The Context

Is democracy still possible? Can the people still hold government accountable? Yes, but that requires working together. And working together requires organizing. Dorian Warren joins host Alex Lovit to talk about building people power, some of the victories that collective organizing has already achieved, and why he believes the United States is on the precipice of building a fairer and more inclusive democracy.

Dorian Warren is the co-president of Community Change, a national organization founded in 1968 to build the power of low-income people, especially people of color, to create a multiracial democracy and a fair economy where everyone can thrive.

https://www.communitychange.org/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com

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For the Americans who feel—justifiably—that they’re excluded from participating in elections, what can be done to help them claim their place at democracy’s table?

Meet three activists from Dayton, Ohio, who’ve found a way. With a high-stakes midterm election right around the corner, we’re highlighting the work of local community members who’ve been thinking about and working on election engagement for years.

Host Alex Lovit is joined by Destiny Brown, Robert Mackey II, and Kevin O’Donnell, all of whom have been working to educate and empower voters in the Kettering Foundation’s hometown of Dayton, Ohio. All three of them are Dayton Democracy Fellows. The fellowship supports and connects everyday people who are dreaming big dreams about what we can be together when we are brave, creative, and steadfast. Learn more about the fellowship here: https://kettering.org/?fellowship=dayton-democracy-fellowship

Destiny Brown is a community organizer and joined the Kettering Foundation as a program associate for Democracy and Community in June 2026. She was part of the Dayton Democracy Fellows cohort in 2024.

Robert Mackey II is an author, youth advocate, and program coordinator at Sunlight Village, a nonprofit focused on the mental health and well-being of underserved youth in Dayton. He was selected as a Dayton Democracy Fellow in 2025.

Kevin O’Donnell is a social studies teacher at Dayton Public Schools and coordinator with Bilingual Nation, a language learning co-op. He was selected as a Dayton Democracy Fellow in 2025.

Check out Robert’s new book here: https://www.steadfastlifestylesinc.org/post/welcome-to-steadfast-lifestyles

Sunlight Village is holding a fundraising gala in November. Tickets are available here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/sunlightvillageinc1/2307275

The Youth Voter Guide that Kevin’s students created is available here: https://www.promotethevoteohio.com/

*Get Tickets to our live show!*

October 19 at the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC. Featuring Kettering Senior Fellow Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II.

https://www.unionstagepresents.com/shows/this-day-live-the-next-realignment-presented-by-the-charles-f-kettering-foundation-19-oct Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com

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For the fourth and final installment of our month-long collaboration with the This Day podcast, we go to 2010 and the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision—which enshrined corporate spending as protected speech and unleashed a new era of dark money in American politics. This Day hosts Jody Avirgan, Nicole Hemmer, and Kellie Carter Jackson are joined by Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, to trace how we got here: from the Tillman Act of 1907 through Watergate, the FEC, the McCain-Feingold Act, and the long effort to keep corporate money out of elections. How much of the problem predates Citizens United, and how much did that ruling change everything?

Be sure to check out the League of Women Voters at lwv.org and their voter information resource at vote411.org.

Learn more about this special series here: https://kettering.org/america-250-podcast-series-begins-in-september/

If you enjoy this episode, go over to This Day’s feed for two more episodes on each of these historical topics. The Context’s host, Alex Lovit, will be the guest in the third episode each week. Listen to all episodes here: https://www.jodyavirgan.com/political-history-show

Attention, Washington, DC-area listeners! Join us on Monday, October 19, 2026, for a live taping of This Day. The Context host, Alex Lovit, will join This Day hosts live on stage. The featured guest is Kettering Senior Fellow Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II.

They will be in conversation about the moment of democratic realignment we are living through right now. Are we witnessing a fundamental shift in who holds power, who gets left out, and how race and class are reshaping the coalitions that define American politics? And what can history teach us about moments like this one?

The event is open to the public, and tickets are available through the Howard Theatre: https://www.unionstagepresents.com/shows/this-day-live-the-next-realignment-presented-by-the-charles-f-kettering-foundation-19-oct Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com

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For the third installment of our month-long collaboration with the This Day podcast, we go to 1964 and a moment when the two major parties in this country, in a sense, switched. This Day hosts Jody Avirgan, Nicole Hemmer, and Kellie Carter Jackson are joined by Eric K. Ward, executive vice president of Race Forward, to trace the story from Jim Crow through the New Deal and into the Civil Rights Act—and to understand why the Democratic coalition that produced it was always too contradictory to survive. How did Black voters move from Lincoln’s party to LBJ’s? And what did White Southerners do when their party started to leave them behind?

Be sure to check out Eric’s documentary White with Fear on PBS: https://www.pbs.org/show/white-with-fear/

Learn more about this special series here: https://kettering.org/america-250-podcast-series-begins-in-september/

If you enjoy this episode, go over to This Day’s feed for two more episodes on each of these historical topics. The Context’s host, Alex Lovit, will be the guest in the third episode each week. Listen to all episodes here: https://www.jodyavirgan.com/political-history-show

Attention, Washington, DC-area listeners! Join us on Monday, October 19, 2026, for a live taping of This Day. The Context host, Alex Lovit, will join This Day hosts live on stage. The featured guest is Kettering Senior Fellow Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II.

They will be in conversation about the moment of democratic realignment we are living through right now. Are we witnessing a fundamental shift in who holds power, who gets left out, and how race and class are reshaping the coalitions that define American politics? And what can history teach us about moments like this one?

The event is open to the public, and tickets are available through the Howard Theatre: https://www.unionstagepresents.com/shows/this-day-live-the-next-realignment-presented-by-the-charles-f-kettering-foundation-19-oct Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com

for information about our collection and use of personal data for

advertising.

For the second installment of our month-long collaboration with This Day, we go to western New York in the summer of 1848. This Day’s hosts, Jody Avirgan, Nicole Hemmer, and Kellie Carter Jackson, are joined by Deva Woodly, Kettering research fellow and professor at Brown University, to discuss the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights—the characters who cooked it up over afternoon tea, the Declaration of Sentiments they wrote in the shadow of the Declaration of Independence, and the one resolution that nearly didn’t pass, until Frederick Douglass stood up to speak. Plus: why western New York was the hotbed of basically every radical idea of the 19th century.

Deva Woodly is a research fellow at the Kettering Foundation: https://kettering.org/fellow/deva-woodly/ Be sure to check out her book, Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements: https://academic.oup.com/book/39098?login=false

Learn more about this special series here: https://kettering.org/america-250-podcast-series-begins-in-september/

If you enjoy this episode, go over to This Day’s feed for two more episodes on each of these historical topics. The Context’s host, Alex Lovit, will be the guest in the third episode each week. Listen to all episodes here: https://www.jodyavirgan.com/political-history-show

Attention, Washington, DC-area listeners! Join us on Monday, October 19, 2026, for a live taping of This Day. The Context host, Alex Lovit, will join This Day hosts live on stage. The featured guest is Kettering Senior Fellow Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II.

They will be in conversation about the moment of democratic realignment we are living through right now. Are we witnessing a fundamental shift in who holds power, who gets left out, and how race and class are reshaping the coalitions that define American politics? And what can history teach us about moments like this one?

The event is open to the public, and tickets are available through the Howard Theatre: https://www.unionstagepresents.com/shows/this-day-live-the-next-realignment-presented-by-the-charles-f-kettering-foundation-19-oct Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com

for information about our collection and use of personal data for

advertising.

Special series announcement! For the next four weeks, we’re bringing you a special series as part of Kettering’s America 250 initiative, “Democracy, Under Construction.” It’s about key events in American history that have brought us toward, or away from, an inclusive democracy—and the work that remains to be done.

We coproduced this series with our friends at a podcast called This Day. It’s a history show, and they’re doing a whole year of episodes about major events that shaped our nation. So, for the next four Tuesdays, you’ll be hearing episodes of This Day in our feed, where their three cohosts and special guests discuss these important moments in American history. Learn more about the series here: https://kettering.org/america-250-podcast-series-begins-in-september/

If you enjoy this episode, go over to This Day’s feed for two more episodes on each of these historical topics. The Context’s host, Alex Lovit, will be the guest in the third episode each week. Listen to the episodes here: https://www.jodyavirgan.com/political-history-show

For our kickoff episode in the series, we go to 1789. That’s when the Founding Fathers spent months that summer hammering out the Constitution—and nearly forgot to include freedom. This Day hosts Jody Avirgan, Nicole Hemmer, and Kellie Carter Jackson are joined by Dahlia Lithwick of Slate to look at how the Bill of Rights came to exist: the philosophical fight over whether rights even needed to be written down, what ended up in it (and what didn’t), and what it tells us about who the Founders were actually building this government for.

