Community Possibilities

In this episode of Community Possibilities, you will meet Amy Ard, Executive Director of Motherhood Beyond Bars. Being a nonprofit leader was not Amy's career plan, but sometimes, life takes you in unexpected places. One profound experience in her life that led her back to her home, Atlanta.

• We talk about how Amy first become aware of incarcerated women who are pregnant and how this forever changed her life.
• The fact that shackling pregnant and laboring women was legal in many states, including Georgia.
• How common is it for women who are incarcerated to be pregnant or have children already. (Hint: We don't know).
• I ask the question some people may be thinking, Why should I care?
• The kind of services does Motherhood Beyond Bars provide?
• How MBB shifted in response to systemic barriers.
• How does MBB make a difference? (any outcomes you can share).
• Why I dubbed Amy "the Equalizer."
• What is challenging for her as a nonprofit leader.
• How they are measuring the outcomes of MBB for the families they serve.
• What is next for Motherhood Beyond Bars.

Learn More about Motherhood Beyond Bars and follow them on social.
Amy's Bio
Amy Ard is the founding Executive Director of Motherhood Beyond Bars (MBB), a nonprofit serving incarcerated pregnant women and their infants. MBB provides holistic family support with the goal of ending cycles of incarceration in families and is the only organization in Georgia supporting pregnant women in custody and conducting vital research on the impacts of maternal incarceration on infants and families. Amy is a graduate of Atlanta Public Schools, Denison University, and Vanderbilt Divinity School. Amy and her husband, Michael Waller, live in her childhood home with Amy’s mother, three children, and a handful of quail in the backyard.
Like what you heard? Please like and share wherever you get your podcasts!

Connect with Ann: Community Evaluation SolutionsHow Ann can help:

• Support the evaluation capacity of your coalition or community-based organization.
• Help you create a strategic plan that doesn’t stress you and your group out, doesn’t take all year to design, and is actionable.
• Engage your group in equitable, difficult conversations.
• Facilitate a workshop to plan for action and get your group moving.
• Create a workshop that energizes and excites your group for action.
• Speak at your conference or event.

Ann's book with

Like what you heard? Please like and share wherever you get your podcasts!

Connect with Ann: Community Evaluation Solutions How Ann can help:

· Support the evaluation capacity of your coalition or community-based organization.

· Help you create a strategic plan that doesn’t stress you and your group out, doesn’t take all year to design, and is actionable.

· Engage your group in equitable discussions about difficult conversations.

· Facilitate a workshop to plan for action and get your group moving.

· Create a workshop that energizes and excites your group for action.

· Speak at your conference or event.

Have a question or want to know more? Book a call with Ann .

Be sure and check out our updated resource page! Let us know what was helpful.
Community Possibilities is Produced by Zach Price
Music by Zach Price: [email protected]

In this episode of Community Possibilties, Dr. Joe Gone, Professor of Anthropology and of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University, joins me to talk about his work at the intersection of culture, coloniality, and well-being in Indigenous communities. An enrolled member of the Aaniiih-Gros Ventre tribal Nation of Montana, he has investigated these issues through collaborative research partnerships in both reservation and urban American Indian settings.
We talk about:

• The historical trauma and the effects of that trauma on American Indians and other Indigenous peoples;
• The pursuit of social justice;
• “Combatting societal erasure” and how it manifests in our communities, in health and mental health research;
• The meaning of the word “decolonizing;"
• What decolonizing mental health services look like and valuing the therapeutic traditions of the past;
• His work in substance abuse treatment with the Blackfeet Nation at the Crystal Creek Lodge.
• “The Power of Story” and indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing and healing;
• What community leaders should appreciate about ways of knowing.

Dr. Joe Gone's Bio
Joseph P. Gone is an international expert in the psychology and mental health of American Indians and other Indigenous peoples. A professor at Harvard University, Dr. Gone has collaborated with tribal communities for over 25 years to critique conventional mental health services and harness traditional culture and spirituality for advancing Indigenous well-being. He has published over 100 scientific articles and chapters, and received recognition in his fields through several fellowships and career awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014 and election to the National Academy of Medicine in 2021.
Connect with Joe
Email: [email protected]

Website: https://gonetowar.com/

Like what you heard? Please like and share wherever you get your podcasts!

