People in Common

About People in Common

Wisdom. Courage. Community. Action. What can we do about it? That question sits at the center of every episode of People in Common, a civic podcast and organizing platform for people ready to turn concern into action. Real conversations with people already doing the work. This is a show about turning what we believe into what we build. Guests include Father Greg Boyle, Shaka Senghor, and Desmond Meade, speaking to an audience that shows up when asked. New episodes every other week. What can we do about the state of the world? More than you think, once we find each other.

Publisher

Jama Fitzgerald Adams

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

23 Sept 2022

Latest episode

30 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

22 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   30 Sept 2026

   'Whatever You Can Give Is Enough' with Victoria Vrana

   As CEO of GlobalGiving, the world's first and largest nonprofit crowdfunding platform, Victoria Vrana connects donors with vetted local changemakers in 175 countries. Jama serves on GlobalGiving's Tech and Innovation Council. The people powering that generosity at scale: a man who made a mosaic out of NYC subway cards in the colors of the Ukrainian flag and auctioned it for $400. A woman who sold stickers for $2 each and donated $500 to wildfire relief. A group of former USAID staffers who organized comedy shows, happy hours, and QR code campaigns to keep PEPFAR-related HIV programs alive. Victoria says "Whatever you can give is totally enough." Show Notes “People should do what they're able to do. And every single thing makes a difference and you build on it. Every single thing.” -Victoria Vrana At 12, Victoria organized her first Amnesty International meeting in her living room (inspired by her activist big sisters). Her mother had to shoo away the adults who showed up at the door. She was the working mom who could not run the Girl Scout troop meetings. Instead, she was the Camping Mom. One weekend a year, for 15 years, she did the thing no one else would volunteer for. GlobalGiving is built on the same logic of giving what you can, how you can. The subway mosaic man. The sticker woman. The USAID staffers who could not bear to walk away from a promise. Every story she tells is of someone who found what they could give, and gave it. That trust is not accidental. Ten million organizations want to be on GlobalGiving's platform. Six thousand are. The vetting is the product. And what GlobalGiving gives back is remarkable: even small donors receive quarterly reports from every organization they support, the same transparency that once belonged only to million-dollar donors. Victoria has a theory: the decline of everyday donors in America is not just a fundraising problem. It is a democratic one. Giving raises voter turnout probability by 10 points. Volunteering raises it by 12. The small-dollar donor is not a consolation prize. She is the point. Technology, including AI, is changing what's possible for the nonprofits GlobalGiving serves. Victoria believes no organization doing essential work should have to scrape by without the tools it needs to thrive. That is the next frontier. The action is simple: Find what you love, Give what you can. Together, it is enough. Action Opportunities Find something you care about and give. Explore thousands of vetted nonprofit projects on GlobalGiving.org (https://www.globalgiving.org) and support local change leaders working on issues that matter to you.. Make GivingTuesday a family values ritual. Victoria sits down with her three daughters every GivingTuesday (https://www.givingtuesday.org) and they "shop" for causes together. Nearly half of all GivingTuesday gifts through GlobalGiving are under $50. If you want to raise generous kids, you have to start the conversation. givingtuesday.org (https://www.givingtuesday.org) Find your 'Camping Mom.' What is the thing that fits your life as it actually is that no one else is doing? It does not have to be grand. It just has to be yours. (Victoria's was being the Camping Mom and now she spends election day at the judge's table. What is yours? Make giving a habit. Pick 2–3 organizations or causes you care deeply about and consider setting up recurring gifts. Build giving into your budget and revisit it as your circumstances change. Explore GlobalGiving (https://www.globalgiving.org)’s disaster response work and Community Aid Fund. Featured Quotes "And you're joining together with all of these other people. You know, over time, over two million people have given a billion dollars through GlobalGiving to organizations.” -Victoria Vrana "People who give are 10% more likely to vote…and if you volunteer, you're twelve percent more likely to go to the polls…There's just this inextricable link between democracy and giving and generosity. And so we need to strengthen both sides of those things right now.“ -Victoria Vrana

2. 

   16 Sept 2026

   'Minnesota Showed Us How' with Steve and Mary Grove | "Rise up peacefully, lovingly, loudly, relentlessly"

   “That threat of fear permeating the community, it really gave Minnesota and I think the community an opportunity to rise up peacefully, lovingly, loudly, relentlessly.“ -Mary Grove In January 2026, the Department of Homeland Security deployed thousands of federal agents to Minnesota as part of "Operation Metro Surge." Steve Grove called it being "occupied by your own federal government." What followed was unlike anything the country had seen: massive protests in subzero temperatures, faith leaders arrested at the Minneapolis airport singing "This Little Light of Mine," and a community that chose song over silence. By February 12, Operation Metro Surge was over. The resistance worked. "That threat of fear permeating the community really gave Minnesota an opportunity to rise up peacefully, lovingly, loudly, relentlessly." — Mary Grove This episode is about what made that possible — and what every community in America can learn from it. Steve Grove is CEO and Publisher of the Minnesota Star Tribune, the state's newspaper of record. He is also the author of "How I Found Myself in the Midwest: A Memoir of Reinvention" (Simon and Schuster, 2025), a book about leaving his home state, spending 12 years at Google and YouTube, serving as Minnesota's Commissioner of Employment and Economic Development, and eventually coming back to run the institution his state needed most. Steve and Jama go back to Harvard's Kennedy School, where he ran a radio show and she was one of his guests. Mary Grove is Managing Partner of Bread and Butter Ventures, a venture fund she co-leads in Minneapolis. She is the founding director of Google for Startups, a former investment partner at Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, and a board member of the Bush Foundation, The Minneapolis Foundation, and HealthPartners. She moved to Minnesota from California on purpose. Together, Steve and Mary co-founded Silicon North Stars in 2013 to open tech careers to underserved Minnesota youth, "finding those future entrepreneurs." When January 2026 arrived, everything they had built was tested. Steve calls Minnesota's ICE raids "the most documented crisis in American history." The Twin Cities' compact geography meant nothing went unseen. Citizens with phones, journalists on the ground, and a local news organization that had spent years building the capacity to tell a story of this magnitude all converged. The Star Tribune was one of the primary sources the world relied on for credible coverage throughout. Jama became a subscriber the afternoon we recorded. What held wasn't improvised. Minnesota had what Steve and Mary call "muscle memory" and "civic exceptionalism." A thriving nonprofit sector, foundation boards that mobilized immediately, neighborhood networks that knew exactly how to scale. Mary describes Casa Maria, a food pantry that typically serves 50 families a week, scaling to 500 families a week during Metro Surge — last-mile delivery, to the door. "I didn't know a single person who wasn't helping to the maximum of their ability," Mary says, "whether that's driving kids to and from school, food, shelter, last-mile delivery." That kind of response does not happen without years of investment in community. The question this episode leaves every listener with: What are you building where you live, before the test arrives? Let us know. Take action: Subscribe to or donate to your local news organization. A free press comes at a real cost. Find one organization in your community you know nothing about. Learn about it this week. Participate in local government. Mary went to her neighborhood caucus for the first time this year. Find your version of that. Subscribe to Steve's Substack "A View from Minnesota": stevegroveview.substack.com Get the book: "How I Found Myself in the Midwest" by Steve Grove Follow People in Common: jamaadams.com/people-in-common-episodes People in Common is hosted by Jama Adams. New episodes every two weeks.

3. 

   2 Sept 2026

   'Coding Belonging' with Justin Steele

   Key Themes Early in his career, a future boss at Google.org gave Justin Steele one piece of advice: take a bet on yourself. He took it, and spent a decade directing $700 million in philanthropic grants. Even credentialed at Harvard and trained at Bain, he still got treated like an outsider inside Google's business culture for having just come from a nonprofit. He calls people who carry both worlds bridgers, people who can sit in the boardroom and the campsite and refuse to let either one erase the other. Even someone who has spent his career solving for belonging fell into the same trap most people do: building the tech solution first and hoping connection would follow. When Justin and his wife Sally built the digital version of Outdoorithm, the platform solved logistics and discovery, where to go, what to bring, but a board member told him on a call that she still felt alone using it. He rebuilt it that weekend. His teenage daughter is now helping code the belonging layer, training a system to catch not just whether someone shows up in a comment section, but whether they actually feel safe. Justin created an AI fundraising platform called Kindora because his own nonprofit needed ten thousand dollars for tent heaters and got nothing but noise back from the expensive tools on the market. So he coded an AI persona modeled as a program officer and set it loose: Reviewed 13,000 funders one by one Rejected 12,000, politely, at machine speed Narrowed the remaining 1,000 to 100 through historical grant data and mission fit Of 50 applications submitted, won $100,000 "This is a perfect example of human scale versus AI scale," as Jama puts it. As Justin was making those funder calls, he and Jama met at a 2025 conference on responsible AI, where Justin first landed on the idea that became his company's founding structure, deciding not to take venture capital. That is also why the company's investment round is open to anyone, not just accredited investors. Be part of it here: wefunder.com/kindora. Asked what keeps him going, he points to two things: conviction, and belonging, communities of people who reflect real values and make you feel, in his words, deeply alive. Action Opportunities Try Kindora. Free to start at kindora.co/en/demos (https://kindora.co/en/demos). If you have ever chased funding for a mission you believe in, “Kindora is like turning on a light in a dark room. They're like, wait, there are people out here who can support our work, and you're helping us bridge relationally and leverage our networks. Get involved with Outdoorithm Collective. Fully supported multi-night camping trips for urban families at outdoorithmcollective.org (https://outdoorithmcollective.org), built to help any family find where they belong outdoors. Ask yourself Justin's question. What's standing between you and success in your mission? Build the small, rough version of the fix anyway. Featured Quotes "I'm alive in a way I've never been alive, at least professionally...I wouldn’t work this hard for anyone else." — Justin Steele "What motivates me every day to keep doing it? The first thing is conviction, which we've already talked about, but the second piece is belonging. I think we all want to belong to something, find communities of people that reflect our values and make us feel alive, and to me, belonging is a big part of the reason why I do what I do." — Justin Steele "To be part of a community, to be building for other people, to breathe something new into the world that means this much to people; the stories I get every day, of tiny little grassroots organizations who'd started to lose hope they were ever going to be funded to do the thing they believe in, because they just want to be doing the work." — Justin Steele Bio Justin Steele is Co-Founder and CEO of Kindora, a Public Benefit Corporation democratizing professional fundraising tools for every nonprofit. When he couldn't afford the fundraising tools that would help his nonprofit succeed, he coded something better with AI.

Who has been a guest on People in Common

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Anat Shenker-Osorio
• Reggie Hubbard
• Desmond Meade
• Father Greg Boyle
• Kelly Ward Burton

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

145

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

18 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

6 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 30 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

14

Social presence

0

YouTube

64

Engagement

51

Contact People in Common

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.