You might already be familiar with filling out the FAFSA form, or you might only know it by reputation. That reputation is somewhere between filing your annual income taxes and running an Ironman triathalon. Revisions, technology issues and widespread confusion over the availability of the form over the past two years might make it seem even more sinister.
Let’s back up. What is the FAFSA? If you have a child finishing high school this school year, the FAFSA plays a big part in determining how much financial aid you could receive—including grants, loans and scholarships—to help pay for college. In Indiana, most families are now required by law to fill out the FAFSA unless they seek a waiver.

Despite recent tumult, all signs point to the FAFSA being ready to fill out this year by the traditional launch date of Oct. 1. Our guest this week is Bill Wozniak, vice president and chief marketing officer of INvestEd, a nonprofit based in Indianapolis and created by the Indiana Legislature to help families navigate the FAFSA process. He provides an overview for the uninitiated and shares some of the biggest misconceptions of FAFSA. For example, if you think you are sufficiently wealthy to put any financial assistance out of reach, you very well could be wrong. If you think you just need to get it done by the end of the year, you might want to think again. And, Wozniak says, the process isn’t nearly as arduous today as its reputation might suggest.

In this episode of the IBJ Podcast, USA Today columnist and sports broadcasting veteran Christine Brennan speaks with IBJ's Mickey Shuey about "On Her Game," her bestselling unauthorized biography of Indiana Fever’s star Caitlyn Clark. Brennan explains how a chance encounter at the Olympic swimming trials led to a whirlwind book deal, and why Clark’s impact on attendance, viewership and cultural visibility is unlike anything women’s team sports have seen.

She also speaks candidly about the WNBA’s handling of Clark’s debut, arguing that league leadership failed to prepare for her arrival and continues to struggle with how to balance promotion, parity and politics. Brennan shares the story behind her viral press conference questions, including one about Clark’s social media activity following a Kamala Harris endorsement, and reflects on what it means to report critically and fairly on the league's biggest star.

Plus, Brennan offers her take on Indianapolis’ vision to become the capital of women’s sports, praises the city’s execution of the WNBA All-Star weekend—even without Clark on the court—and urges leaders to keep Clark in Indy as long as possible.

Natalie van Dongen grew up in a small farming community outside a modest city in central Illinois. She spent most of her youth either in school or in the woods by her home. Approaching high school graduation, she wanted to study theater in college and definitely didn’t want to go to Butler University, where both of her parents graduated. But that’s where she eventually chose to go.

Two weeks ago, she became the Hogsett administration’s point person for addressing the concerns and complaints of nearly 1 million Indianapolis residents. In eight years, she had risen from an internship with the mayor’s office to the city’s director of community outreach. Along the way, her positions included liaison to the City-County Council and then deputy director of policy and planning for the Department of Public Works. She was a key figure in the city’s push for universal curbside recycling that’s now expected to begin in 2028.

In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, host Mason King asks Van Dongen about the principles of effective communication with an incredibly broad range of people and organizations. She also digs into the nitty-gritty of universal curbside recycling and the education campaign planned over the next two years. And she excavates her roots in the village of Towanda, Illinois, and how they led her to explore the power of community.

Host Mickey Shuey unpacks the high-stakes arrival of the 2025 WNBA All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis—and explores what it means that the league's biggest star, Caitlin Clark, is sidelined. With thousands descending upon the Circle City. Featuring interviews with WNBA Chief Growth Officer Colie Edison, USA Today columnist Christine Brennan, sports marketer Ken Ungar, and leaders from Visit Indy, Indiana Sports Corp., and Pacers Sports & Entertainment, this episode dives into the marketing, civic planning, and vision behind one of the biggest weekends in WNBA history as the city looks to use the weekend as a catalyst for its own ambitions around women's sports. If you enjoyed the episode, get caught up on the season in your favorite podcast app or on IBJ.com.

We’ve hit a head-spinning milestone in the history and development of women’s basketball in Indiana. This week, Indianapolis is hosting the WNBA All-Star Game and all of its related festivities, coming amid an unprecedented surge in popularity for women’s basketball. The top vote-getter for the game is Caitin Clark of the Indiana Fever—a team that now sells out an 18,000-seat arena for nearly every game. The international media is here, and everyone is talking about the potential for players’ salaries to significantly rise. 

