Communications to Bridge Divides

Season 6Long FormDiversity Inclusion and Accessibility

Nov 17

About This Episode

This episode of Mission Forward is sponsored by Unit of Impact, a powerful new platform created for small businesses interested in measuring and sharing their social and environmental impact. Listen in for a brief interview with co-founder Polina Pinchevsky at the end of this week’s show. For listeners of Mission Forward, visit https://unitofimpact.com and start a free trial with 20% off any annual plan and enter the promo code EARLYBIRD2022 at checkout. Offer good through December 31, 2022.

Michael Gordon Voss is publisher at Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR), and this week’s conversation is all about trust.

See, Micheal has spent the last few decades building relationships of trust between his publications and his reading public. That experience has made him an expert in a few key areas we're eager to explore this week. What is the role of curation when it comes to using news and information in building and maintaining trust with your audience? How does the broader social sharing economy impact our ability to impact change? What is the value of a publication in an information economy that is so challenged for trust between publisher and reader right? We explore those areas and more this week.

A little about Michael: before joining SSIR, Michael was Vice President, Associate Publisher, Business Development & Marketing for Scientific American, based in New York City, where he drove commercial marketing and brand strategy, strategic partnerships, sponsorships, and new product development. His career in digital and traditional media has spanned nearly two decades and a wide array of titles and companies, including Newsweek, Meredith Corporation, and George magazine.

Over the course of the show, we make reference to a few stories that make for appropriate follow-up from the pages of SSIR.

If you've never had the opportunity to hear from Michael directly, we're honored and thrilled to bring him to you this week. His work is the foundation for thought-provoking exploration for our growth as communicators while guiding organizations to move their missions forward. Our great thanks to Michael for joining us this week on the show.

Michael Gordon Voss:
More and more over the years we've seen the importance of other ways of sharing information and insights grow in importance, and the fact that those other ways also allow us to expand the kind of the scope and perspective of people who are contributors to SSIR.

Carrie Fox:
Hey, there and welcome to the Mission Forward podcast, where each week we bring you a thought-provoking and perspective shifting conversation on the power of communications. I'm Carrie Fox, your host and CEO of Mission Partners, a social impact communications firm and certified B corporation. And that was the voice of Michael Gordon Voss publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, who joined me recently to talk about the power of information to power social innovation.
Michael has a compelling personal story, an incredible commitment to explore what's possible in how information is curated, how it is shared, and quite honestly, how it's leveraged to increase impact over time. If you're in the social innovation space, SSIR is likely your go-to read, but even if it's not, there is so much to be learned from Michael and the Stanford Social Innovation Review's approach to communications. So stay tuned. This is a great episode ahead.
Let's just start at the top and say how excited I am to have some time with you today, Michael, as I spend a lot of my time working on issues of local and trusted news and when I think about the news that I trust, Stanford's Social Innovation Review is right on top.
So I am thrilled to connect with you today for a bit about the role that SSIR, as those of us who know it and love it refer to it as SSIR, plays in delivering content and engaging your readers and really thought provoking and leading edge topics and in guiding organizations to move their missions forward. I would also be remiss to say that you are incredibly kind and gracious to be back here on the show with me today after a couple technical difficulties yesterday. So I am doubly grateful for this time with you today.

Michael Gordon Voss:
Well, Carrie, thank you for inviting me on the show. It's a privilege and an honor to be a part of this in your sixth season. I have to say I am a little bit nervous, because I'm used to being the one asking the questions, not answering the questions. So this is a little bit of a departure for me, but I'm looking forward to talking with you today.

Carrie Fox:
Awesome. The tables have turned, but this will be fun. This will be fun and engaging, and I know the audience is going to love this. So Michael, as you know, on this show, we are talking about the power of communications, to move nonprofit missions forward, to move for purpose missions forward, but also this power of communications in bridging divides and advancing justice, equity, inclusion and belonging. And you are digging into those topics at SSR these days. So we're going to talk a little bit about that, but I would love to start with a story. I would love to hear more about you and how you came to do this amazing purposeful work that you do.

