When someone tells you their story, listening is an honor. It is an opportunity to connect to someone else's life experience, to recognize that we are all shaped by the inequities and privileges we are born into and that the consequences of both reverberate through families, communities and public systems. In the case of Courtney Stewart, my guest on this week's episode of Power Station, his story is his calling. It informs his leadership as founder and CEO of the National Reentry Network for Returning Citizens, a community based nonprofit that offers a continuum of care, from meeting material needs to skill building for the workforce and criminal justice reform advocacy and one-on-one sessions that support mental health. As with the most powerful stories, Mr. Stewart's is not entirely predictable. The neglect and harms he experienced as a child and his very early entry into the system could have continued to traumatize him. Instead, he encountered adults who poured into him, a practice he continues with others today. And he shares how inadequate and short-term funding levels challenge nonprofit progress. This is his story to tell, listen!

The story of Washington DC's Ward 8, Ward 7 and Anacostia specifically is often told, largely by people who don't live there, in terms of deficits, both in resources and the community itself. The truth is entirely different. It was home to the Nacotchtank's indigenous settlements in the 1700s, white Navy Yard workers in the late 1800s, when Black people were barred from living there, and became a hub of African American arts and activism, post white flight, in the 1960s. And while the community has been historically underinvested, its people are resilient. Even today, for example, there are only 3 full-service grocery stores available to some 160,000 residents. Investing in people and communities, as we know, is a policy choice. As my guest Tiffany Williams says on this week's episode of Power Station, "it's not a matter of can we, it's a matter of will we." As President & CEO of Martha's Table, which has served the community for 45 years, Tiffany has stewarded in a new and transformative era which includes community members in its program design and priority setting. She is a truly great human and a changemaking leader. Hear her!

Carlos Toledo, executive director of the Wanda Alston Foundation knows that the organization he leads, and the community it serves, are on the federal government's target list, but he will not allow the opposition to steal his joy. Instead, he stays laser focused on advancing his nonprofit's mission: providing housing, social services and a pathway to financial independence for homeless youth, primarily Black and Latino, who are queer and trans. Many of these young people have been rejected by their families, the first step into homelessness and interaction with the criminal justice system. What they receive from the Wanda Alston Foundation must feel like magic. It starts with acceptance and love from staff, volunteers and the city itself, whose DC Mayor's Office of LGBTQ Affairs launched the Wanda Alston Foundation and continues to champion young people whose intersectional identities make them particularly vulnerable in this moment. In this episode of Power Station, Carlos talks about the legacy of Wanda Alston, the embracing LGBTQ+ community that supports its work and how his experience on the Harris Walz campaign trail that prepared him for the countless roles and responsibilities of nonprofit leadership. Hear HIM!

The dizzying assault by this administration on our constitutional right to vote is memorialized in The Save Act, which has so-far failed in the Senate, and in state houses bent on disenfranchising Black Americans. My guest this week, Alex Ault, Senior Policy Council at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, expects to see more versions of legislation marketed by the White House and members of Congress as voting security, a solution to a problem that does not exist. He points to the influential community, this nation's 8,000 poll workers and election officials who have argued, successfully, that their ability to administer fair elections would be jeopardized by requiring documentary proof of citizenship, that would exclude married women with name changes and trans people from voting. We look back at the origin story of the Lawyers Committee, launched in 1963 after President John F. Kennedy called upon private bar attorneys to leverage their collective clout to fight for civil rights. The call to action reverberates today. And Alex shares the origin story that makes him a powerful champion for justice.

A conversation with John Yang, President and Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice reverberates with facts and feelings. To start, we talk about the recent Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship, an outcome of President Trump's preoccupation with erasing this foundational constitutional right. As John explains on this episode of Power Station, this impulse is rooted in the desire to control who should and should not be considered an American. We are seeing this play out in real time in immigration sweeps and detention centers across the country. And while we do not see a lot of reporting about this, the birthright citizenship issue has a disproportionate impact on Asian Americans. In fact, about 1 in 25 people in the community would be impacted by an adverse ruling. But when John talks about birthright citizenship and his organization's broader civil and human rights mission, he is not advocating for Asian Americans alone. He collaborates with African American, Latino and LGBTQ organizations to advance together towards a more just America for all. This value of inclusion runs deep within John and is embedded in AAJC's strategies and programs. Hear him!

The data is unimpeachable. Homelessness is a national crisis and the numbers of people struggling to live without permanent housing is growing. The latest (2024) data from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) finds that 771, 480 people are currently unhoused, and 17,500 more are joining those ranks each week. As decades of research and people with lived experience tell us, ending homelessness requires a massive increase in the affordable housing supply, policies that position low-income renters to stay in the housing they have, and the resources needed by on-the-ground homeless service providers to meet human needs and strengthen communities. And a culture shift is underway. Policymakers and the public are increasingly aware that homelessness is the outcome of broken systems and not of personal failings. On this episode of Power Station I talk to Ann Oliva, the incomparable CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness about leading, with the long view, in unstable times. She shares how the Alliance deploys policy advocacy, research, capacity and movement building to make possible a future where all of us are housed. As Ann says, the Alliance is non-partisan, but it is not neutral.

