Episodes

  • Crushing Medical Debt: The Movement to Revolutionize Healthcare Access

    Crushing Medical Debt: The Movement to Revolutionize Healthcare Access
    Jan 8 2025
    In the United States, medical debt isn’t just a financial burden; it’s a reflection of deeper systemic inequities that force individuals to take on “survival debt” — debt incurred just to meet basic needs like health care. Today, Mayor Carter joins us alongside Allison Sesso, the Executive Director of Undue Medical Debt, to explore how cities can lead the charge in addressing medical debt — and what it means to rethink our systems of care, equity, and economic justice.
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    33 mins
  • Reckoning with the History of Community Development

    Reckoning with the History of Community Development
    Dec 18 2024
    Today, we nod to the past while paving a new way forward for the future of anti-racist community development. This episode explores the layered history of American community development and the policies that have shaped — if not torn — the fabric of our communities.

    If we're going to achieve community development that is actually anti-racist, a baseline understanding of its history is not only a prerequisite.

    To build that fundamental understanding, Third Space Action Lab's Anti-Racist Community Development research project documents some of the early exclusionary government policies that shaped U.S. communities and responses of community development, from the Federal Home Loan Bank Act of 1932 to the Housing Act of 1949.

    In today's episode, we hear from Tonika Johnson, a social justice artists visualizing the arc of community development in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood (read more about her Folded Map art project) and historian Claire Dunning, an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and author of “Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State.”

    “The ways that federal housing policy is being designed and implemented is enabling white families to build equity, and Black families, if they're able to buy housing, are not able to build equity at the same rates or in the same kinds of ways,” says Dunning, whose research focuses on how nonprofits have used and critiqued government funding to develop alternative responses to urban problems. “It's just more expensive to occupy housing as a Black family … as a result of the ways that the government has intervened.”

    This sponsored episode was produced in partnership with Third Space Action Lab. Its Anti-Racist Community Development research project was developed with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. To learn more about strategies for advancing practical, concrete change in the sector, visit The People's Practice.
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    51 mins
  • Repairing Democracy Beyond the Ballot Box

    Repairing Democracy Beyond the Ballot Box
    Dec 4 2024
    Participating in elections is just one part of civic engagement. The many other ways of influencing your community and public policy are arguably the greatest difference to rebuilding trust.

    Healing democracy was never going to happen with an election. In this episode, we discuss real ways to go beyond the ballot box and engaging people as we restore trust in government and in city leadership, based on our recent webinar on the same subject.

    “A colleague at a conference I was at earlier this year said, 'In city government, we hear so much about creating an environment that's good for business. What about creating an environment good for democracy?'” says Tom Borrup, co-editor of the new book “Democracy as Creative Practice: Weaving a Culture of Civic Life.”

    In this episode, we hear from Borrup; Phoebe Bachman, a Philadelphia-based artist, curator, and facilitator from The People's Budget; April De Simone, founder of The Practice of Democracy; Next City collaborator Richard Young, founder and executive director of CivicLex; and Pam Bailey, the editor of the Beyond Elections section at Proximate, a new nonprofit newsroom covering public participation and democratic innovations.
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    28 mins
  • What The Election Means for Cities

    What The Election Means for Cities
    Nov 20 2024
    In this special episode, Next City’s editorial leaders share what they’re hearing from readers and listeners about resisting setbacks at the federal level and driving changes locally.

    The days following the U.S. presidential have been defined by an overwhelming sense of uncertainty, despair and even fear from urban changemakers working in local government, non-profit organizations, philanthrophy, grassroots advocacy and organizing, and beyond. While their work will be more important than ever, many are saying, it seems like it will also be more difficult than ever.

    In this week's episode, we're joined by Next City's editorial director, Deonna Anderson; our managing editor, Aysha Khan; and our senior economic justice correspondent, Oscar Perry Abello. They're discussing the results of a few recent ballot initiatives across the country; what concerns and responses they're hearing from readers and sources; and what gives them hope that local change is still possible regardless of the election results.

    “City officials, mayors, local governments, state governments – they have a lot of levers that they can be pushing that will make their residents lives better in tangible ways, where they can enshrine protections of their vulnerable communities,” Khan says. “The systemic issues at a federal level have to be addressed. But there are also systemic issues at a local level that can be addressed and literally transform people's lives.”
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    38 mins
  • On Making Appalachia Safer from Climate Change

    On Making Appalachia Safer from Climate Change
    Nov 6 2024
    “There's that R-word that wants to come up that I despise – resilience,” says Tiffany Sturdivant, executive director of Appalshop, a media, arts and community economic development organization that's been operating in the Kentucky mountains for more than five decades.

