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Nancy

Podcast

Walls of Moms

Nancy takes a break from the podcast to muse on the army of mothers powering the resistance.
Nancy
August 19, 2020
insights

Walls of Moms

Did you hear about the Wall of Moms in Portland, Oregon? These middle-aged ladies in yellow t-shirts and bike helmets made national news when they formed a human barrier to help protect peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters from armed federal agents. The images of these women, sometimes accompanied by “dads” with leaf blowers to help disperse tear gas, were powerful for many reasons, one of which was the disturbing incongruity of seeing women you’d more likely associate with school bake sales or church socials in a semi-military confrontation. Yet there they were, at the heart of the resistance.  The word…
Nancy
August 19, 2020
Podcast

Quilter, Warrior

This episode features a conversation with Sara Trail, founder of Social Justice Sewing Academy, an organization that provides young people in marginalized communities with free workshops to make textile art about social justice issues. You might think of quilters as little old ladies in rockers, but this fierce, young warrior will upend all your notions of what can be achieved through the artistic expression of quilting. The young makers use fabric, needle and thread in decidedly un-old lady-like ways to create arresting images where they can protest injustice and advocate for social change, giving them the chance to be heard…
Nancy
August 12, 2020
Chip Away to Defeat Trumpinsights

Four Ways to Chip Away at the Margins and Defeat Trump

In New Faces of Democracy, I profile all kinds of people and grassroots groups with one thing in common, defeating Trump and his agenda this November. There are activists across the gamut -- candidates and artists, newsletter writers and fundraisers. And then there is one category of activism that focuses on what I call “chipping away at the margins”.  We all know that, in 2016, Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. And we also all know that he won the electoral college, and therefore the presidency, by a mere 80,000 votes in three swing states. So the…
Nancy
August 6, 2020
Podcast

The Next 50 on the Youth Vote

In 2018, Zak Malamed was living the millennial dream with a job at Facebook. But after coming home from a trip to Auschwitz to images on CNN of internment camps on the Mexican border, he decided he could no longer sit on the sidelines and he needed to do something that felt more purposeful. Since then, he has founded The Next 50, a group focused on helping young people harness their grassroots political powers through political giving. Zak and Nancy discuss how political giving and proximity to power can engage young voters in the political process, how Democrats need to…
Nancy
July 28, 2020
Podcast

How to Flip Florida Blue with 140 Florida Blue Project

Janelle Christensen is a professor and head of the Florida Democratic Environmental Caucus. Margie Stein is a political activist who has found her niche in fundraising for Florida state races. Together, this dynamic duo are spearheading an effort to turn Florida blue by taking a page out of the Virginia playbook that helped flip that state in 2019. Their program, called 140 Florida Blue Project, has recruited democratic candidates to run in all 33 of Florida’s state legislature races in which the Republican candidate had been running unopposed. They talk about why it matters to chip away at the margins…
Nancy
July 21, 2020
Podcast

Tiny Pricks and the Art of Protest

This week’s podcast features a conversation with artist Diana Weymar of Tiny Pricks Project. Diana is a textile artist who one day in 2018 had the impulse to embroider the words “I am a stable genius” onto an old piece of her grandmother’s needlework, and Tiny Pricks was born. Now Tiny Pricks is a public textile-based protest project with hundreds of participants around the world and 56,000 followers on instagram. Nancy and Diana talk about the importance of preserving Trump’s language and transforming it into something beautiful in protest, the therapeutic benefits of doing this work, learning to stay present…
Nancy
July 7, 2020
Creative Activisminsights

Creative Activism

July 14th 2020 I’m a firm believer in silver linings, even in these days filled with dark clouds, and one of these is the flourishing of creative activism taking place right now. If you’ve been following my podcast and the videos on my website, you might have noticed that I’ve got a real soft spot for this kind of thing. I was an art history major who then went on to law school, so this sits squarely at the intersection of my interests in art and policy. Political art can serve as a mirror that we hold up to society.…
Nancy
July 1, 2020