Leaders want to bring more compassion into the culture of work, yet many wrestle with how to do it in a way that feels both authentic and respectful.

The answer lies in the simple act of looking out for one another.

This short-form episode is part of the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday that delivers a dose of communication insights directly to your inbox. If you like what you read, we hope you’ll subscribe to ensure you receive this each week.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

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This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.

This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.

The volume of one-way communication is ramping up everywhere we turn—our feeds, inboxes, meetings, and media. All that noise leads to an increased feeling of distraction but rarely an increased sense of connection or understanding.

All that noise affects our ability to listen to one another, too.

This short-form episode is part of the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday that delivers a dose of communication insights directly to your inbox. If you like what you read, we hope you’ll subscribe to ensure you receive this each week.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

_____
This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.

This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.

When Dr. DeRionne Pollard talks about leadership, she doesn’t begin with titles or institutions. She begins with memory: a two-year-old child clapping cymbals in a community college classroom, a six-year-old sitting outside a glass-paneled door while her aunt trained to open an in-home childcare center, a young girl learning generosity from neighbors who showed love through casseroles and practicality through labeled Tupperware. These early stories might be sentimental details—but even more important: they form the foundation of a life devoted to service, community, and purpose.

This week, Carrie welcomes Dr. Pollard at a moment of meaningful transition. After leading Nevada State University through a period of growth and change, she has stepped into a national role as President of the American Association of Community Colleges. The shift has asked her to reflect on the shape of her career, the communities that raised her, and what it means to lead with intention in a system that touches every corner of the country.

Dr. Pollard shares how she prepared herself for the move—literally mapping out her goodbyes and thoughtful introductions on a whiteboard—and why leaving a campus was both a professional milestone and a personal test. She speaks openly about legacy, shaped in part by the loss of her mother at a young age, and how that experience continues to guide her toward work that feels both meaningful and deeply human.

As she steps into this new chapter, her perspective on community colleges offers both clarity and optimism. She describes these institutions as engines of opportunity: responsive, resilient, and built to serve learners across every age, background, and ambition. Her vision for their future isn’t theoretical—it’s grounded in lived experience and in the communities that shaped her.

Closing out the season, Carrie reflects on the generosity woven through this conversation. The entire arc of “hellos, goodbyes, and the space between” comes into sharper focus through Dr. Pollard’s story—one that reminds us that intention, humility, and connection can shape the work long before strategy ever appears on a page.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

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This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.

This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.

Some stories begin with a single alarm bell. This one begins with dozens of small ones—nonprofit leaders quietly signaling the same thing at the same time: the ground under them was shifting, and shifting fast. Because the France-Merrick Foundation funds discrete, one-time capital projects across Baltimore, they hear from an unusually wide cross-section of organizations. And in early 2025, all those cross-currents pointed in the same direction: instability, delays, burnout, and a crisis arriving faster than anyone had planned for.

France-Merrick chose to act. In this conversation, Amy Gross walks Carrie through how her foundation made the rare choice to increase its payout and launch the Meet the Moment Fund, dedicating 40% of their annual giving to rapid-response support. The board shifted from quarterly to monthly meetings. The application process was streamlined to a single stage. And the goal was simple: respond before inaction made the moment worse.

Along the way, Amy offers a window into the larger questions philanthropy is wrestling with this year—how nonprofits survive when government contracts become unpredictable, why earned revenue has gone from “nice to have” to essential, and what it means for funders to collaborate when the sector is feeling squeezed from all sides. Her own hope rises and falls with the day’s news, she admits, yet intention and community remain steady guides.

This episode makes a perfect connection to this season’s theme of hellos, goodbyes, and the space between. Amy’s answers—focused on connection, recognition, and leaving behind an impact that outlives her—echo the very principles her foundation brought to its decision: see people clearly, respond with purpose, and do the most good you can with the moment you’re given.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

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This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.

This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.

Twenty-one years ago, when I started my first communications firm, a mentor offered a warning I’ll never forget: “Starting a firm focused on nonprofits is bound to fail. There won’t be enough work to sustain you.”

Twenty-one years later, and we’re still here.

This short-form episode is part of the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday that delivers a dose of communication insights directly to your inbox. If you like what you read, we hope you’ll subscribe to ensure you receive this each week.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

_____
This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.

This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.

