Power Station: The Social Activism Podcast for Progressive Non-Profits

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.