Connect with Ann: Community Evaluation SolutionsHow Ann can help:

• Support the evaluation capacity of your coalition or community-based organization.
• Help you create a strategic plan that doesn’t stress you and your group out, doesn’t take all year to design, and is actionable.
• Engage your group in equitable, difficult conversations.
• Facilitate a workshop to plan for action and get your group moving.
• Create a workshop that energizes and excites your group for actio

Like what you heard? Please like and share wherever you get your podcasts!

Connect with Ann: Community Evaluation Solutions How Ann can help:

· Support the evaluation capacity of your coalition or community-based organization.

· Help you create a strategic plan that doesn’t stress you and your group out, doesn’t take all year to design, and is actionable.

· Engage your group in equitable discussions about difficult conversations.

· Facilitate a workshop to plan for action and get your group moving.

· Create a workshop that energizes and excites your group for action.

· Speak at your conference or event.

Have a question or want to know more? Book a call with Ann .

Be sure and check out our updated resource page! Let us know what was helpful.
Community Possibilities is Produced by Zach Price
Music by Zach Price: [email protected]

In this episode of Community Possibilities, Sam Gill joins me to talk about his work with the Doris Duke Foundation. She was "always a woman of her times" and that is reflected in her funding priorities and the Foundation trys to follow her example today. Sam shares the history of the Doris Duke Foundation and who Doris Duke was. She was a woman a head of her times in many ways.

• Mission and Values - Supporting the well-being of people and the planet for a more creative, equitable and sustainable future.
• Funding priorities of the Foundation.
• Why the Foundation’s is committed through a diverse and equitable biomedical research workforce as a founding member of the 90 strong, STEMM Opportunity Alliance.
• Disruption describes when the structure of a market changes. Sam shares how disruption can help everyone participate in the market of science and how that will promote equity.
• How their work helps address the fundamental causes of child abuse and neglect to reshape the child protection system and gets to how it makes decisions about who is a fit parent. The Foundation is working with state agency's who want to look at the child systems in an upstream way.
• Why this is a hard time to be an institutionalist.
• How coming to the answers to some of our hard questions means questioning institutions, but may not mean dismantling them and how the margins of conversations help
• How Building Bridges helps tell the stories of Muslims in various ways.
• The role of philanthropy can play in advancing social justice and equity by funding many possible solutions. Why debate will help us get to solutions to societies biggest probelms.
• His advice for people working in communities (have tenacity, take energy by polarization, look for opportunities for collaboration

Sam Gill
President and CEO of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

Samsher (Sam) Singh Gill is president and CEO of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which supports the performing arts, medical research, the environment and child well-being. He is also president of the Duke Farms Foundation and the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art.

Previously, Gill served as senior vice president and chief program officer at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and vice president of Freedman Consulting, LLC.

Gill attended the University of Chicago and the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
Like what you heard? Please like and share wherever you get your podcasts!

Connect w

Like what you heard? Please like and share wherever you get your podcasts!

Connect with Ann: Community Evaluation Solutions How Ann can help:

· Support the evaluation capacity of your coalition or community-based organization.

· Help you create a strategic plan that doesn’t stress you and your group out, doesn’t take all year to design, and is actionable.

· Engage your group in equitable discussions about difficult conversations.

· Facilitate a workshop to plan for action and get your group moving.

· Create a workshop that energizes and excites your group for action.

· Speak at your conference or event.

Have a question or want to know more? Book a call with Ann .

Be sure and check out our updated resource page! Let us know what was helpful.
Community Possibilities is Produced by Zach Price
Music by Zach Price: [email protected]

In this episode of Community Possibilities, Crystal Atson joins me to talk about her work with The Ford Family Foundation and their work in rural communities. We talk about:

• We dig into why they work in rural communities and what that looks like.
• How they developed their Community Building Approach and the way it guides their work.
• The four principles that guide the work of the Foundation.
• Crystal's take on the power dynamics between funders and grantees.
• How they recognize and deal with those power dynamics while working in communities.
• How nonprofits can connect with funders.

Crystal's Bio
Prior to joining the Foundation in June 2016, Crystal Aston worked at the nonprofit Great Northern Services in Weed, Calif., for 11 years, most recently as the community services manager. She was instrumental in growing the community food program and played key roles in providing assistance to the survivors of the Boles Fire of 2014.

Crystal has extensive experience in obtaining grant funding from federal and private sources. Her work included maintaining relationships with local governments to make sure services were not duplicated; she analyzed proposed legislation and regulations to determine how agency services could be impacted.

