Mission Forward with Carrie Fox

Have you ever had one of those moments, maybe after a big presentation or an important conversation with a loved one when you’ve wondered, “did that go OK?” In this week's Finding the Words, Carrie explores our universal quest to be heard. 

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

We are just five years from the bicentennial anniversary of the Black press.

Freedom’s Journal was founded March 16, 1827 in Lower Manhattan, New York by John Brown Russwurm, the first African American graduate of Bowdoin College, and the third Black person to graduate from the halls of an American college or university.

Our guest this week refers to the Journal as a mouthpiece of the Black movement, an artifact of Black history that not only represents the place of the movement that has been in motion for hundreds of years in this country, but a marker of just how far that movement has come in the many years since.

Brandon Nightingale is a historian and the Black Press Archives digitization project manager at the Moorland Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. Brandon's project: to research and document the history of the Black press.

The Black Press Archive was started at Howard in 1973, donated by the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Now, fifty years on, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation has gifted the Archive $2 million to digitize the historic collection. Brandon kicks off season 7 of Mission Forward with a conversation on the importance of protecting the voices of the Black press and sharing them with the world. Our great thanks to Brandon for sharing his experience and enthusiasm with us this week.

• (00:00) - 200 Years of the Black Press

Houston Kraft is a professional speaker, author, curriculum designer, and kindness advocate whose book, Deep Kindness: A Revolutionary Guide for the Way We Think, Talk, and Act in Kindness, has inspired millions to examine the difference between niceand kind and why specifically deep kindness is not only a revolutionary act, but a necessary one.

Kraft is also the co-founder of Character Strong, which develops training programs and curricula for effective, sustainable school culture change. To date, his work has reached more than 1 million students and their teachers.

There is something special at the intersection of Houston Kraft’s initiatives, something we’ve forgotten along our journey toward building bigger, better, faster organizations and teams. To us, it appears that Houston has given us a profound reminder that social-emotional learning benefits the whole person; at Character Strong, it’s for the school kids, and with
Deep Kindness, we realize it’s for us big kids, too. 

Thanks to Houston and his team for creating the time for this conversation. We’re honored to offer it to our Mission Forward community.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

Dan Buettner is a National Geographic Fellow and multiple New York Times best-selling author and joins us this week to share his work researching and documenting Blue Zones around the world. 

A Blue Zone is a geographically-defined and confirmed area of extreme longevity. Specifically, Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy, Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California, boast populations that live the longest and are the healthiest people in the world. What makes them live so long? Dan and his team of demographers have spent years researching these Blue Zones, documenting how these populations live and work.

“We're spending $18 trillion a year on largely avoidable diseases. That number just keeps going up,” says Buettner. “We know these populations have a fraction of the heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and dementia. “Why don't we focus on trying to set up our cities and our workplaces so they look more like a Blue Zone?”

That’s precisely what he and his team are doing now, working to create healthy communities across the United States, beginning with Albert Lea, Minnesota, where they built the foundation for the Blue Zones Projects.

The Blue Zones books are inspirational for crafting better, healthier homes and workplaces, and we're thrilled to have Dan Buettner on the show this week to talk about his latest book, The Blue Zones Challenge: A 4-Week Plan for a Longer, Better Life.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

To many people, narrative change is just another jargon term that gets tossed around in politics and philanthropy. To me, it’s a powerful tool to shift how we interpret and understand the world around us, with the goal of making the spaces between us smaller.

This is week 48 of the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday that delivers a dose of communication insights direct 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

Craig Newmark calls himself an “old-school nerd.” The way he frames his work is simple and modest: “doing what I can to support the people who fight to protect the values that America aspires to: fairness, opportunity, and respect.” 

His work is, at its core, about connection. In fact, many of his efforts today in philanthropy stem from lessons clearly learned in his earlier outings. As founder of craigslist.com, he brought people together in an unprecedented fashion, paving the way for communities of exchange that still thrive to this day. 

Through Craig Newmark Philanthropies, he’s become an outspoken advocate for trustworthy journalism, voting rights and access, countering efforts to destabilize our country through disinformation, protecting local, community, and ethnic media, battling food insecurity and fighting for teachers. The list goes on and on and on.

He joins Carrie this week to discuss many of these efforts and how his experiences as a technologist, connector, and influencer positioned him as a perfect vessel for doing good in the world. He is among the most thoughtful and humble folks we have met, and we’re thrilled to bring him to the show this week.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

We can’t have it all.  We can’t expect that strong body without putting in the work, just like we can’t commit to a bold plan or a set of clear values and then decide to compromise them.  But how do you know,  clearly and definitively, who you are, and who you are not, at your core?