It starts with a handful of seeds.

When Mission Partners’ design director Anne Kerns shows up at a civic rally with paper packets filled with flowers, herbs, and vegetables, she’s there to share. To spark a conversation. To see what happens when you hand a stranger something living. That image—Anne with her seeds—is at the heart of this week’s conversation. Because design, as she tells Carrie Fox, isn’t only what you make; it’s what you grow. It’s an act of attention, of cultivating curiosity in yourself and in others.

From the geometry of a Frank Lloyd Wright logo at Wingspread to the exacting hues of red that pulse with both passion and danger, Anne reveals the hidden life inside design decisions most of us overlook. Every line has intention. Every color has memory. Every choice says something about who we are and what we value.

Together, Carrie and Anne trace the invisible thread between creativity and community: how a refreshed logo can honor history without erasing it, how accessibility transforms good design into inclusive communication, how technology—from PageMaker 1.0 to AI—tests our understanding of what it means to create with soul.

In the end, Anne circles back to red—the color she’s loved since childhood, the color that announces her presence to the world. For her, design isn’t a product; it’s a legacy of connection. The mark we leave behind isn’t ink or pixels—it’s how we made others feel seen.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

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This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.

This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.

Pete Wright has spent decades amplifying other people's voices. As a producer, he's an invisible architect of countless conversations, the one who shapes stories without telling them, who creates space for others to shine while remaining carefully out of frame. But what happens when the producer becomes the protagonist?

In this episode of Mission Forward, Carrie turns the tables on her own show's producer—a role reversal that reveals something unexpected about the nature of legacy, presence, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

Pete's journey from behind-the-scenes collaborator to solo podcaster with "Headstone" represents more than just a podcast pivot. It's a confrontation with what he calls a "terrifying hello"—the moment when there's no net, no team, no one to blame or credit but yourself. For someone who has made a living being the essential person nobody sees, stepping into the spotlight requires a fundamental reimagining of identity.

The conversation that emerges between Carrie and Pete is intimate in the way that only comes when two people who've worked together closely finally sit down to really see each other. They explore the deaths that shaped them, the hellos that changed them, and the space between where presence lives.

"Saying hello is an act of courage because it implies change," Pete says, getting to the heart of why so many of us struggle with transitions. Every hello promises that something about us will be different on the other side. Every goodbye demands we let go of a version of ourselves we've grown comfortable being.

In an industry obsessed with personal branding and thought leadership, Pete has built a career on making other people's ideas more powerful. His new solo podcast isn't an abandonment of that philosophy but an evolution of it—using his platform to explore how ordinary people create extraordinary legacies through the simple act of being present for one another.

As Pete and Carrie navigate questions about presence, legacy, and the space between hellos and goodbyes, they reveal something essential about how change actually works: it's not in the dramatic moments but in the daily practice of showing up, of choosing courage over comfort, of saying yes to the person you're becoming while honoring who you've been.

Links and Notes

• Headstone with Pete Wright
• “How to Be Remembered Without Saying a Word With Carrie Fox,” Carrie's appearance on "Headstone," July 19, 2025
• “After Life,” Radiolab, First Broadcast July 27, 2009

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

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This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.

This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.

This is a story about invisible infrastructure—the kind you only notice when it's gone. 

Peter Panepento started his career covering planning board meetings for a weekly newspaper in upstate New York, watching in real time as the binding agents of community life dissolved. Now he runs a communications agency working with community foundations, institutions that have operated in nearly every American community for over a hundred years but remain mysterious to most people. The puzzle he's trying to solve: How do you create recognition for something designed to fade into the background?

Panepento's solution was counterintuitive. Instead of emphasizing how different each of the 900 community foundations is, he found the common thread: they all "Make More Possible." It's a template simple enough to be universal but flexible enough to contain multitudes. His team also conducted the first field-wide benchmarking survey of community foundation communications and found something troubling—93% lack adequate budgets, half expect resources to decrease, and most have no crisis plans. At the exact moment when clear communication has become existentially important, the people responsible for it are being asked to do more with less.

Peter joins Carrie this week to explore two models of community-building that work precisely because they're ordinary. The Chicago Community Trust hosts "On the Table"—thousands of simultaneous conversations over meals where neighbors discuss what matters. The Black Belt Community Foundation in Selma, Alabama, has moved over $100 million in 20 years by giving actual grant-making power to local volunteers in each county. They were practicing trust-based philanthropy before anyone coined the term. These aren't flashy programs—they're deliberately low-tech interventions designed to restore something simple: the habit of looking your neighbors in the eye and finding common ground.

