This week, we elevate our season one conversation with Natalie Burke that addresses one central question: how does racism harm us all?

We welcome one of our own to Mission Forward this week: inclusivity advocate and graphic designer, Eleni Stamoulis. Her voice is welcome counsel ensuring that the projects that we take on at Mission Partners are as inclusive and accessible as possible.

Democracy Fund’s Najma Roberts joins Carrie Fox to talk about the role professional communicators hold in guiding and demonstrating institutional values to the world.

Tim Hykes is a designer, user interface consultant, and host of the Unconference Podcast. Today he joins Carrie Fox to talk about design as a means of communication and equity.

Ashton Lattimore joins Carrie Fox to talk about her role as Editor-in-Chief at Prism, an independent nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color.

Nimra Haroon joins Carrie to talk about the key themes that will drive the interviews in Season 4 of Mission Forward as the show turns to assess the power, privilege, and responsibility in the field of communications.

We're a few weeks out from releasing season four, but we wanted to share a bonus episode with you today featuring an awesome communicator in his own right, Timothy Hykes, of the Unconference by Design+Diversity podcast.

Alicia Bell is director of Media 2070. What started as a research essay detailing the role that media has played in anti-black racism and harm has grown into a free press and a growing consortium of media makers and activists, collectively working toward media reparations.

Our guest this week is Mia Birdsong: pathfinder, community curator, and storyteller, who steadily engages the leadership and wisdom of people experiencing injustice to chart new visions of American life. She has an extraordinary gift for leveraging the brilliance of everyday people so that our collective gifts reach larger spheres of influence, cultural and political change, and create well-being for everyone.

Our guests this week, authors Todd Newman and Emily Howell (together with Dominique Broussard), present their insights into the messengers and their messages that constellate to keep us unhealthy.

Getting resources to organizations truly doing front line work involves challenging entrenched ideologies and engaging leadership often marginalized in philanthropy: people of color. And so it is a group of funders and organizers of color who founded the organization, those who know best how to poke at philanthropy's power problem. One of the leaders of this charge is our guest today: Iara Peng, founder and CEO of JustFund.

Linda Villarosa is a brilliant storyteller, a journalist author, editor, and educator. She's a New York times magazine contributing writer where she covers race, inequality, and health. She joins us today to talk about just how far our public health system has to go on issues of equity and inclusivity.

This is going to be a season of perspective-shifting conversations that will touch on faith, media, the economic recovery, and the role of philanthropy. We start this week with a big picture conversation with our new co-host, Natalie S. Burke.

A few weeks back, we reached out to a group of CEOs and business leaders with a very big request: join Carrie and Alex Orfinger of the Washington Business Journal for an honest, on-the-record, uncomfortable conversation about the anti-racist commitments and statements we have made over the last twelve months, and assess our progress against those commitments. In our season two finale, we bring you that conversation.

C.Marie Taylor’s company is Equity Through Action and through that organization, she leads leaders through active coaching, equity training, leadership development and recruitment focused on building equity into the very fabric of those with whom she works.

Our guest today is a testament to that. Corey Briscoe serves as managing partner and chief operating officer for ABCD and Company. Their work is rooted in “event planning,” which might be true in practice, but in spirit it serves to minimize so much of the hard work of change Corey and his team have lead in the last year as their world shifted.

Jackie DeCarlo’s leadership is a model of adaptability. The COVID-19 crisis called on skills beyond those of daily operations. This week on the show, she joins us from the Manna Food Center administrative offices in Silver Spring, Maryland, to share the leadership lessons that helped her continue to press the organization forward.

This week, before we can dismantle inequality in financial systems, we must understand our roles in these systems. Karen Wawrzaszek is here to help us unpack the complexity of these systems.

This week’s show goes straight to the heart of the dynamics in entrenched business processes that serve to stifle innovation through diversity and limit opportunities for marginalized communities. The opportunity, says our guest, lies in demography.

Carolyn Lowery sat down with Carrie Fox earlier this year to discuss race in the workplace as part of our virtual community conversation series. The goal was to model a conversation on race and racism to show that while these conversations may be challenging, they don’t have to be intimidating.