Podcast
Power Station
Hosted by Anne Pasmanick · EN
Power Station is a podcast about change makers. Each episode features a nonprofit leader whose organization is leading progressive change in underinvested and overlooked communities.
32episodes
Episodes
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Building relationships makes it possible to know what business owners are experiencing
Mar 1600:39:34Tap to summarizeIt 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.
Transcribe →Our communities don't need saving, they need investment, trust, and the rights tools to shape their own futures
Mar 900:40:14Tap to summarizeWe 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.
Transcribe →The Face of DC's Justice System is Black
Mar 200:32:09Tap to summarizeWhat does it take to generate transformative changes to a criminal justice system that targets, harms and disempowers Black people? DC Justice Lab was founded to answer this question, to generate transparency and accountably in a city, our nation's capital, which relies on over-policing and surveillance to control its citizenry. Our Metropolitan Police Department, which is deployed at a cost of over $500,000,000 annually and for which there is very little oversight, has most recently abetted federal ICE agents in carrying out unlawful detainments. This overcriminalization of Black and Brown people is not what DC Justice Lab envisions as public safety. In this episode of Power Station, DC Justice Lab's CEO Clinique Chapman shares how her team, a powerhouse cohort of social workers, lawyers, and policy experts invite community members to identify the changes that they believe will strengthen neighborhoods and protect families. She brings a powerful and personal lens to this mission. As a social worker who has worked with young people in the court system, brought corrections officers and incarcerated people to a common table to reimagine a system that diminishes all of them, Clinique truly is changemaking in action.
Transcribe →He made a pledge of more than $2B dollars to Black businesses and the Black community
Feb 2300:35:05Tap to summarizeRev. Christopher Zacharias is a powerful example of what it means, as Walt Whitman described, to contain multitudes. It starts with his religious calling and belief in engaging across faith traditions to advance equity and justice in communities where they have been denied. He uses his voice to call out policy decisions and corporate practices that harm communities of color and identifies the action steps needed to produce solutions. Rev. Zacharias is grounded in his position as Senior Pastor of the John Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church in Washington DC, an historic pillar of America's civil rights movement. On this episode of Power Station I speak with Rev. Zacharias about his interconnected roles as Executive Director of Interfaith Action for Human Rights, whose legislative campaigns are designed to stop the overuse of solitary confinement in prisons within DC, Maryland and Virginia and his leadership of Boycott Target DC, a coalition organized in response to Target's rejection of its DEI programs and $2.5B commitment to Black businesses after the 2025 election of Donald Trump. Momentum is building for each, and corporate and public leaders are paying attention. Rev. Zacharias invites us all to exercise our passion and purpose.
Transcribe →We can no longer say that the federal government won't use that against you
Feb 1600:32:22Tap to summarizeHow do we maintain our well-being and motivation when our government is targeting entire populations for deportation and also the nonprofits that protect their civil and human rights? For Naznin Saifi, my guest this week on Power Station, the answer is clear. Her self-care is getting up every day and going to work. As executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center, Naznin leads a small cohort of attorneys in representing a diverse population speaking over 100 languages with critical housing, immigration, family law and domestic violence concerns. Staff are all first generation Americans who understand the language, cultural and increasingly, the political barriers that Asian Pacific Islanders, especially recent arrivals in America, face when seeking help with systems that are unfamiliar to them. The Center represents the community in multiple municipalities, each with distinct administrative and court processes. A current challenge is that clients are afraid to leave their homes to go to court and seek justice. And Naznin cannot guarantee their safety, a heartbreaking reality in these times but the Center is there for them, always. Despite the challenges there is joy in and celebration of their victories.
Transcribe →A family that earned up to $69,000 in 2025 may be eligible for up to $8,000 in a tax credit
Feb 900:43:11Tap to summarizeIt may seem inconceivable given all that is happening in our nation but yes, tax season is here again. And while that is stressful and complex, particularly for those who have lost their jobs, from federal employees to nonprofit professionals and journalists, for lowest income Americans, filing taxes is a singular opportunity for financial empowerment. That is because of the Earned Income Tax Credit, added to the U.S. Tax Code in 1975, our most powerful tool for lifting lowest income wage earners out of poverty. I cannot imagine a conversation about solutions to economic inequality, through public policymaking and community education, without Joseph Leitmann-Santa Cruz, my guest, again, on Power Station. Joseph recounts how transformative these dollars, which are earned and not charity, are for these families. We commiserate over the cruelty of the latest White House executive order, which makes receiving those benefits exponentially more difficult. Joseph shares how this administration's efforts to undermine the right of all communities to prosper informs his nonprofit consulting and role with the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. As always, he is driven by a belief in family, his own and all of ours.
