For this week’s episode, Rebecca sat down with Indi Dutta-Gupta, a dear friend and colleague who’s dedicated his career to ending poverty in America and building an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few. Today he serves as president and executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), one of the nation’s leading organizations dedicated to advancing economic security and racial equity. They had a far-ranging conversation about the long road to the historic one-year expansion of the Child Tax Credit authorized as part of COVID relief and the road ahead to making a guaranteed minimum income for families with children a permanent reality in the United States; what it looks like to set a north star and work backward to create a strategy to get there; the challenges of balancing family and work as a social justice leader; why he got married with his hand on A Theory of Justice; and lots more.  

Links from this episode:

• Follow Indi on Twitter @IndivarD and learn more about CLASP’s work

• Here’s Indi’s recent Congressional testimony assessing the twenty-five years of the Child Tax Credit; the National Academy of Sciences report on child poverty; and the Center for American Progress proposal for expanding the Child Tax Credit into a child allowance 

• Here’s the prior Off-Kilter episode with Representative Rosa DeLauro and others on the CTC

• Nominate the changemakers you most want to hear from by emailing us at [email protected]

For this week’s episode, Rebecca sat down with Kathleen Romig, a dear friend and colleague who today serves as the director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, one of the nation’s leading organizations that focuses on economic and budget policy for low-income families. To mark the eighty-eighth anniversary of Social Security, they had a far-ranging conversation about the history behind the program, who’s helped by Social Security today, and why there’s no room for cuts; the importance of moving beyond technocratic, budget-focused narratives to put people at the center of policy; the human consequences of bureaucratic disentitlement; Kathleen’s own path to combining heart and head in her work and how that’s made her a more effective policy advocate; and more.

Links from this episode:

• Follow Kathleen on Twitter @kathleenromig and learn more about her work at CBPP

• Here are the prior Off-Kilter episodes we mentioned about SSI and bureaucratic disentitlement

• Nominate the changemakers you most want to hear from by emailing us at [email protected]

For this week’s episode, Rebecca sat back down with Zaki “The Barber” Smith, an entrepreneur, a powerhouse activist, and a criminal justice reform leader whose work focuses on ending the perpetual punishment that comes with having a criminal record in America. They had a far-ranging and emotional conversation about the historic clean slate legislation that passed the New York Assembly earlier this summer and now awaits the governor’s signature; how a criminal record can be a life sentence to poverty; the impact of the criminal records crisis on millions of American families; the economic as well as emotional toll that comes with perpetual punishment; his own path from prison to national policy advocacy; how his years as a barber shaped him as an advocate; his work with murals, film, and other art forms as tools for criminal justice reform; and lots more.  

Links from this episode:

• Follow Zaki on Twitter @ZakiTheBarber, learn more about of his work as a policy entrepreneur at Next100, and connect with Zaki

• Learn more about New York’s Clean Slate campaign and the legislation that recently passed the New York Assembly to clear millions of New Yorkers’ records

• Learn more about his #EndPerpetualPunishment mural campaign

• Nominate the changemakers you most want to hear from by emailing us at [email protected]

For this week’s episode, Rebecca sat down with Alejandra Vazquez-Baur, an educator-turned-policy advocate whose work focuses on expanding supports for K–12 immigrant students—especially newcomers—and multilingual students. As Alejandra describes herself: “I am a product of resilient Mexican women. A sister. A dancer. An educator. A visionary.” They talk about the National Newcomer Network Alejandra co-founded as a policy entrepreneur at The Next 100; how she’s bringing her experience in the classroom as a high school math teacher onto the national policy scene; the role of dreaming in her work and her path to claiming her role as a visionary; resilience and how to stay rooted; how music, dance, and movement inform her advocacy work; and lots more.  