Be sure to check out Dahlia’s Amicus podcast and all her work at Slate.

https://slate.com/author/dahlia-lithwick

More about This Day:

This Day podcast, hosted by Jody Avirgan and historians Nicole Hemmer and Kellie Carter Jackson, takes listeners beyond the head-spinning headlines of today and into the unexpected historical moments that have shaped American life and politics. This Day is part of the Radiotopia podcast network. Listen to the show here: https://www.jodyavirgan.com/political-history-show

And finally: if you’re in the Washington, DC, area, join us on Monday, October 19, 2026, for a live taping of This Day. Alex Lovit will join This Day hosts live on stage. The featured guest is Kettering Senior Fellow Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II.

They will be in conversation about the moment of democratic realignment we are living through right now. Are we witnessing a fundamental shift in who holds power, who gets left out, and how race and class are reshaping the coalitions that define American politics? And what can history teach us about moments like this one?

The event is open to the public, and tickets are available through the Howard Theatre: https://www.unionstagepresents.com/shows/this-day-live-the-next-realignment-presented-by-the-charles-f-kettering-foundation-19-oct Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com

for information about our collection and use of personal data for

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Faith-led movements in the US have catalyzed some of our greatest expansions of civil rights. But, at the same time, Christianity has also been used as justification for some of the worst evils in American history. How do people of faith reckon with this tension? And what will it take for Americans of all racial backgrounds, ethnic origins, and faith traditions to commit to dismantling faith-cloaked racism?

Jemar Tisby joins host Alex Lovit to discuss how to protect the progress toward racial equity, while continuing to take steps forward toward an inclusive democracy.

Jemar Tisby is a historian, author, and the founder and CEO of Tisby Media. He studies and writes about history, race, and faith in the United States. He’s a New York Times bestselling author, and his popular Substack, Footnotes, is one of the most read in its category.

https://jemartisby.substack.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@JTisby Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com

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How long do people have to live in America before they’re considered American? How long does it take to prove themselves as productive, peaceful members of society? For millions of immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades, the answer seems to be, “never.” Immigrants without documents or with temporary status are vulnerable to exploitation by their employers and have been made scapegoats by xenophobic politicians. Patricia Campos-Medina joins host Alex Lovit to discuss how problems with the United States’ immigration, labor, and democratic systems are connected—and what it will take to fix them.

Patricia Campos-Medina is a scholar of race, immigration, and labor. She’s the executive director of the Worker Institute at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. She coauthored the 2025 book Legalized Inequalities: Immigration and Race in the Low-Wage Workplace.

https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/worker-institute

https://www.russellsage.org/publications/book/legalized-inequalities Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com

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How does a dissident become a dissident? The Atlantic staff writer Gal Beckerman joins host Alex Lovit to discuss his new book, How to Be a Dissident. It’s part instruction manual, part history, and part call to action to resist the oppressive forces of our own times.

Gal Beckerman is a writer and editor. His previous books include The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas and When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry.

https://www.galbeckerman.com/how-to-be-a-dissident

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In the United States, elections hold our representatives accountable. But voters get a limited slate of options—and significant economic redistribution is usually excluded from the ballot. Meanwhile, economic inequality in the United States is growing to record levels, and many wealthy Americans are paying a lower effective tax rate than most of their fellow citizens. Jeffrey Winters joins host Alex Lovit to discuss American oligarchy, how it distorts our democracy, and what we can do about it.

Jeffrey Winters is a professor of political science and director of the Equality Development and Globalization Studies program at Northwestern University. He is the author of several books about oligarchy, wealth, and democracy, most recently The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Blind-Spot/Jeffrey-Winters/9781668221532

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