Michael Gordon Voss:
So Carrie, it's interesting, I'm a gay man who came of age in the 1980s, and at that time, for me, the major issue was the treatment of LGBTQ Americans, especially in the light of the AIDS epidemic. And that's what first showed me that you can become actively engaged with an issue and fight for change. But at the same time, while I was doing that through actions, through volunteerism, I volunteered as a facilitator with GMHC for many years, that was still taking place in my personal life. And in my professional life I was really centered more on marketing and communications in the for-profit space. And it was only when I moved into media that I started seeing those worlds come together somewhat, in the sense that you can, even if you were working for a for-profit company, you could still be very mission focused in what you're doing.
So my first job in magazines and media was with George Magazine. And for those of you in the audience who don't remember what George was, we referred to ourselves as a post-partisan political magazine. In retrospect, we were maybe being a little optimistic, overly optimistic, but we wanted to be a place where Americans, young Americans in particular, could hear all sides of different arguments in an attempt to actually come to a way forward, to bring all voices to the table, regardless of political orientation, regardless of lived experience. So that that way we could make the country, the world a better place.
After George, I went onto Newsweek for five and a half years, and there again the same sort of idea. We thought by bringing these diverse voices to the table, that we were bringing greater perspective on the issues that were changing and shaping the world. And certainly with the seven and a half years I spent at Scientific American before SSIR, that was about drawing that direct line between science research, especially foundational science, and the solutions, the technological solutions, scientific solutions, medical solutions that are helping to reshape our world many ways for the better, some ways for not so better.
So again, it was this idea that even in a for-profit space, you can definitely focus on your mission. And one of my big beliefs is that that ability to kind of recenter around mission is what definitely keeps you going when you're going through challenging periods in your business.

Carrie Fox:
Wow.

Michael Gordon Voss:
And then really it was only when I came to SSIR that I started working specifically for a nonprofit in the nonprofit space. Because, as you like, at SSIR, we operate as a social enterprise. We're not funded by the university. So we have to figure this out ourselves and walk the walk that we are preaching to the people who are kind enough to be part of our audience.

Carrie Fox:
You are your own definition of social innovation. You practice what you preach.

Michael Gordon Voss:
Well, in a sense that with SSIR we definitely think of social innovation as something that all sectors have a hand in. And, certainly, it's the work of traditional nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, but it's socially responsible businesses, it's social enterprises, it's government and policy makers, and it's certainly academia. Because we think that if we bring together the best of theory and research that's taking place together with the best of practice, then we are generating a space where these insights can help the organizations that are actually doing the work. Because we're not doing the work ourselves, but we're creating this space where those who are doing the work can be more effective and more efficient, and ultimately that'll lead to better outcomes for all of us.

Carrie Fox:
So how many years then are you at SSIR, about?

Michael Gordon Voss:
Five and a half years.

Carrie Fox:
All right-

Michael Gordon Voss:
Five and a half years.

Carrie Fox:
... so if you think back over that time, and maybe before you got there too, but the concept of social innovation even feels like it's changed. It almost feels like it needs a new definition as we think about the world we're in now, and the stakes that we see in front of us. We've always had high stakes, but the stakes are high, as we think about the issues, the intractable issues that we've been dealing with decade after decade. How do you think about the role that SSIR plays now versus the role that it played five years ago?

Michael Gordon Voss:
That's an excellent question. I think when SSIR first launched, and it's odd, people are always surprised when I remind them that we're only going to be 20 years old next spring, because it feels like we've been such a part of this ecosystem all along. But it's maybe not surprising when you think that the ecosystem itself is not that old. The concept of social innovation was still fairly new in and of itself when SSIR launched in 2003. So I think you're spot on when you're saying that social innovation in itself has evolved just as SSIR has tried to evolve in its coverage of social innovation.
When social innovation first was becoming more commonly understood or recognized, I think people were still thinking specifically about social entrepreneurship, maybe impact investing aspects like that. What we're seeing is that, yes, those are still important parts, but we are seeing activism and new ways that people organize becoming a part of social innovation. We're seeing greater coordination between different sides of the ecosystem becoming a more important part of social innovation.
And we're even seeing ideas that have been fundamental to social innovation, concepts like collective impact, that those have continued to evolve over time too. And in fact, just recently, I think, you may have seen it, we had John Kramer and Mark Kania, the authors of the original piece on Collective Impact that we published 10 years ago, write a new version of that where they actually talked about the things they missed when they first came up with the five pillars of collective impact.
So I think one of the other things that's become even more important is we've always brought the academic, the research, the theory that perspective to the work of social innovation. But I think what we're seeing now is that it's really growing. That research is coming from disciplines that go outside of just the traditional space that we would think of as the social sciences of the social sector. So, really, I think that at the same time that in the world of practice, social innovation is reshaping and growing, in the world of research, it's doing the same thing.

