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

___
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

___
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

___
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

___
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

___
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 about political violence in America: it’s getting worse. Here’s what we think we know about why: polarization, social media, extreme rhetoric. But what if we’re looking at this all wrong?

Rich Harwood has spent the last 30 years in the places many of us have written off—communities fractured by poverty, loss, and division. What he’s found in those places challenges our assumptions about where progress begins. It’s not happening in Washington. It’s not playing out on cable news. It’s emerging, quietly but powerfully, through a reawakening of what Harwood calls civic culture—the often-invisible fabric of how we live together, trust each other, and shape the future we want.

Rather than simply addressing polarization as a political problem, Harwood argues we’re living through something deeper: a crisis of belonging. His book, The New Civic Path, maps out a way to reverse that trend—not by starting with grand unifying movements, but by starting small, building momentum, and restoring belief in what’s possible together.

In this conversation—recorded just a day after a harrowing act of political violence—Harwood offers a rare kind of clarity. Not a feel-good story, but a practical invitation to shift how we work, lead, and rebuild. For anyone seeking a way forward in a time of fracture, this episode offers something even more vital than answers: it offers a way to begin.

Links and Notes

• The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation
• Rich Harwood's book "The New Civic Path: Restoring Our Belief in One Another and Our Nation"
• Reading, Pennsylvania community report
• Mission Forward Podcast previous episode with Dr. John Paul Lederach

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

___
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.

Every ending carries within it the seed of a beginning. To leave something behind—whether it’s a beloved job, a familiar city, or the comfort of a community—requires not only courage but also an embrace of uncertainty. In this first episode of Season 11, we step directly into that tension: the sacred space between goodbye and a new hello.

Carrie Fox sits down with nonprofit leader Mike Pope and theater founder Elisa Pupko at the very edge of a new chapter. Together with their two young children, they’re leaving behind steady careers, a home in Brooklyn, and the familiarity of everyday life to embark on a yearlong journey around the world. It’s a leap that began with a fleeting thought on a run and grew into an intentional act of re-imagining what family, leadership, and community might look like.

As Mike reflects on stepping aside from his nonprofit after 15 years, he asks what it means to honor an organization by knowing when to let go. Elisa, meanwhile, navigates the delicate balance of letting her company grow stronger in her absence while choosing presence with her family. And together, they invite us to consider what it means to say yes—not when the plan is complete, but when the possibility feels alive.

Their story is not only about travel; it’s about perspective. About the way children learn to smile at strangers on playgrounds in foreign cities. About how leaders discover strength in stepping back. About how the question “what if?” can open doors we didn’t realize were waiting.

With this conversation we invite you to wonder what might happen if we—all of us—leaned into the space between goodbye and hello, and allowed it to teach us something new.

Follow along with Elisa and Mike and their whole family at https://twokidsoneworld.com/.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

___
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 does it mean to stand at the threshold of change? To face a door that is both closing and opening at the same time? In Season 11 of Mission Forward, Carrie Fox invites us into that liminal space—the sacred and often unsettling pause between hello and goodbye. It is here, in the transitions, where the most important work of leadership—and of life—often takes place.

This season, you’ll meet people who have walked away from stability in pursuit of something more true. You’ll hear from those who said yes before they were ready, and in doing so, discovered new strength. And you’ll learn from leaders who chose to stay rooted, practicing presence and commitment in a culture that prizes constant movement.

These are stories not just about change, but about how we communicate through it—about the clarity, courage, and care required when our words and actions mark turning points. Because goodbyes are never just endings. Hellos are never just beginnings. And the space between them? That’s where possibility lives.

Join Carrie Fox, host of Mission Forward and founder of Mission Partners, for Season 11. New episodes coming soon.

Hello. Goodbye. And the Space Between.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

Two builders walk into a podcast studio… no, seriously. This isn’t the start of a joke, but the beginning of a deeply fascinating exploration into the very architecture of social change. We’re talking about the kind of change that doesn’t just rearrange the furniture, but rebuilds the house from the foundation up. And that, my friends, is a far more intricate and precarious undertaking.

This week on Mission Forward, we’re joined by not one, but two remarkable individuals who embody this spirit of courageous construction. Stacey Palmer, editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy, sets the stage  introducing Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith America, and Iara Peng, the visionary behind JustFund.

Together, Eboo and Iara paint a vivid picture of what it truly means to build a more just and equitable world. They share their hard-won wisdom, gleaned from years of experience battling bureaucratic inertia and challenging deeply ingrained biases. Eboo recounts his early struggles navigating the labyrinthine world of philanthropic gatekeepers, a story that resonates with anyone who’s ever dared to dream big. Iara, meanwhile, offers a glimpse into the future of giving, where technology empowers donors to align their actions with their values, transforming philanthropy from a passive act of charity into a dynamic force for change.

This episode is a call to action, a reminder that we all have a role to play in building the world we want to see. Grab your metaphorical hardhat and join us as we architect social innovation with two of the most inspiring builders of our time.

Links & Notes

• Interfaith America
• JustFund
• We Need to Build by Eboo Patel
• The Chronicle of Philanthropy

• (00:00) - Sponsor: Reconsidered Change Hub

It's election season. The air crackles – a strange cocktail of anticipation and apprehension. We’re drowning in pronouncements, predictions, and the ever-present din of commentary. But what if the key to navigating this volatile landscape isn’t about shouting louder but listening deeper?

On this episode of Mission Forward, we explore that very question with Jennifer Brandel, a process innovator and co-founder of Hearken. Hearken helps institutions truly hear their audiences. Brandel's background, spanning from NPR to the New York Times, gives her a unique vantage point. She’s not just a theorist; she’s wrestled with these challenges in both her professional and deeply personal life. Our host this week is our own Brian Fox, chief strategy officer at Mission Partners, a native at navigating volatile landscapes himself.

Together, they unpack the surprising power of curiosity and deep listening, especially when the stakes are high. Think of a surgeon in the operating room: skilled hands guided by intense focus and precise observation. Or a negotiator: not bulldozing, but listening, seeking the subtle cues that can de-escalate a challenging conversation. In the chaotic aftermath of a natural disaster, it's the quiet acts of empathy and connection that rebuild shattered communities.

So why, when it comes to the equally turbulent terrain of politics, do we so often resort to the verbal equivalent of a sledgehammer?

Brandel and Fox share how we can move beyond the echo chambers and engage in meaningful dialogue, even – perhaps especially – with those with whom we vehemently disagree. They explore the difference between listening to respond and listening to understand. They shine a light on the subtle art of “looping,” a technique that can transform heated debates into opportunities for genuine connection, and reveal how organizational values, when they’re more than just empty slogans, can serve as a compass in moments of uncertainty.

This isn’t just about surviving the election; it’s about building a more resilient, empathetic, and ultimately, more democratic society. Join us as we uncover the hidden power of listening in a world that desperately needs to hear.

Links & Notes

• Hearken
• Amanda Ripley's High Conflict
• Slate's How To Podcast (Two-Part Series with Jennifer Brandel)
• Monica Guzman's I Never Thought of It That Way
• Braver Angels
• John Paul Lederach's Pocket Guide to Facing Down a Civil War

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward