Raza Gillani is a journalist and organizer from Pakistan with a robust trajectory leading social movements in favor of students, worker, and immigrants’ rights both in his home country and in New York City. In Lahore, where he grew up, Gillani co-founded the Progressive Students Collective and the Haqooq-e-Khalq movement, which advocated for the rights of the masses. He is currently a member of the Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) collective in NYC, where he serves as an organizer of South Asian working-class communities, leveraging power through electoral and movement work.  More recently, Raza started Muhadjireen NYC, a social media activist community that connects South Asian immigrants in New York City with local politics through journalistic reporting. This project emerged as a response to the underrepresentation of South Asian demands in the mainstream media, and it aims to promote in-depth coverage of how immigrant areas operate on a social, political, and economic level. 

Their conversation moves from the personal to the political, following Aburaddi’s life growing up in Gaza and pursuing journalism abroad, to how storytelling became both a survival tool and a form of resistance.

To answer these questions we spoke to Marjorie Kelly, a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the Democracy Collaborative, author of The Making of a Democratic Economy (co-authored with Ted Howard), Owning our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution, and The Divine Right of Capital. For years Kelly has been a thought leader in the next generation of employee ownership, impact investing, and the construction of a community-rooted democratic economy.  

In this episode, we explore Marjorie Kelly’s long list of experiences and unique perspectives on the economic situation we all find ourselves in. MEDLab director  Nathan Schneider moderates a discussion with Marjorie Kelly and a cast of live audience members about our unique socio-economic challenges and what we can do about them. 

In this episode, Tara Coughlin interviews Benj on how to develop a new language to try and describe the new things happening in AI.

The Colorado Sun is a small but mighty digital news source for the state of Colorado. It is a Public Benefit Corporation making it first and foremost dedicated to serving the Colorado public, and setting it apart from traditional news sources. We talked to Eric Lubbers, in charge of Technology and Strategy for the Sun, to better understand how it operates.

What does this mean for people who rely on Colorado Community Media? How will this relationship change the news ecosystem in Colorado, and what consequences could it have for local media nationally? We will hear from leading people behind this deal, Melissa Milios Davis (Gates Family Foundation), Lillian Ruiz (National Trust for Local News), and Larry Ryckman (Colorado Sun), about how it works and what they hope it will produce.

Brick House’s founder, the veteran journalist and entrepreneur Maria Bustillos, explains why she thinks a simpler, older model of cooperative ownership could be a better way forward—even while she remains hopeful about the sci-fi promise of blockchains.