Living Cities
New York City
This collaborative of 19 of the world’s largest banks and philanthropic foundations—including Citibank and the Rockefeller, Ford, MacArthur and Gates foundations—asked us to help it launch a podcast on race, to amplify its decision to re-focus its work on social justice.
Journalists Tanzina Vega of CNN and Barrett Pitner of The Guardian (U.K.), spoke candidly in our podcast studio about how social turbulence is changing mainstream media’s coverage of race.
(PHOTO: Dan Demetriad)
Living Cities
New York City
This collaborative of 19 of the world’s largest banks and philanthropic foundations—including Citibank and the Rockefeller, Ford, MacArthur and Gates foundations—asked us to help it launch a podcast on race, to amplify its decision to re-focus its work on social justice.
THE CHALLENGE
Before Donald Trump’s election to the White House, Living Cities’ work had been focused on improving the lives of low-income people, but as anti-racism protests began sweeping the nation after that election, the organization decided to “respond to the current moment in America” by changing its work to focus on fighting for racial equity, instead.
OUR WORK
We began working with Living Cities’ senior staff to help it pilot and design, record and edit a limited series podcast called Voicing Race—a conversation with business, media and local government leaders on race in America during a time of mass protest.
The first segment featured interviews with two prominent journalists of color—Tanzina Vega, who covered race for CNN, and Barrett Holmes Pitner, a columnist for The Guardian (U.K.) and the BBC, about how the mainstream media’s coverage of race was changing. Another segment, recorded at a SxSW conference panel hosted by Living Cities, featured three city mayors—Richard Berry of Albuquerque, Steve Adler of Austin and Rosalynn Bliss of Grand Rapids—discussing the challenges they were experiencing in their foundation-funded work to dismantle racial inequities in the distribution of city services.
“Because whiteness in America has been seen as the norm—and everything else as ‘the other’—this is the first time we’re seeing a focus on what whiteness in America really is about.”
Tanzina Vega
Former CNN National Reporter, Inequality/Race
OUR IMPACT
Voicing Race, one of the nation’s first podcasts on race, reached more than 140,000 regular listeners during its first three episodes. It helped to add context to the social turbulence that Living Cities’ member networks were seeing on their screens. For external audiences, the series identified different facets of Black life across the nation, and catalyzed what Mayor Stephen Adler of Austin, TX, called “uncomfortable conversations that, if not uncomfortable, aren’t going deep enough when the goal is racial healing and social justice.”
The first podcast segment we produced about how mainstream media covers race in America (above), and a BrandStories photo taken while covering a social justice rally (below)