Exactly 50 years ago, Judi Warren was preparing to enter her senior year at Warsaw High School. She didn’t know that she was on the precipice of history.  The Indiana High School Athletic Association had officially sanctioned girls basketball, which meant it would have its first statewide girls basketball champion at the end of the season. Warren would end up a transformational figure in the state’s most popular sport, becoming the first Miss Basketball and helping kick-start the rapid growth and evolution of the game for Hoosier girls and women.

She’s our guest this week to provide a first-hand account of how girls who played the game in the early 1970s had to fight for respect, funding and even decent practice time—and then how quickly attitudes changed after she guided Warsaw to the first state championship. She then became one of the early recipients of a college basketball scholarship, helped nurture talent through basketball camps, and became a coach—returning to the state finals with Carmel High School. In these ways, she understands the path that has led to this moment as Indy hosts the All-Star Game. She also weighs in on the impact of the WNBA and Caitlin Clark in particular. 

Independent bookstores have been on the retail death watch for a few decades now. But, as one American author might put it, reports of their impending demise have been greatly exaggerated. For many, the recipe for success is local ownership, strict attention to local needs and concerns and calendars packed with special events to help create a sense of community. This is what Tiffany Phillips has found over nine years as founder and owner of Wild Geese Bookshop in Franklin.

Phillips had a well-established career as an attorney in the health care industry as she was turning 40. But Franklin didn’t have a bookstore. One thing led to another as Phillips sought a new office space, and soon she was doing double-duty as a lawyer and a bookshop proprietor. She had a bigger vision for the store as a hub for cultural life and a haven for anyone interested in creativity. As Wild Geese approaches its first decade in business, it has developed a national reputation on the authors circuit as a destination where Phillips and her staff pull out all the stops to host hundreds of fans and involve other local businesses, like the historic Artcraft Theatre and the Main & Madison Market Café. 

IBJ’s Taylor Wooten recently wrote about this in the May 30 issue of the paper. For the IBJ Podcast this week, host Mason King wanted to chat with Phillips about the small-business challenges of opening and growing the shop and how she fights against persistent fears that investing in the printed word in a small Indiana city is, well … kind of crazy.

Coming after the baby boomers, Generation X is often referred to as “the forgotten generation,” the self-reliant generation and perhaps the last free-range generation. Today, you certainly could argue that it's  becoming the financial-panic generation.

The first Gen Xers hit the workforce right around the time pensions gave way to 401(k) accounts with self-directed invested assets. Recent studies indicate that Gen Xers who have retirement accounts have saved on average somewhere in the neighborhood of $180,000. That’s well below the $1 million popularly seen as the minimum requirement for beginning a comfortable retirement. (Of course, the ability to sustain income in retirement depends a lot on your spending habits and the quality of life you try to pursue.)

Nearly 50% of Gen Xers don’t even have a retirement plan, according to asset management firm Schroders. So IBJ Podcast host Mason King began compiling some of the most common questions his fellow Gen Xers ask about pending retirement or, if need be, semiretirement. For example, when is the best time to start taking Social Security, especially given that it’s headed for a funding deficit early next decade? What exactly do you do with your 401k funds once you retire? And what should you start doing today if your retirement savings are in the five figures or low six figures? In this week's episode of the IBJ Podcast, columnist Pete the Planner weighs in on the big questions for Gen X and warns against a common strategy for diversifying portfolios that King thought was genius.

Nearly one year ago—July 1, 2024—the urban university in downtown Indianapolis known as IUPUI—or Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis—officially split into two separate campuses. This created Indiana University Indianapolis, a standalone campus in the IU system, and Purdue University in Indianapolis, which is considered an extension of Purdue’s main campus in West Lafayette.

IU Indianapolis took the vast majority of the land and buildings considered part of IUPUI. The school is focusing in part on research, commercialization and student opportunity in the life sciences and biotech sectors. With its Lafayette extension, Purdue wants to draw more students interested in engineering and business to the university, including through new degree programs such as motorsports engineering and executive education.

