Nancy

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…

In this bonus episode, Nancy talks about four groups focused on chipping away at the margins in key, battleground states to beat Trump this November: 140 Florida Blue Project, Galvanize USA, Vote Values and American Bridge.

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…

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…

In this week’s bonus episode, Nancy talks about trends in creative activism from protest needlework to fashion design.

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…

This week Nancy speaks with Mark Bergman, a lawyer and Democrat based in London, who since 2017 has been keeping his fellow Democrats abroad engaged in the political process here at home through conference calls with candidates, elected officials and democracy groups. Mark’s calls have featured sitting senators, state attorneys general, candidates for the House and Senate, and other prominent American political figures like James Comey and James Carville. With an audience maxing out in the double digits, the calls provide an intimate opportunity for listeners to hear from and ask questions of these Americans who have stepped up to…

Almost two months into the podcast, Nancy takes a break to muse on one theme that's been coming up a lot in her interviews: the importance of state and local elections.