There is a paradigm shift underway in how nonprofits are advocating for and with people diagnosed with shattering neurogenerative conditions. It starts with treating patients as experts, identifying their priorities for research and leveraging their abilities to forge powerful relationships in Congress, with federal agencies and at all decision-making tables. I AM ALS, a nonprofit founded by Brian and Sandra Wallach after Brian's diagnosis at age 37, is reinventing the playbook for how to approach finding a cure and treatment for a condition that is both devastating and 100% fatal. Brian and Sandra, who met on the Obama presidential campaign trail, are applying their experience with political organizing and mobilization to the eradication of this disease. In this episode of Power Station I speak with Andrea Goodman, the exceptional CEO of I AM ALS, about how a patient-centered organization is achieving robust investments in medical research by Congress and greater cross-pollination of ideas and resources among previously siloed scientific institutions. Andrea views herself as a facilitator of the people, organizations, and institutions whose expertise, resources and compassion are critical to delivering a cure. We can learn so much from the sea-change that I AM ALS is leading.

We have reached a hopeful moment in the decades-long and hard-fought campaign for a housing policy framework that acknowledges the need for all Americans to have a safe and affordable place to call home. The national conversation about the housing affordability crisis is finally catching up to the mission that the National Low Income Housing Coalition was founded, in 1974, to advance. The Coalition advocates for and with lowest-income renters, who are the most severely cost-burdened tenants, and ensures that their voices are centered in policy debates. Congress is on the cusp of passing the 21st Century Road to Housing Bill, the largest housing legislation in a decade, a supply-side strategy for addressing a wholly insufficient supply. In this episode of Power Station I speak with Renee Williams, Senior Advisor for Public Policy at the Coalition about the non-supply provisions of the legislation that are most promising for low income tenants, including administrative solutions to housing voucher and disaster recovery programs. While the Coalition endorses the bill, it has concerns. Increased supply comes with consequences, from unaffordability to displacement. Implementation with integrity is key to success. The Coalition continues to move the conversation forward.

A conversation with Dr. Tiffany Manuel, is illuminating, gripping and if you are engaged in meeting material human needs and advancing social justice, it is an instructive and energizing call to action. In this episode of Power Station, Dr. T shares how the practice she founded, TheCaseMade, empowers nonprofit leaders to reimagine how to be impactful changemakers in a profoundly divided America under an administration that is aggressively dismantling civil and human rights. She brings her academic grounding in the social sciences and deep experience in the nonprofit housing and community development sector to a practice of creating narratives that invites neighbors, policy makers and even former detractors to become organizational champions. Dr. T applauds the bold and unbowed nonprofit leaders who have the humility and desire to do what it takes to shift mindsets, to win small victories on the way to the generational project that is narrative change. And she reminds us that these leaders, who do not submit to demoralization, bring the energy we all need into every room and conversation. Dr. T's books, The Case Made and Fast Track should be required reading for all determined and open hearted change makers! https://www.thecasemade.com

It speaks volumes when an urban planner, an expert in housing, community and economic development who has served in leadership positions in the federal government, national nonprofit intermediaries, and in a community-based Latino serving organization decides that his passion lies in working at the hyper-local level with communities that are often underserved and underestimated. Manuel Ochoa, my guest on this week's episode of Power Station, launched Ochoa Urban Collaborative in 2019 to support the change making aspirations of marginalized communities in the US and globally. He shares his contributions to the Purple Line Corridor Coalition, a public-private and community partnership, supported by the University of Maryland's National Center for Smart Growth, whose mission is to ensure that the state's largest transit investment is designed and implemented with equity as its North Star. Manuel focuses on the scores of small businesses along the Corridor, mostly immigrant owned, that managed to survive the pandemic and are now navigating an economic downturn and the White House's anti-immigrant agenda. And we talk about the role of the arts in community development and more personally, in Manuel's life.

We are all shaped by the neighborhoods we grew up in, from the cost and conditions of our housing to the bonds we formed within them and whether we had access to parks and grocery stores. And the data bears out that zip codes are more effective predictors of our well-being than our own genetic code. Improving neighborhoods that have been battered by extractive public policies, poverty and unsound housing conditions has been the cornerstone of the community development sector for decades. The sector has progressed in its technical ability to finance projects perceived as risky and at its best has evolved by requiring that redevelopment is rooted in the vision of community residents. Putting community first is the ethos of Neighborhood Allies, a nonprofit community development intermediary with a difference. In this episode of Power Station, I speak with its exceptional leader Presley Gillispie, who brings a full gamut of personal and professional experiences to this endeavor. Its goals, lifting 100,000 Pittsburghers up the socio-economic ladder in the next decade are ambitious, but achievable. And it means everything that Neighborhood Allies sees mental health as foundational to a strong community and actively invests in connecting residents to resources.