This Civic Moment

Join us for the finale of Season 3! This episode was recorded live on Monday, April 3, 2023, at the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis.  

It features Kelly McGowan, founder of Transform 314, and Shavanna Spratt, Creator & Host of Da Hood Talks podcast. Monday Nite Live is a St. Louis-based YouTube series that features drama, foolery, and discussion of local policies and politics. On this night, we discussed the Municipal Elections that occurred on April 4. Some of the themes included taxes on recreational marijuana, the Ferguson mayoral race, St. Louis City’s ward reduction to 14 alderpeople, ward funding, various school board elections in the county, St. Louis Community College Board of Trustees elections, and more.  

Annie Rice is a former Alderperson who represented the 8th Ward of St. Louis from 2018 to 2023. Prior to her aldermanic election, Annie was the Democratic Committeewoman for that same ward and represented the 5th Senate District to the Missouri Democratic Party. She recently completed a four year term on the Board of the Migrant and Immigrant Community Action (MICA) Project and has a background in immigration and civil rights law.

In this episode, Annie joins Eric Reiter and Bethany Copeland, fellows at the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement, to discuss her journey into politics, recent changes in the St. Louis aldermanic landscape, and provide guidance on navigating local government.

Blake Strode is the Executive Director of Arch City Defenders, a nonprofit civil rights law firm in St. Louis, Missouri providing holistic legal advocacy and combating the criminalization of poverty and state violence against poor people and people of color. He is also a Co-host of Under the Arch podcast, which discusses issues impacting the St. Louis community and the people working to change them. 

In this episode, Blake joins Eric Reiter and Bethany Copeland, of the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement, to discuss carceral systems, localized reparations, public safety as community wellness, and how to create more equitable structural changes within the law.

Tony Messenger is the Metro Columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, writing four columns a week in a position he has held since September 2016. He joined the Post-Dispatch in 2008 as a capital correspondent and political columnist in Jefferson City. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for a series of articles written in 2018 on debtors' prisons in rural Missouri.

In this episode, Tony joins Eric Reiter and Bethany Copeland, of the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement, to discuss conflict, complexity, how journalism relates to democracy, and why the news in St. Louis is so relevant to the rest of the country.

Dr. John Inazu is a Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis and a Senior Fellow with Interfaith America. He is also an author and Founder of The Carver Project, a non-profit that connects students and faculty to community engagement through their Christian faith. Professor Inazu’s scholarship focuses on the First Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion, and related questions of legal and political theory.

In this episode, Dr. Inazu joins Eric Reiter and Bethany Copeland, of the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement, to discuss authentic relationship building, how law affects activism, and the value of bringing faith identities into public discourse.

Dr. Punch is a trauma surgeon and the Executive Director and founder of Power 4 Stl and “The T”. He also serves as Medical Director at the Bullet Related Injury Clinic, a community-based free clinic that focuses on the experience of the Black masculine body. In the wake of the Ferguson Uprising, LJ moved to St. Louis to join the faculty at the School of Medicine at Washington University, but has since left academia. The threefold focus of his career is education, trauma, and equity.

In this episode, Punch joins Eric Reiter and Bethany Copeland, of the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement, to discuss bringing institutional resources into the community, bullet injuries as a public health crisis, and how medicine can be inclusive and humanizing.

Aaron Naparstek '93 is a co-host, producer, and creator of The War on Cars, a popular podcast dedicated to pushing back against the pernicious effects of car culture and automobile dominance. He is also the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog, a publication covering urban transportation, land use and environmental issues, with outlets in six U.S. cities.  

In this episode, Aaron discusses car-free advocacy, the arc of change, and personal stories from turning passion into policy. This episode was recorded in front of a live audience on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, as part of the Gephardt Institute's inaugural Civic Action Week in Sept. of 2022.

There’s a lot of terminology around elections – mail-in ballots, absentee voting, midterms – that can seem inaccessible to people just beginning to vote for the first time. Here’s a short introduction to what you need to know to make sure your vote counts.

In this special Voter Series of This Civic Moment, our host, Otto Brown, talks to Co-chair of WashU Votes, Spencer Chrein about the logistics of casting your ballot. This episode was co-created by WashU Votes and the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement.

Jason Rosenbaum, St. Louis Public Radio Politics Correspondent, is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Since starting his career in the mid-2000s, Rosenbaum has covered politics, policy and rock and roll music for various media outlets, including the Columbia Daily Tribune, St. Louis Beacon, and the Riverfront Times. 

In this episode, Rosenbaum joins Louis Damani Jones and Bethany Copeland, of the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement, to discuss the ever-evolving media landscape, the impact of the Ferguson Uprising on journalism, and the lack of public awareness surrounding local and state politics. 

Author Vivian Gibson, joins us to discuss factors impacting the decline of the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood. Her memoir, The Last Children of Mill Creek, documents the nation’s largest urban renewal project and its consequences on the black community through stories from her childhood in St. Louis.

In this episode of This Civic Moment, our hosts welcome Vivian Gibson. This podcast, hosted by the Engage Democracy Fellows at the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement at Washington University, seeks answers to these questions while providing listeners with multiple angles to inquire, reflect, and discern our civic identity and calling as a community.