Carrie Fox:
Yeah, I'm glad to hear that and think about that. And it certainly comes across in the pages of the magazine. Connecting a dot here to Antoinette Carroll who often says that, "The person who holds the pen is the person who holds the power." And so it's how the story is shaped, how the story is shared is how we understand the world around us, how we understand any given issue, and that there are inherently people who are going to have access to be among the researchers and people who are not. And I've started to see shifts in how you even think about delivering content that broadens the tent a little bit to how you think about expertise. I'm curious if there's anything you want to weigh in on there.

Michael Gordon Voss:
Yeah, no, that's an excellent point. I think for most people, you think of SSIR and you think of our traditional long form articles, and that's certainly the foundation that SSIR built its reputation on. But more and more, over the years, we've seen the importance of other ways of sharing information and insights grow in importance, and the fact that those other ways also allow us to expand the kind of scope and perspective of people who are contributors to SSIR.
So what do I mean by that? I mean, we've been producing our webinars for over 11 years now, and our webinars reach on average anywhere from 20 to 25,000 people every year. And the great thing is with a webinar is, you may not have someone who is comfortable, let's say, writing a 5,000 or 6,000 word article, but they are fantastic if you put them on a Zoom platform, and let them kind of talk through what they've been working on. They really just come to life.
And I think that's also true of our conferences. I think we've definitely made a very concerted effort to break out of the typical sage on the stage approach in our conferences and really bring diverse perspectives and voices into the room, and often in conversation with each other. So one thing I was really proud of in, I guess, it was 2020, where we first moved Nonprofit Management Institute,, because of the pandemic to a completely virtual conference, not only did we have a record number of people who were able to attend, because we were taking away those barriers of time and space, but we had an amazing array of speakers who were there. And we also got rid of, as much as possible, the I'm going to stand up and present for 25 minutes and then you're going to ask me questions. And instead try to move as many of those sessions into conversations.
So we had a great one between former governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick and Don Gips, CEO of the Skull Foundation, talking about what it is to help build a truly multiracial democracy in the United States today. And those are the kind of exchanges that I think are baked into the idea of social innovation being an all in approach, that all sectors have a role to play, where all sectors have a role to play.

Carrie Fox:
Right, I mean, it's just another case in point that you didn't set out or your colleagues didn't sit out to just publish a magazine. There's a community of practice here that I think, we work, as I noted at the top with many newsrooms, many non-profit organizations who are producing news in many different ways, news and information. And many of them are asking, "How do we create an engaged readership? How do we create an engaged community?" You all truly have thought about how do we make this a two-way conversation, not how do we push information out to the world? And that seems to really be coming across in terms of how you've evolved too as an organization.

Michael Gordon Voss:
Thank you. Thank you for that. It's great to be recognized for it. And I think a lot of us in the sector, we often will focus on what we haven't accomplished yet as opposed to giving ourselves credit for some of the things we have accomplished. So we look at and think, "There's so much more we could be doing to foster community amongst our audience." So that is something that we really want to lean into over the next couple of years.
But another thing that I wanted to, and you and I were talking briefly about this before we started today, we also want to, when we're talking about expanding the voices, the community, one thing that we knew for a while was that we were missing an opportunity to connect to people who weren't Native English speakers. We looked at traffic to ssir.org, and almost half of it, about 45% was coming from outside of the United States, but still skewing to either English speaking countries or countries where there was a tradition of English language.
If you think about the fact that part of what makes SSIR what it is that we are the space where new ideas are brought forward, where they're tested, where they're often challenged, and we think in that process ultimately made better. We don't want to miss that fantastic idea that's coming from somewhere outside of North America, because the author isn't someone who's comfortable, again, what I was saying before, writing a 5,000 word piece in English language.
So if there's one thing that I'm super proud of over the past five years, it's the growth of our local language editions. And so now we started in 2017 with a Chinese language edition, and over the years we've added pan regional Spanish pan regional Arabic, Korean, Japanese, and our most recent edition, our Brazil edition. And it really reflects the idea that we believe the work of social innovation is truly global. Not just because issues are global, not just because foundations and organizations and NGOs work globally, but because new ideas are coming up globally.