Links from this episode:

• Follow Alejandra on Twitter @Ale_VazquezBaur and learn more about her work and her policy entrepreneurship at Next100

• Learn more about the National Newcomer Network and follow #NationalNewcomerNetwork to stay up to date

• Learn more about ImmSchools

• And here’s more about the Obama Foundation fellowship

• Nominate the changemakers you most want to hear from by emailing us at [email protected]

Welcome to the summer/fall season of Off-Kilter! We’re excited to be back and up and running with the show after a break, just in time to mark Disability Pride Month. And to kick things off right, Rebecca sat back down with Mia Ives-Rublee, a long-time disability rights and justice activist who today serves as the director of the disability justice initiative at the Center for American Progress. They talk disability pride; what liberation means to the disability community; how Mia’s path as a transracial adoptee and competitive athlete shape her advocacy today; and lots more.  

Links from this episode:

• Follow Mia on Twitter (and Threads) @seemiaroll and learn more about of her work at CAP

• Here’s a treasure trove of PBS Newshour content for Disability Pride Month

• And here’s the last Off-Kilter episode with more on why updating SSI is necessary to economic liberation for disabled people

• Nominate the changemakers you most want to hear from by emailing us at [email protected]

This week, Off-Kilter is wrapping up our ongoing series digging into why in the famous words of Audre Lorde, “self-care is political warfare. A recurring theme uplifted by several guests throughout this series has been the importance of bringing your whole self to the work—a phrase that, like so much within the topic of self-care, has become watered down enough in recent years that it’s about as likely to spur eye rolls as genuine interest in many circles. 

So to dig a little deeper beneath the surface of what it really looks like to bring one’s whole self to social justice work, Rebecca sat down with the brilliant Andraea Lavant, a longtime disability justice advocate, to delve deeply into the subject of claiming one’s identity, and what that looks like as part of self-care. We had a far-ranging conversation about Andraea’s own journey to claim all parts of her identity as a black, disabled, queer woman, and how that ultimately led her to start a strategy and communications firm focused on culture shift and building a society and an economy where disabled people of color belong.

For more:

• Learn more about and connect with Andraea’s firm, Lavant Consulting

• Follow Andraea on Twitter @andraealavant 

• Here’s the Off-Kilter episode feat. writers Alex Ashley Fox and Emily Ladau about the harms that come from “masking” to fit in at work, for autistic as well as neurotypical people with and without disabilities

• Here’s the Off-Kilter episode feat. Social Security Works executive director and We Act Radio cofounder Alex Lawson about tapping into your own inner weirdo (in the best possible way) and finding the technique that works for you

• And here’s the Off-Kilter episode that memorialized Judy Heumann, godmother of the disability rights movement

As Off-Kilter’s ongoing series continues, digging into why in the famous words of Audre Lorde, “self-care is political warfare,” we’re zooming out for this next episode to explore the goal of ending poverty in the United States—and the broader work of economic and social liberation—as self-care for the larger collective organism of which we are all part.

In this spirit, as Rebecca describes in this episode, she often thinks about advocates and activists for economic and social liberation as healers—healers of a collective organism that today is very sick—with one huge glaring symptom of that illness being widespread, needless poverty in the midst of plenty. Of course healers rely on good diagnostic tools—and this kind of “social justice advocacy as collective healing” framework can then help us understand something like a measure of poverty as a diagnostic tool—a tool that’s only as good at diagnosing social illness as what it measures and how it’s designed. 

So to zoom in on what America’s broken official poverty measure has to do with self-care, Rebecca brought back three thought leaders who are deep experts in poverty measurement, all of whom have been working for years to bring attention to how outdated and flawed our leading diagnostic tool on this front (a.k.a. America’s Official Poverty Measure) is—and the importance of rethinking how we measure poverty in the United States. if we are serious about meaningfully eliminating it versus just putting a band-aid on a still-very-sick economy.  

Shawn Fremstad is the director of law and political economy as well as a senior adviser at the Center for Economic Policy Research. Shailly Barnes is the policy director for the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice. David Brady is a professor of public policy at the University of California Riverside, where he directs the Blum Initiative on Global and Regional Poverty; he’s also a fellow with the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. 

