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Next City

Straw Hut Media

Join Lucas Grindley, executive director at Next City, where we believe journalists have the power to amplify solutions and spread workable ideas. Each week Lucas will sit down with trailblazers to discuss urban issues that get overlooked. At the end of the day, it's all about focusing the world's attention on the good ideas that we hope will grow. Grab a seat from the bus, subway, light-rail, or whatever your transit-love may be and listen on the go as we spread solutions from one city to the Next City .

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  • 22 episodes
  • weekly
  • Avg 33 min
  • English

Episodes 22

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  • Wednesday · 2 min

    Coming Soon: Not My Narrative

    This October, Next City is launching Not My Narrative, a new podcast and essay series about the stories we tell ourselves that are mistaken for facts and the people proving them wrong.

  • September 2 · 39 min

    The Secret Sauce in Democratic Community Engagement

    A group is working to ensure that the closure of Hester Street in New York City doesn't mean the loss of its wisdom as a trusted facilitator of processes that authentically engaged the community in development projects.

  • June 24 · 14 sec

    Summer Break

    Next City is on a brief hiatus for the summer. We'll be back at the end of July. Thank you for listening to Next City. Together we can spread good ideas from one city to the next city.

  • June 10 · 43 min

    On Being Planners With Purpose

    We are creating a podcast episode about these three episodes related to the Planners With A Purpose conference that Next City sponsored.

  • June 3 · 37 min

    After 150 Episodes, Revisiting Our Favorite Solutions

    The Next City podcast debuted in November 2021 and has now recorded 150 episodes, with hundreds of interviews about solutions with changemakers. Host Lucas Grindley and Editorial Director Deonna Anderson look back on some of the biggest takeaways after more than 75 hours worth of journalism.

  • May 20 · 43 min

    For Immigrant Communities, These Organizations Build Belonging

    Sponsored podcast: From Chelsea to the Berkshires, these organizations do the frontline work of caring for their community when federal policy turns hostile. When ICE raids and hostile federal policies destabilize entire communities, frontline organizations in cities and rural counties alike are answering with door-knocking, theater, wellness programs, and the slow work of building power from within. In this sponsored episode with The Culture & Community Power Fund, two Massachusetts organizations respond to the mounting pressures facing immigrant and refugee communities. The organizations they support are responding to the moment, said Erik Takeshita, Director of The Culture & Community Power Fund. "It was already really hard work, and now it's like you have to add another layer of creativity and ingenuity to really be able to reach out to people,” said Takeshita. La Colaborativa in Chelsea turns organizing and door-knocking into power in so many ways, including policy wins, arts and wellness programming, and a full continuum of youth services. Norieliz DeJesus is the Director of Youth Programs for La Colaborativa, but she first came to the organization as a teen participant. Today, she knows many neighbors who also went through the program and work as nurses, police officers, and community leaders. She considers them part of“ the safety net that this community has created over the years.” “It makes it easier for the community to trust when they can see that the person in those seats of power are people who lived and experienced this community,” said DeJesus, who is a member of the city council. Meanwhile on the other end of the state in Berkshire County, the team at Multicultural BRIDGE—including Gwendolyn VanSant, CEO and founding director, and Dr. Lina Polo, the physician who leads its public health programs—host culturally specific wellness days, support groups, food distribution, and coordinate the county's Community Health Improvement Plan all as ways of addressing isolation, healthcare gaps, and belonging in a predominantly white rural region. "If you treat the least healthy and the person with the least access, it's going to improve things unseen," said VanSant on the need for solidarity. This sponsored series is created in partnership with ⁠The Culture & Community Power Fund (C&CPF)⁠, a national funders’ collaborative advancing the role of culture in building identity, agency, and collective power. This series explores the cultural ecosystem—the traditions, stories, rituals, and spaces that sustain frontline communities—and what it takes to support and strengthen it. ⁠Read the complete series.⁠

  • May 13 · 38 min

    How Boston’s Chinatown Turns Culture Into Power

    This sponsored series is created in partnership with The Culture & Community Power Fund (C&CPF), a national funders’ collaborative advancing the role of culture in building identity, agency, and collective power. This series explores the cultural ecosystem—the traditions, stories, rituals, and spaces that sustain frontline communities—and what it takes to support and strengthen it. Read the complete series. Boston’s Chinatown has for many years faced incredible pressures of displacement, but a network of nonprofits has turned art, storytelling, and organizing into a strategy to empower the community to fight back. In this sponsored episode with The Culture & Community Power Fund, leaders of three community organizations explain how the Chinatown Cultural Plan gives their coalition a shared roadmap for collaboration. "Embarking on this cultural plan allowed us an opportunity to step back, talk to many organizations, community members, see what people are doing, and see how our work complements each other and strengthens each other," said Cynthia Woo, director of the Pao Arts Center at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center. The center is among a network of community organizations working on the plan that received unrestricted funding from C&CPF, a national funders’ collaborative that supports organizations working on the front lines in communities impacted by systemic oppression. Erik Takeshita, director of C&CPF, says the philanthropic sector will too often “focus on the organization as a unit, not necessarily as the community, as the unit of change and intervention. As a result, you end up with these fractured communities.” In Boston’s Chinatown, the network they’re supporting also includes the Asian Community Development Corporation and the Chinatown Community Land Trust. Angie Liou, executive director of ACDC, explains their “anchor strategy,” which uses arts and culture as an anti-displacement tool “and a tool to strengthen Chinatown's boundaries and sense of identity and belonging.” Lydia Lowe, executive director of the Chinatown CLT, explains how art and storytelling drive their organizing and even helped the land trust acquire its first permanently affordable homes. "Sharing stories is a really important part of strengthening our power,” said Lowe. “Because we want every generation to be grounded in that history and to know that there are struggles that happened before us and we can win and we can make a difference."

  • April 29 · 37 min

    Real Solutions Are Everywhere

    A partner episode with the podcast, Real Solutions, produced with The Othering & Belonging Institute.

  • April 22 · 38 min

    Lessons on Serving Immigrant Communities Under Attack

    As immigrant communities face daily threats from ICE and the Trump administration, they need allies they can trust. And that's why today we're looking at nonprofit newsrooms that speak directly with immigrant communities.

  • April 8 · 34 min

    Tenants Rising: Organizing for Housing Justice, Part 2

    Examine tenant-led movements and legal strategies to preserve affordability and resist displacement. It could highlight lawsuits like the one in Missouri where tenants fought to keep their homes within the LIHTC program, connecting to broader tenant unionization efforts nationwide.

  • April 1 · 32 min

    Tenants Rising: Organizing for Housing Justice, Part 1

    Examine tenant-led movements and legal strategies to preserve affordability and resist displacement. It could highlight lawsuits like the one in Missouri where tenants fought to keep their homes within the LIHTC program, connecting to broader tenant unionization efforts nationwide.

  • March 25 · 33 min

    This City Spent $1 Million To Erase $90 Million in Residents’ Debt

    On a daily basis, thousands of Americans are faced with the choice of whether to seek needed medical care, or stay home untreated to avoid sliding further into debt. But one city in Kentucky has found a way to alleviate the dangerous pressures of medical debt for its residents.

  • March 11 · 36 min

    Building Affordable Housing Without Federal Dollars

    One new reality many community leaders are dealing with: Federal funding is rocky, to say the least. So today, we're looking at affordable housing solutions that have located sources of funding outside of the federal goverment. We'll visit Pittsburgh, Atlanta, South Texas, and Seattle to learn about four locally-driven funding models for affordable housing.

  • March 4 · 34 min

    From Tangled Title to Shared Prosperity

    Across the country, low-income communities face threats of displacement, predatory investment activity and limited wealth-building opportunities. One often-overlooked contributor to these dynamics: a lack of formal estate planning. When a homeowner passes away without an estate plan, their home often becomes an “heirs’ property,” a property with no clear title. Without a clear title, homeowners face immense barriers–they cannot access the equity in the home, sell the home for a fair market price, obtain loans for repairs or purchase insurance, among other challenges. For low-income families, this situation can lead to significant home value depreciation, forced sales and even homelessness. Unfortunately, heirs’ properties are widespread, particularly among low-income communities. A conservative analysis estimates that heirs’ properties nationwide have an assessed value of over $32 billion. If communities nationwide could identify households at risk, help address’ estate planning issues and ensure clear transfers of property title, they could stabilize neighborhoods, reduce home loss and protect immense amounts of wealth for low-income residents. Fortunately, a program in Jacksonville, Florida, is showing the way. Heirs’ properties are widespread in Jacksonville and the surrounding area in Duval County, with an estimated 10,000 heirs’ properties in the region. Emerging from a process of deep community engagement, LISC Jacksonville launched its Heirs’ Property Program in 2020 and has since engaged hundreds of households with estate planning services. In this sponsored episode produced in partnership with Results for America, learn more about the immense impact of addressing heirs’ properties and how the model developed in Jacksonville might inspire your community. Download the complete Results for America toolkit on replicating this model by visiting https://results4america.co/heirs-property

  • February 25 · 34 min

    A Food Security Solution for Urban and Rural Neighbors

    Highlighting our recent coverage on nonprofit and alternative grocery models in Kentucky, this event would look at how communities—from urban Lexington to rural areas—are addressing food insecurity through creative, equitable approaches to food access.

  • February 11 · 41 min

    Solutions for Rebuilding After Climate Disaster

    Explore how communities in Altadena are rebuilding after devastating wildfires, with a focus on inclusive, community-led design and architecture. It would spotlight the role of Black architects and collaborations like AfroLA, emphasizing environmental justice and equitable recovery.

Showing 1–20 of 22 episodes