Carrie Fox:
All right, so I love this and we're going to go a layer deeper into this, but first I want to acknowledge something for those who are listening, that there's two pieces I'm hearing from you that feel really important to hold onto. One is to know your blind spots, to be aware of your blind spots. You are identifying early on that maybe you were not just missing a piece of the market but missing a piece of the story, right?

Michael Gordon Voss:
Right. Absolutely.

Carrie Fox:
And so absolutely understanding that and taking action on it feels really important. But the other piece of how you move a mission forward, one, know your blind spots, two is watch and listen for the signals. And I would love to understand if you can take a step back and think about, since releasing these six local language editions, but also the kind of thematic information that you see being published over and over again, what are the signals that you see in social innovation that are important to be paying attention to right now? Where this field is going?

Michael Gordon Voss:
I mean, I think we all see that there's a growing need to address issues of equity in the work that we're doing. Obviously, since the events in the United States of 2020 with the murder of George Floyd and the growing recognition of the institutionalized systems of disenfranchisement, of exploitation that exist, not just in this country but around the world, people have been recognizing the need to look more closely at questions of equity and belonging and dignity.
So it's not something that I think would be a surprise for me to say that that's a topic that we see happening all over the sector. We see it not only in foundations and how they're looking at their relationship with their grantees and other organizations with whom they partner. We are definitely seeing it in activist organizations, too, but we're even seeing it within traditional non-profits and recognizing that there are some inherent power imbalances that take place within the organization, that happen between organizations and their constituents.
And that really what we need, right now, and you've set me up for a great segue to talk about something we just did a couple of weeks ago, we've seen this desire to address some of these inequities by bridging, by building these connections between diverse groups to be able to get to something that's really actionable, that can move an organization or move an issue forward. And so I mentioned two weeks ago we had our annual Nonprofit Management Institute for this year, first hybrid one that we produced. First time we had people back together in over two years, in-person. And the whole focus of that was bridging the divide.
And where part of that was about how do you bridge, let's say, the partisan divides that are very obvious in the US and around the world, but how do you bridge divides of other sorts? How do you divide bridge divides between a board that may think one priority is important and a senior leadership team that sees very different sets of priorities? Or between a program team and an organization that's very committed to something and then a community that's coming back and saying, "Actually that's not what we need"?
So really that's that bridging movement is something that I see really starting to become a recurring theme as we look at submissions, as we talk to people throughout the sector. And I think that that's something that will go a long way to actually addressing that other idea, the questions of equity and justice.

Carrie Fox:
So let's go one step deeper there, and think about, you're on communications podcast bridging is pretty effective, pretty good example of the role that communications plays in moving issues forward and in bringing people together. If you were to think about those who are attending your events and reading the magazine, so many organizations are struggling with these issues, how to communicate effectively, how to communicate authentically, the workplace is changing. How do I find the right words? And we know it's more than about the right words. But what are some of the communication struggles that you see showing up both on the pages and maybe also in between the pages of SSIR?

Michael Gordon Voss:
One of the challenges we see not only popping up in the pages of SSIR when we talk about effective communication, but also that we certainly face ourselves is how do you find a way, and maybe this comes back to the bridging idea, but how do you find a way to reach beyond your core audience without watering down the message or diminishing the quality of that message?
And what I mean by that is we recognize that in order for us to really have impact, we can't just be talking to the people who are already aware of the issue or already aware of us, in the case of the specialized media like SSIR. So we have to go beyond that core to the next level, to the people on the periphery of it if we really want it to have impact. But that can sometimes be hard to do because we're dealing with very complex issues.
And so we want to be able to meet people where they are. And I think we all recognize that that's one of the keys to effective communication. And we want to do it in a way that's respectful of both them and the work that we're doing. So it really is a delicate balancing act. But I think what we found works well is finding people who may not be the traditional voices that we bring to the table when we're having these discussions, but voices that themselves will bridge it either because their experience, their background, ties them more closely to this next level of people.
I, in many ways, put myself in that camp. I was not working in social innovation prior to this. And so there are times when I'll sit there and I'll say, "Okay, I understand this is the concept, I understand this is the theory, how do I translate it to someone who may see this as important but doesn't yet realize that it's important for them"? So I think that's one of the big challenges that we see is how to bridge that, to make it very simple, without dumbing it down.

