This is a great conversation with my dear friend Robyne Walker Murphy, nationally recognized art and social justice educator and Executive Director of Groundswell, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that brings together artists, youth, and community organizations to use art as a tool for social change. We discuss the role of nonprofits in helping communities all across the country move forward following the craziness of 2020, as well as the question of whether we are ultimately heading in a more equitable direction as a sector and as a country.

This is another incredible conversation with a dear friend Kemi Ilesanmi, who has spent 20+ years as a cultural innovator and leader, helping to create a world in which artists and creativity are manifest as powerful agents for positive community change. Kemi is the Executive Director of The Laundromat Project, which advances artists and neighbors as change agents in their own communities. We discuss the power of hope in the face of fears, how the world has been opened up since the pandemic began, and how important collective problem-solving and collaboration will be in building a more equitable next normal.

This is a fantastic conversation with Tarik Ward, Director of Music Programs at ELMA Philanthropies. The sustainability of nonprofits is always a question on the mind of organizations, but 2020 made it an even more pressing one. We discuss maintaining the sustainability of nonprofits in practice as well as how philanthropy can often play an unconscious role in disadvantaging black and brown led organizations. Tarik believes that if philanthropy as a whole can continue to evaluate its relationship with grantees and how success is measured, institutionalized bias can be rooted out and we can move forward towards greater equity.

In this episode we speak with Katy Rubin, an artist, facilitator, and founder of Theatre of the Oppressed NYC. As a nonprofit, Theatre of the Oppressed NYC partners with communities that face discrimination to spark transformative action through theatre. For the last decade, Katy has dedicated herself to illuminating the power that disenfranchised communities truly have. As a white leader, Katy has grappled with her position of power and how much space she does, and should be, taking up. We discuss questions of power dynamics, who gets to pose those questions, and how to re-shape systems for the next normal.