    “People are so strong….I think that's probably a testament to mountain people, right, or people anywhere who are disenfranchised and are just working with what they have. Use what you have until you can get more.”

    When you think about climate issues, your mind might go first to the coasts and rising sea levels. But climate issues in the middle of the country are also urgent – and the solutions being forged offer lessons for all of us, urban and rural alike. Appalachia reminds us that no matter where we’re from, our futures are linked—and we’re better when we work together to solve shared challenges.

    That's a critical lesson we took away at this year’s Vanguard conference in Kentucky, where we brought together 40 emerging leaders in urban Lexington and rural Berea to learn from the region's innovators and gain fresh perspectives. Today's episode features Kelsey Cloonan of Community Farm Alliance; Chris Woolery from the Mountain Association; Sturdivant from Appalshop; Baylen Campbell with Invest Appalachia; and Jeff Fugate, Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky, who works closely with communities on urban planning and development. Together, they unpack the ways communities here are addressing the impacts of climate change, while also honoring Appalachian values and strengths.

    This episode is part of the series we're bringing you from this year's Vanguard conference in Lexington, Kentucky, where our theme was exploring the dynamics of urban-rural interconnection.
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    46 mins
  • What Lexington Taught Us About Urban-Rural Interconnection

    What Lexington Taught Us About Urban-Rural Interconnection
    Oct 30 2024
    In today's episode, we're bringing you highlights from our conversations at this year's Vanguard conference in Lexington, Kentucky, where our theme was exploring the dynamics of urban-rural interconnection – not urban-rural divisions.

    We will explore how communities are stronger when we stand in solidarity, and when we learn from each other's experiences.We'll hear from Mandy Higgins, Executive Director at the Lexington History Museum; Mark Lenn Johnson, president of Art Inc. Kentucky; as well as Jim Gray, the former two-term Mayor of Lexington and Kentucky's current Secretary of Transportation, who went from living in a small town to leading the growth of one of the state's largest cities. With a population of over 320,000, Lexington is a model for how urban and rural can coexist, collaborate and thrive.
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    29 mins
  • Revisiting Lexington - "This ‘Big Town’ Has Solutions for Cities Everywhere"

    Revisiting Lexington - "This ‘Big Town’ Has Solutions for Cities Everywhere"
    Oct 23 2024
    This week, we’re revisiting an episode we released earlier this year, all about Lexington, Kentucky — a city where collaboration and creativity are transforming challenges into opportunities. In this episode, we highlighted how Lexington’s leaders are finding ways to foster nonpartisanship, boost civic engagement, and narrow the racial wealth gap.

    We’re bringing this episode back now because it offers a window into the themes we explored in even greater depth during our Vanguard conference, held in Lexington just last month. Over the next couple of weeks on this podcast, we’ll be sharing special episodes that bring you along with Next City to the conference.

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    28 mins
  • Why Urban Farms Should Be Taken Seriously

    Why Urban Farms Should Be Taken Seriously
    Oct 9 2024
    In Newark and across Essex County, New Jersey, urban farms do more than grow food — they're strengthening a community. But advocates say that convincing the state and local governments that these farms are worth investing in has not been easy.

    “At a local level, most urban farms, they don't own their land. It's borrowed from the city's adopt-a-lot program,” says Kimberly Izar, Next City's Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Segregation, who has reported for us on urban farming in the region. “At any point, that means that the city can take away the land in favor of, let's say, like a luxury developer. Another thing is that the vast majority of New Jersey municipalities don't have zoning laws specifically for urban farms, which makes it really hard for your average urban farmer to carry out their operations.”

    To combat these challenges, Newark-based urban farming advocate Fallon Davis – who founded the education nonprofit STEAM Urban and its urban farming progam, and who heads the Black and Brown Indigenous Immigrant Farmers United – is working on a critical new set of policy recommendations for uplifting local urban farmers of color.

    “For black farmers, we don't have a right to farm in New Jersey. We're not even covered and protected” by the USDA's Right to Farm Act, which only covers farms with more than five acres, Davis argues. “And that is extremely discriminatory.”

    Read Izar's original reporting, published in collaboration with The Jersey Bee as part of our series on segregation in Essex County, here.
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    33 mins