Carrie Fox:
Yeah, right. But putting a message or putting an idea into practice requires that it be plain language and understandable, and simple enough to be able to share with someone else for that trickle down effect to happen.

Michael Gordon Voss:
A 100%. A 100%. And I also think that one of the other advantages we have is the changing tools that we have at our disposal. It's like, while in some ways you would say podcasts are not a new technology, it's still something fairly new and experimental. And I know it's not something that major media companies were doing 10 or 15 years ago, but this is a great way to tell stories, to bring other voices in, to have a conversation.
I was talking to Monica Guzmán, who's a journalist and the author of a great book, I Never Thought of it that Way, that really is about how to have difficult conversations in partisan times. But one thing she shared was an anecdote about a journalist workshop she went to after she had finished her undergraduate work, and she had been taught as a journalist to go in with her list of questions. And what instead she learned in that workshop is, "No, you go in with one great question, and then let the response lead you forward in that process."
And that's something I think that not only serves you when you are trying to get across information in a format like a podcast or in a webinar or something like that, but actually it's something that becomes beneficial in all your communications, and not just your external communications. I mean, when you're thinking about what you're sharing with an audience, think about it as if it were a conversation. Think about, "If I say this, what's that likely to have people start thinking about next? And then how can I follow them through that path too?" And it's not always easy to do that when you're, let's say, writing an article or putting out a newsletter, but it's certainly much easier to do that when you're having a podcast or having a webinar, having conference or something like that.

Carrie Fox:
Right. The power of a good prompt, right?

Michael Gordon Voss:
Right.

Carrie Fox:
To open the door to the conversation is the difference perhaps between the power of a really well-written and memorized corporate speak versus an open door to an actual conversation. And that's what we need more of now.

Michael Gordon Voss:
And I think it also, if I can, it gets back to something you said earlier, which is about authenticity. Because I think whether it's external communications or internal communications, and I might even argue for internal communications, it's even more important. I think authenticity is one of the things that is vital to successful communications. Human beings have a very good sense of sniffing out when someone is being inauthentic.
And I think that's even more the case when you are talking to folks within your own organization, because these are the people you spend most of your time with. And they know what's going on behind the scenes, so they should be able to tell more than someone on the outside that, "You're telling me you're doing this because of X, that I know the real reasons why."

Carrie Fox:
That's true. That's true. We can see through communications pretty easily on what's real and what's maybe not so real or not very deep, right?

Michael Gordon Voss:
Right.

Carrie Fox:
When you made the mention of the six local language editions and you were talking about those, I had this vision in my head of Solutions Journalism. And I love Tina Rosenberg and David Bornstein and what they started there, and how that has now expanded to so many newsrooms and how they play out this idea of solutions journalism. In many ways, I think about SSIR as a solutions journalism publication.
But talk to me about the impact of the work that you put out into the world. How are you able to measure are people picking up on the concepts that they're learning and putting them into practice? And are you hearing back when you all come together in the Nonprofit Management Institute? I'd be curious how you're measuring the effectiveness of that incredible work you're putting out into the world.