As a field coordinator for The Ford Family Foundation, she works to build trusting relationships with community stakeholders to support long-term, sustainable action. She helps connect communities to resources from the Foundation and other sources.

Crystal has a bachelor's degree in liberal studies from California State University Chico.
Learn more about the Foundation: tff.org
Contact Crystal: [email protected]
Like what you heard? Please like and share wherever you get your podcasts!

Connect with Ann: Community Evaluation SolutionsHow Ann can help:

• Support the evaluation capacity of your coalition or community-based organization.
• Help you create a strategic plan that doesn’t stress you and your group out, doesn’t take all year to design, and is actionable.
• Engage your group in equitable discussions about difficult conversations.
• Facilitate a workshop to plan for action and get your group moving.
• Create a workshop that energizes and excites your group for action.
• Speak at your conference or event.

Have a question or want to know more? Book a call with Ann .

Be sure and check out our updated resource page! Let us

Like what you heard? Please like and share wherever you get your podcasts!

Connect with Ann: Community Evaluation Solutions How Ann can help:

· Support the evaluation capacity of your coalition or community-based organization.

· Help you create a strategic plan that doesn’t stress you and your group out, doesn’t take all year to design, and is actionable.

· Engage your group in equitable discussions about difficult conversations.

· Facilitate a workshop to plan for action and get your group moving.

· Create a workshop that energizes and excites your group for action.

· Speak at your conference or event.

Have a question or want to know more? Book a call with Ann .

Be sure and check out our updated resource page! Let us know what was helpful.
Community Possibilities is Produced by Zach Price
Music by Zach Price: [email protected]

In this episode of Community Possibilities, Whitney Austin joins me to talk about how her life changed during what was otherwise a normal day on the Sept. 6, 2018 during a mass shooting in Cincinnati, Ohio. Three weeks after the shooting, she founded Whitney Strong with her husband, Waller Austin.
Episode Highlights:

• How she and her husband went from knowing nothing about nonprofits to where the organization is now.
• Why they choose a path of inclusivity and common ground, a hard thing to do when working to prevent gun violence.
• Why they take a data-informed approach.
• Whitney Strong’s Safe a Life Initiative
• Why a public health approach to gun violence research is needed.
• Why WS pursues policies that people from both parties support and their commitment to having conversations that unify.

As Whitney says, she is a defiant optimist and "We can do better, when we come together."

Find out more about Whitney and Whitney Strong at https://www.whitneystrong.org/

Whitney’s Bio

Impassioned after surviving the Sept. 6, 2018, mass shooting in Cincinnati, Ohio, Whitney cofounded Whitney/Strong with her husband, an organization focused on finding common ground to end gun violence through data-driven, responsible gun ownership solutions.
Under her leadership, Whitney/Strong has executed on a number of responsible gun ownership solutions including securing the first hearing on gun safety legislation in Frankfort in over a decade. Joining Ohio Governor Mike DeWine to announce the STRONG Ohio legislation, a response to the community call of “Do Something” after the Dayton Oregon District shooting in 2019. Distributing over 12,000 gun locks across Kentucky and Ohio thanks to a partnership with the American Academy of Pediatrics and with the support of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Training over 500 people in neighborhoods disproportionately impacted by gun violence in methods to reduce gun violence. And most recently, lobbying Senator Mitch McConnell and Rob Portman to ensure passage of the federal Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
Prior to her calling, Whitney was employed by Fifth Third Bank for 15 years as Vice President, Digital Lending Product Manager. In 2018, Whitney and her team launched the first omnichannel digital lending application in the industry.
A wife and a mother of two, Whitney resides in Louisville, Kentucky where she earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Louisville. She enjoys traveling to new locations with her family, musical theatre, the Bengals, college basketball, and getting outdoors.
Connect with Ann:

Like what you heard? Please like and share wherever you get your podcasts!

Connect with Ann: Community Evaluation Solutions How Ann can help:

· Support the evaluation capacity of your coalition or community-based organization.

· Help you create a strategic plan that doesn’t stress you and your group out, doesn’t take all year to design, and is actionable.

· Engage your group in equitable discussions about difficult conversations.

· Facilitate a workshop to plan for action and get your group moving.

· Create a workshop that energizes and excites your group for action.

· Speak at your conference or event.

Have a question or want to know more? Book a call with Ann .

Be sure and check out our updated resource page! Let us know what was helpful.
Community Possibilities is Produced by Zach Price
Music by Zach Price: [email protected]