native communities. Tribes own and manage their own housing stock and must navigate many levels of municipal, state and federal governance. And th...
Jun 08, 2020•31 min
Our democracy is imploding and that is not hyperbole. Across the nation, communities are protesting the murder of an African American man by a White police officer who carried out this execution under the watchful eyes of devastated onlookers, including a young woman who captured the images on her phone. And the pandemic that is ravaging communities of color is by no means over. How can ambitious champions of change be effective in these times? The best social change nonprofits are advocating fo...
Jun 01, 2020•27 min
If you want to understand why the United States has the most expensive and worst performing health care system among developed countries, in terms of access, equity, efficiency, and outcomes, you have a unique and vital resource in Families USA. For forty years, this national nonprofit has investigated every aspect of our broken bureaucracy, from the cost of prescription drugs to the politicization of Medicare to the implicit bias deep within our delivery systems. And it has used this understand...
May 25, 2020•34 min
While we worry about how to restore our democracy, Jonathan Mehta Stein knows that in disenfranchised communities, many people feel that democracy has never worked for them. This is the starting point that Jonathan, the newly appointed executive director of Common Cause California, embraces. He is a civil rights attorney who believes that at this moment in time, relying on litigation and legislation alone is not enough. He argues that we need more community organizing to inspire those who have b...
May 18, 2020•33 min
Small businesses have been devastated by COVID19, and by extension, so have their owners, workers and communities. We are talking about true small businesses, not Shake Shack or Ruth’s Christ Steak House. Their role in our economy is so significant that Congress appropriated federal funding for them through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) within the CARES Act. This moment underscores the importance of federal investment in small businesses that meet needs in underserved communities. The mo...
May 11, 2020•32 min
Can we ensure that the Decennial Census, our most inclusive civic enterprise, will not become a casualty of the COVID19 pandemic? The answer is unfolding in real time. Nonprofits have spent years mounting campaigns to combat an historical undercount in communities of color, of children, immigrants and LGBTQ people. Fortunately, some people and organizations, thrive in challenging times and that is definitely the case with Lizette Escobedo, who directs the Census 2020 campaign for the National As...
May 04, 2020•30 min
Gallup polls indicate that Americans have lost confidence in Congress, the courts and the media but one institution, the library, remains a trusted resource. Libraries provide access to books, computers, literacy classes, and social services, often in partnership with nonprofits. And while we may perceive libraries as static, they are evolving organizations. In fact, the American Library Association, in conjunction with national civil rights groups, spent 2019 preparing to become the go-to resou...
Apr 27, 2020•31 min
We are all uncertain about life in an ongoing global pandemic. We know that conditions are most dire for those who have lost family members, jobs, and housing. And this time is dizzying for nonprofits and think tanks whose mission is to improve the quality of life for the most impacted communities. The issues they have worked on for decades are suddenly leading the national conversation. As Co-Executive Director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Georgetown University, Indivar Duta-Gupta...
Apr 20, 2020•38 min
In 110 Power Station episodes, one consistent theme resonates: The ability to advance progressive change is based in intentionality. It starts with documenting inequities, analyzing who is impacted, building a constituency of impacted people, and advocating for the policies and resources required to achieve systemic change. Rebecca Sive is a change maker. She champions women’s leadership in politics, corporations and nonprofits. As she points out, no sector, including nonprofits, is immune to th...
Apr 13, 2020•29 min
As a nation, we are learning, in real time, how to function and survive in a pandemic. We look for national leadership rooted in integrity and competence. And we are finding that, not in our president, but from governors, mayors, medical professionals and, while less recognized, nonprofit leaders. Nonprofits continue to serve communities, even in a lock-down. Housing groups are organizing online for spending bills that support lowest-income renters, homeless people and shelter providers. Nonprof...
Apr 06, 2020•29 min
