Producer and director Chris Landry's new film series Reimagining Philanthropy critically examines the issue of philanthropy as the financial driver of movement and social justice work, and how movement leaders believe it can be fixed. Joining Chris is historian of US philanthropy and the author of White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation's “An American Dilemma” and the Making of a White World, Dr. Maribel Morey. Dr. Morey appears in the series' first episode, alongside many other leading voices reshaping the field and challenging long-held assumptions about how philanthropy operates.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links to Convergence's Bookshop. Purchases made through our bookshop support our movement media work.

This week on the show we are debuting a new format we’re calling the Attention Economy Navigator. The goal of Block & Build has always been to help organizers figure out what’s happening, how people are responding, and get a sense for what’s working out there in the world. The Attention Economy Navigator came out of a conversation Cayden had at the Narrative Power Summit about Naomi Klein’s 2023 book, Doppelganger. An interesting takeaway from the book is that Klein suggests a new political spectrum in addition to left and right defining political division in our society, and the determining factor is how prominently conspiratorial thinking shapes our political views.

Joining to help build this month's Attention Economy Navigator in real time are Convergence Managing Editor, Akin Olla, and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast, Nima Shirazi.

Before diving in, we are joined by co-founder and co-director at Siembra NC, Nikki Marín Baena, to discuss what organizing's happening on the ground in North Carolina with ICE's recent mobilization in the region.

This month's navigator chart can be found here.

Stories we referenced in this episode:

This week on the show, we will first talk about how on the ground organizing was a factor in Zohran Mamdani’s historic 10-point victory in the New York City Mayoral election last week.  We are joined by a panel of leaders from different local organizations who worked on the campaign to learn more about their work and strategies.

Then we talk with activist Rafael Uzcátegui, who has been part of the Venezuelan human rights movement for decades. He discusses how the American left can orient itself to show solidarity as Trump aggressively pursues violent intervention in and around the country.

In this episode, we are joined by Co-Founder and Organizing Director of Kentucky Tenants Union, Josh Poe to discuss how their organizing strategy successfully brings people together to fight and win against landlords in a red state.

This week on the show we are joined by Chicago-based writer, organizer, and podcaster Kelly Hayes, whose new edited volume, Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis, is out November 4 from AK Press. You may also know Kelly from their excellent podcast, Movement Memos, their newsletter, “Organizing My Thoughts,” or their previous book, with Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You.

This week on the show we are joined by historian Gerald Horne, whose 2025 book, The Capital of Slavery: Washington DC 1800-1865 explores the early history of the capital city of the United States and the role of enslaved people in how it was built. This is explored in the book both in terms of the hands that did the labor to build its edifices and monuments, and in terms of how fear of free Black people shaped the law, policy, and governance of the District, in ways that echo today.

This week we are joined by Marzena Zukowska and Shanelle Matthews. Together they are the co-editors of the new book Liberation Stories: Building Narrative Power for 21st Century Social Movements. This anthology of essays and interviews distills successful theories, strategies, and tactics from the movement left for anyone wanting to understand and participate in modern progressive movements.

This week on the show we take a look at the Trump administration's multifaceted attacks on immigrants as testing grounds for authoritarian control, how we got to this point, and what efforts are being made to push back. Joining to discuss is Program Director at Detention Watch Network, Stacy Suh.

This week on the show we are joined by Executive Director of State Power Caucus, Margie Del Castillo. Their organization is currently focusing on work that goes beyond mobilization to build lasting governing power at the state level across the country – we talk in this episode about what that looks like in different states.

State Power Caucus is a multi-state organizing project primarily focused on the “build” aspect of Block & Build strategy. They do this by supporting state based organizations in the process of moving from short-term mobilization into consistent state based infrastructure, leadership pipelines, and co-governance capacity. By bringing organizations together to think about long-term goals, they build alignment and share skills to strengthen movements in the long run.

This week on the show we are joined by Lina Srivastava, Founder of the Center for Transformational Change. She’s developed a framework to help communicators, creatives, and organizers think through the infrastructure we must develop to build narrative power–the power not just to tell the stories we want told, but to shift the landscape of common sense about the issues we’re struggling to win.

Lina joined us a few weeks ago for this recorded conversation, but the insights and lessons are more relevant than ever as we navigate the changes looming on the horizon as factions of the far Right fight among themselves about the meaning of the horrific murder of right wing propagandist, Charlie Kirk, and our movements face intensified scrutiny and attacks as scapegoats.