This is week 47 of the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday that delivers a dose of communication insights direct 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

Mitch Album is the author of Tuesdays with Morrie, which, if you have heard of none of his other books, you've likely heard of that one. His collected works have sold over 47 million copies and have been translated into 45 languages and if you've only read Morrie, you owe it to yourself to pick up his others. Check out Have a Little Faith or The Stranger in The Lifeboat to get started.

This week, we present a special live conversation between Albom and Carrie Fox, recorded November 2022, on the heels of the book's 25th anniversary. We've been talking about the power of communications to make change this season, and this week, we invite you to think in terms of simplicity. To wit: "[In Morrie] people substitute themselves into the story. They're me, or they're Morrie, or their person is Morrie. If I had a nickel for every time someone would stop me and take out a wallet and say, 'let me show you my Morrie', and they would take out a picture. A teacher, a parent, a grandparent, or something like that. I think there's a universality to it, and that's why it's been picked up around the world the way it has."

This is one of Albom's true gifts: to tell stories so deeply personal, so easy to project ourselves into, that we can't help but see ourselves in them. And once we're able to see ourselves in a story, or a pitch, or a release, we capture a spark of empathy to light the flame of change. 

We're thrilled to be able to share this conversation with you here. Our great thanks to Mitch Albom and Grace United Methodist Church for allowing us to share in the experience.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward

This episode of Mission Forward is sponsored by Unit of Impact, a powerful new platform created for small businesses interested in measuring and sharing their social and environmental impact. Listen in for a brief interview with co-founder Polina Pinchevsky at the end of this week's show. For listeners of Mission Forward, visit https://unitofimpact.com and start a free trial with 20% off any annual plan and enter the promo code EARLYBIRD2022 at checkout. Offer good through December 31, 2022.

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Michael Gordon Voss is publisher at Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), and this week’s conversation is all about trust. 

See, Micheal has spent the last few decades building relationships of trust between his publications and his reading public. That experience has made him an expert in a few key areas we're eager to explore this week. What is the role of curation when it comes to using news and information in building and maintaining trust with your audience? How does the broader social sharing economy impact our ability to impact change? What is the value of a publication in an information economy that is so challenged for trust between publisher and reader right? We explore those areas and more this week.

A little about Michael: before joining SSIR, Michael was Vice President, Associate Publisher, Business Development & Marketing for Scientific American, based in New York City, where he drove commercial marketing and brand strategy, strategic partnerships, sponsorships, and new product development. His career in digital and traditional media has spanned nearly two decades and a wide array of titles and companies, including Newsweek, Meredith Corporation, and George magazine.

Over the course of the show, we make reference to a few stories that make for appropriate follow-up from the pages of SSIR.

• "Change is Worth the Risk" by Mauricio Miller
• "The Four Principles of Purpose-Driven Board Leadership" by Anne Wallestad
• "The Next 10 Years of Impact Investment" by Yasemin Saltuk Lamy, Christina Leijonhufvud & Nick O'Donohoe
• "Coming Together from a Place of Strength, Not Weakness" by Carrie Fox

If you've never had the opportunity to hear from Michael directly, we're honored and thrilled to bring him to you this week. His work is the foundation for thought-provoking exploration for our growth as communicators while guiding organizations to move their missions forward. Our great thanks to Michael for joining us this week on the show.

• (00:00) - Sponsor: Unit Of Impact – Promo Code EARLYBIRD2024

If you’re a regular listener to this show, you know that our conversations run the gamut; from interpersonal communications to corporate communications, we’re interested in communications that change lives. Today on the show, we’re going even bigger. 

Jeff Caporizzo is Senior Partner and Executive Creative Director at ICF Next, an agency dedicated to “Next-level participation.” That sounds like a big promise in today’s connected communications economy, but take a look at some of their work, and you’ll see just how action backs the language. 

Jeff joins Carrie Fox today to talk about the power of mass communications and advertising to inform viewpoints, behaviors, and narratives and even disrupt false or negative narratives. No time like the present, right?

Jeff is a creative storyteller. He has used his craft for good over the years, and in campaign after campaign, he’s helped his clients grow through challenging — even uncomfortable — lessons about how they use language, image, and spokesvoices to tell the stories of their brands for the better. 

So, welcome to this conversation about messaging, power, and justice, all seen through the lens of the ad. Thanks to Jeff for his time and contribution to this conversation. We can’t wait to see what he creates next.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Mission Forward