With a relatively modest amount of land set aside for its Indianapolis operations, Purdue needed to figure out how it eventually could have an outsized impact. It recently revealed its long-term plans—16 buildings ranging from five to about 20 stories on just 28 acres of land in the northwest sector of downtown. In this week’s edition of the podcast, IBJ’s Mickey Shuey unpacks Purdue’s high-density strategy to serve 15,000 students per year by 2075.

Mickey also digs deep into perhaps the greatest hindrance to growth in that area—West Street, the wide and heavily trafficked thoroughfare that essentially creates a barrier between the Mile Square and everything to the West. As Mickey reports in the latest issue of IBJ, tearing down that figurative wall is becoming a greater priority for the city of Indianapolis. The Hogsett administration has begun “preliminary discussions” with the neighborhood and universities to develop potential solutions. But any fix likely to come from those talks—whether spanning the roadway with bridges or tunnels, creating a parkway, or adding more crosswalks to slow traffic—will be expensive and likely require consensus from many stakeholders.

Indianapolis-based housing developer Onyx + East recently scored a three-peat on IBJ’s annual list of fast-growing companies—all of which were on the watch of CEO Kelli Lawrence. She took the top job in 2019, when its annual revenue was about $19 million. By 2024, its annual revenue had climbed to $90 million—a nearly 375% increase over five years.

Founded in 2015 as an offshoot of Indianapolis-based apartment developer Milhaus, Onyx + East has specialized in for-sale housing such as townhomes, duplex homes and single-family residences within planned communities in high-demand urban and suburban areas. Its focus has widened from Marion Couty to the Indianapolis metropolitan area to markets in Ohio and Florida. It also has expanded into the build-to-rent category.

Kelli Lawrence grew up in a traditional suburban home in Toledo and was a first-generation college student. She entered Ball State University with a strong sense of what she wanted to do—study urban planning and development in Ball State’s school of architecture—and a hunger for student governance, joining and leading a wide array of campus organizations. He first job out of school was long-range planner for the city of Carmel, getting involved in the early stages of some of the city’s signature projects. All of these topics are on the table for this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, as well as her current role as CEO of Onyx + East. We discuss the economics of developing and pricing its projects in central Indiana, how to onboard new employees in the midst of business growth, her early years in the housing development when she often was the only woman in the room, and why she describes herself as a “joiner.”

Doug Boles already had his dream job as president of Indianapolis Motor Speedway since 2013. Then Roger Penske, owner of both IMS and the IndyCar Series, asked him to be president of IndyCar following the departure of Jay Frye in February. The pitch: Boles would retain his first job while also taking on the second. “It wasn’t something that I expected,” Boles says in this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast. “When Roger Penske calls you and says, ‘I need your help,’ you don’t usually say, ‘No.’ You say, ‘Yes, sir, how can I help?’ And then you get on board and you start figuring it out.”

A few months later, early in the morning after qualifying for the Indy 500 on May 18, Boles called Penske to inform his boss that he felt it was necessary to ratchet up the severity of penalties against two Team Penske drivers—including two-time defending champion Josef Newgarden—by placing them at the very back of the field. “It was not the [phone] call I wanted to make,” Boles said.

Nor was it the only difficult conversation Boles would have with IndyCar teams about costly penalties by the time the Indy 500 victory banquet rolled around on May 26. “This month was probably the most physically and emotionally draining and taxing month that I’ve had since I’ve been [IMS] president,” Boles told IBJ. 
These have been the highest-profile decisions to date in Boles’ tenure as IndyCar president as he works on implementing Penske’s larger vision. Most importantly, that means bringing together IMS and IndyCar to work more as a single unit and leverage their strengths. It also means working with Fox, IndyCar’s new broadcaster, to find ways to build the audience. It means working with promoters and sponsor. All of those topics are on the table in this wide-ranging podcast, as well as emerging efforts to improve inspection of cars and to create an independent officiating board that would operate completely outside the Penske organization to quell concerns about conflicts of interest. Boles also shares his take on the need for the annual irritant shared by many local fans: the TV blackout of the live Indy 500 broadcast.