Transcribe →When I was sentenced to life and arrived at prison I couldn't help but go within
Feb 200:36:16Tap to summarizeWhen a small group of incarcerated men within California's prison system decided to use their lives to uplift fellow prisoners, they launched what is known nationally as C.R.O.P., Creating Restorative Programs and Opportunities. They knew that 54% of those who are released from California prisons encounter a world they barely recognize and without adequate support and resources, will reoffend within three years. In this episode of Power Station my guest is Terah Lawyer, the extraordinary leader who, as president of CROP, is demonstrating the power of systems and culture change in real time. Terah brings her lived experience with incarceration, academic grounding and deep commitment to her community to the design and implementation of Ready 4 Life, an innovative campus-based reentry initiative that is proving to be transformative. It trains and places participants in substantive jobs with meaningful wages, provides secure housing and invests in each person's personal development, from taking accountability to honing leadership skills. Terah honors the nonprofits, formerly incarcerated leaders and champions like Gov. Newsom and the California State Legislature who are investing in the potential and humanity of those who are striving for a productive second chance. A story that needs to be heard.
Transcribe →The deportation machine that has been unleashed in our communities would not be possible without tech companies like Palantir
Jan 2600:38:58Tap to summarizeIn 2001, in the nascent days of the internet, activists came together to wrestle with a growing challenge, the impacts of an increasingly corporatized media ecosystem on communities of color. They set out to intervene in media and tech practices that harm people of color and reimagined how these sectors could better represent the aspirations of local communities. This led to the founding, in 2009, of Media Justice, an organizing, education and field building organization that has generated significant wins, from passage of the nation's first facial recognition ban to another first, limiting the rates that families of incarcerated people could be charged for phone calls. As Steven Renderos, my exceptional guest on this episode of Power Station explains, where 25 years ago the villains dominating the field were Clear Channel and Comcast, they are now the tech oligarchy, billionaires whose influence is weakening our democracy and extracting local resources. But the public, in these harrowing times, is waking up and taking action. First-time protesters are showing up at public hearings to speak out against the economic and environmental harms of data centers. And Media Justice is powering their activism, developing leaders and connecting them across our nation.
Transcribe →They want to round up people with disabilities and put them in institutions
Jan 1900:39:43Tap to summarizeWe are experiencing an increasingly rapid erosion of civil and human rights in America. People with disabilities are one improbable yet frontline target. Their decades-long campaign to win protections in housing, employment and healthcare is now facing a shocking reversal of hard-won legal rights. As Theo Braddy executive director of the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL) says on this episode of Power Station, discrimination against and the oppression of people with disabilities is largely invisible in our society until it happens to us. And because we are all aging into disability, we face a steep learning curve and a responsibility to become advocates for ourselves and others. That is the ethos that guides Theo's leadership of the NCIL, the longest running disability-led association in the nation. Its membership is comprised of some 660 centers across the county that empower people with disabilities to thrive in their communities and Statewide Independent Living Councils that are mandated to create independent living plans. This powerful movement now faces Executive Orders that call for mass institutionalization into nursing homes and the US Department of Justice's failure to enforce the Americans with Disability Act. Theo Braddy has a different plan. Hear him!
Transcribe →We pride ourselves in bringing technical solutions to human problems
Jan 1200:35:22Tap to summarizeWhen Kat Guillaume-Delemar was six years old she was already an engaged community member. When a fire took the house next to her apartment building, she wondered about the elderly woman who had lived there and whether a new home would replace hers. As often happens in disinvested neighborhoods, that space became a vacant lot that remained the same for decades. Kat now leads the Center for Community Progress, a national nonprofit that brings technical solutions to human problems and failed systems, specifically bringing community-defined purpose to vacant, abandoned and/or deteriorated structures across the United States. As Kat explains on this episode of Power Station, Community Progress partners with municipalities and community leaders who have experienced the trauma associated with deteriorated and dangerous conditions and have a vision that will serve and strengthen their neighborhoods. These successes are not often highlighted in the media, but they are happening, nonetheless. The wins include the passing of progressive housing policies, the creation of affordable rental units, increased homeownership, centers for the arts and a beautiful park where an elderly woman's home once stood. Kat brings heart, expertise and tenacity to making a more equitable America. Hear her.
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