For more:

• Check out the last Off-Kilter episode on poverty measurement, feat. Shailly, Shawn, and David

• Dig into Shawn’s report on why the U.S. poverty line is too damn low: “The Defining Down of Economic Deprivation: Why We Need to Reset the Poverty Line”

• For more on the case for shifting to a relative poverty measure, check out David’s report: “American Poverty Should Be Measured Relative to the Prevailing Standards of Our Time”

• Learn more about the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, CEPR, and David’s work at UC–Riverside 

• Follow Shailly @shaillybarnes, Shawn @shawnfremstad, and David @DaveBrady72 on Twitter

This week Rebecca sat down with Kim Knackstedt, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, where she serves as director of the Disability Economic Justice Team and director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, both of which launched a little over one year ago in April 2022. Before coming to TCF, Kim served as the first-ever director of disability policy for the White House Domestic Policy Council for the first year of the Biden presidency. 

They had a far-ranging conversation about what it looks like to apply disability as a lens across all economic and social policy making in the United States; the story behind the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, going behind the scenes on the work discussed in the Collaborative’s one-year anniversary event, which aired on Off-Kilter earlier this month; and the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency and what it means for disabled people in the United States. 

And continuing with the “self-care is political warfare” throughline from all of this spring’s episodes for the podcast, they also talked about Kim’s ongoing process of detoxing from the “destroy yourself for the work” culture of the White House and Capitol Hill; how she’s been rediscovering self-care in her own life as a leader within the disability community who also lives with chronic illness; and more.

For more:

• Learn more about Kim’s work here and follow her on Twitter @kiknack

• Learn more about the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative here and in its one-year anniversary event—and follow the Collab on Twitter @dejcollab and by signing up for its monthly newsletter 

• Here’s the Collaborative’s Disability Economic Justice Policy Framework, showing how to embed disability as a lens across policymaking

• Here’s Kim’s piece (with TCF’s Tara Oakman) on the ending of the public health emergency

• You can find Off-Kilter’s episode with The Kelsey about putting disabled people at the center of housing policy here

This week, Off-Kilter continues our ongoing series of conversations with social justice leaders digging into why, in the famous words of Audre Lorde, self-care is political warfare—and the role radical self-care plays in their own lives to sustain them in this work. 

Our next guest in this series is Michele Evermore, a longtime leading voice fighting for America’s most marginalized workers, particularly when it comes to unemployment insurance. Michele is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and most recently served as deputy director of policy in the U.S. Department of Labor’s new Office of Unemployment Insurance Modernization under President Biden. She's also a martial artist and an avid gardener whose tomato list we should all be lucky enough to get on.

Rebecca and Michele had a far-ranging conversation about how the historic, if sadly short-lived, improvements to the U.S. unemployment insurance system went from ideas to public policies early in the COVID era; the story behind the Office of Unemployment Insurance Modernization and where things stand for jobless workers today; and the toxic “moral hazard” narrative that continues to hamper progressive policymaking to ensure workers have protection when they lose a job through no fault of their own. They also talked about how self-care shows up in Michele’s own life as a leader on social insurance, why she got into martial arts and how it informs her policy advocacy, and more.

For more:

• Learn more about Michele’s work here and follow her on Twitter @EvermoreMichele

• And you can find Off-Kilter’s most recent episode on unemployment insurance and the cliff created by expiring COVID-era improvements here

This week, Off-Kilter's taking a break from our regularly scheduled programming to bring you a conversation hosted by The Century Foundation's Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, marking its one-year anniversary. Launched in April 2022, the Collaborative is a first of its kind initiative bringing together more than 40 disability rights and justice leaders and leading think tanks and research organizations to work collaboratively to bring a disability lens across all economic and social policymaking in the U.S.   Learn more about the Collaborative's work at DEJC.org and by following @DEJCollab on Twitter.