The broader lesson isn't really about community foundations at all. It's about the challenge of making essential infrastructure visible. Whether it's local journalism, public health systems, or civic institutions, the things that hold society together tend to be the things we notice only when they break. We're living through what might be called the great unbundling of American civic life—the institutions that once created shared spaces have either disappeared or fragmented into a thousand digital pieces. Community foundations are one of the few remaining institutions with the potential to be what Panepento calls "community conveners." But they can only play that role if people know they exist.

Links & Notes

• Turn Two Communications & First-Ever Communications Benchmarking Survey
• Find your local community foundation
• Chicago Community Trust - On the Table initiative
• Black Belt Community Foundation, Selma, Alabama

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

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This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.

This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.

What happens when a community refuses to let its story be told from the outside in? In this conversation, Carrie Fox sits down with Lisa Snowden, Editor-in-Chief of Baltimore Beat, to explore what it means to build journalism as a thriving business model and an act of community care. Born out of the ashes of the Baltimore City Paper and shaped by the unrest following Freddie Gray’s death, Baltimore Beat has never been about neutrality—it has been about presence, about listening, and about amplifying voices too often ignored.

Lisa traces her journey from courtroom reporter to newsroom leader, revealing how perspective and personal truth can reshape the role of journalism itself. She describes the radical choices that have guided the Beat: shifting from for-profit to nonprofit after early financial collapse, accepting a transformative million-dollar grant at the height of the pandemic, and creating “beat boxes” that don’t just hold newspapers but double as neighborhood resource hubs. Inside those boxes, you’ll now find Narcan, notebooks, water bottles, or even hand warmers—small objects that together become an expression of community solidarity.

Even the act of delivering the paper has become something larger than distribution. By replacing outside delivery contractors with local community members—drivers who know every street and corner—the Beat stumbled into a model of journalism that is participatory, intimate, and trusted. Today, those same drivers are welcomed by shopkeepers and seniors waiting for the latest issue, reinforcing a sense of belonging that no algorithm or national newsroom can replicate.

What emerges from Lisa’s story is a portrait of local journalism as a lifeline. In her telling, journalism cannot be sterile or detached. It must be human. It must show up. And in the Beat’s case, it must be willing to save lives, as when a box outside their office provided the Narcan that brought a neighbor back from an overdose. This is the work of journalism that doesn’t just inform a city—it sustains it. And it is proof that local news is not dying, but thrives in reinventing itself as the heartbeat of a community.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

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This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.

This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.

Here’s what we know: journalism in America is in upheaval. Free speech is under attack. Trust is being challenged, and reporters are under siege. And yet—walk onto a college campus today and you’ll find students running toward journalism, not away from it. Why?

That paradox is at the center of today’s conversation between Carrie Fox and returning guest Michael Bolden, the newly appointed Dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Michael has spent decades wrestling with the structural problems in media—first at the American Press Institute, and now inside one of the country’s most storied journalism schools. For him, the decision to move wasn’t about retreat. It was about running toward the hardest questions: How do we prepare journalists for a world where technology outpaces ethics? How do we rebuild trust in an age of fractured attention? How do we turn a profession under siege into one that still holds possibility?

In this wide-ranging dialogue, Carrie and Michael explore what it means to train truth-seekers in a time of disinformation, how to balance innovation with enduring values, and why collaboration across disciplines may hold the key to journalism’s renewal. Michael’s optimism is striking: he doesn’t see students discouraged by the obstacles; he sees them galvanized by them.

At a time when the story of journalism is often told as decline, this episode offers a counter-narrative—one rooted in resilience, curiosity, and the conviction that media’s future, though uncertain, is very much alive.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

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This episode is supported by The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread. At their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed campus, Wingspread brings leaders and communities together to turn dialogue into action. Learn more at johnsonfdn.org or wingspread.com.

This episode is also brought to you by Positively Partners. When HR starts to slow down your mission, it’s time for a better solution. Positively HR is the fully outsourced HR partner that understands nonprofits—and acts like part of your team. Learn more at PositivelyPartners.org.