Michael Gordon Voss:
So it's always tough in media to measure impact per se. You can measure very easily. You know how much traffic you have to your website. You know how many people subscribe to your publication. Impact becomes a little bit harder to get your hands around. What I usually look at is I think about topic areas or concepts that at the time they were first introduced, very often in the pages of SSIR, they were very new, very outside the pale. And it could be something as simple as, let's say, applying design thinking to social problems. That we now look around and these are part of the day-to-day fabric of the work of social innovation.
And while we can't say that that's a 100% us, we'd like to think that since we were the place that, as I said earlier, helped to bring those ideas forward to a broader audience of the social innovation ecosystem, let people challenge those ideas, push back at them. Well, push back on those ideas. That's kind of what improved them and got them to the point where they started getting critical adoption.
I will say that pushing back on ideas is something that we are proud of. Our editor-in-chief, Eric Nee was here at the time that we published it, when Muhammad Yunus won his prize, that was around the same time that SSIR published an article against microfinance or questioning microfinance. And there were people who turned around and said, "How could you do that?" It's like, well, coming to what you were saying, one of the tenets of solutions journalism is that you don't just fetishize the hero. You don't just look at the solution as being this perfect thing. You have to question it.
You have to look at the underpinnings, because you also want to make sure, and this is where bringing the science aspect into this. You want to make sure that you can replicate this. You have to be able to test it. You have to build to replicate it. So it's not just this one-off thing. So going back to measuring our impact, as I said, I think we rely on seeing how many ideas that were born and kind of disseminated through SSIR are now part of the day-to-day way that the sector, the social innovation ecosystem approaches change. And that's part of what we see as our impact.

Carrie Fox:
I can only imagine how fascinating it would be to be inside one of your editorial meetings and thinking, "Are we going to take this? This is a big idea. Are we going to take this idea? Could this be the big idea? I don't know. Is that too safe?" You're probably constantly challenging, where are we going to go?

Michael Gordon Voss:
It is. And what we are trying to do is besides introduce new ideas and test existing ideas, we want to also build upon ideas. We want to use what we have already accumulated over the past nearly 20 years as a foundation for people to really come up with new solutions built on top of those, or even better, new research on top of them too. And as for the editorial meetings, it's funny, we are getting ready for our 20th anniversary, and so we were having conversations about back in the day when SSIR first launched, they had to go out and solicit articles for the magazine.
And now I don't want to dissuade anyone from submitting an article, but we reject 75% of what we get. And, yeah, you're right, there's always a little bit of that, "Oh, are we rejecting something that could be the next you big thing?" But the good thing about this work though is, it's never done. If part of what you're trying to do is bring social innovation forward, there is always going to be a new innovation that you can test, that you can hopefully refine, and that will hopefully actually create greater impact on the issue that it's working to address.

Carrie Fox:
So pretty sustainable business model you've got there as well as-

Michael Gordon Voss:
Exactly.

Carrie Fox:
... an incredible publication. So, all right, so now we're going to wrap up with one final thought. We've really focused this season on stories at the top, and what's making you feel hopeful as we wrap up here. So what is making you feel hopeful about the future?

Michael Gordon Voss:
A few things. I mean, let me qualify it by saying that it's hard to be optimistic all the time, especially when there's so much to be pessimistic about right now. There's challenges to democracy, there's the existential threat of the climate crisis, pervasive social and economic inequity. But a couple of things that I get excited about. So first of all is, you are probably familiar with the idea of the public interest technology movement. And much like in the 1950s and '60s when there was the birth of the public interest law movement, when people thought that laws were a way to address the systemic inequities in our culture, because that was a big lever that you could pull, but that it required an all in approach from academia, from government, from the nonprofit sector, from the civil society space, as well as from the for-profit space.
Today we are seeing technology in that same way. And I think there are some fantastic people doing things to help move forward this idea of public interest technology, and of centering the public interest before technology. So there are folks on the academia side like Latanya Sweeney, who's the founder of the Public Interest Tech Lab and the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard. Or our colleague Lucy Bernholz at the Digital Civil Society Lab here at Stanford. There are folks in government who are doing this. Alondra Nelson, who really built her reputation in racial justice work, was hired by the Biden administration to be the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. And was up, until recently, the acting director.
You look in civil society, you've got folks like Sean McDonald and Bianca Wylie of Digital Public, and foundations, of course, like Ford or Siegel Family Endowment. So I see there are great people who are getting behind this concept of public interest tech. And I think this has a potential to be a really effective lever to help address a lot of the systemic inequities that we see in society today. Of course, not a slam duck, but that's what this work is all about.
The other space that I am optimistic about, and, again, I'm hoping I'm not overly optimistic, is that there are people who are really helping us work towards building a democracy that reflects the realities of our world today. I was fortunate enough to be in conversation with Angela Glover Blackwell a couple weeks ago, and we were talking about folks like Nick Tilsen, who's contributed very often to SSIR, who's the CEO of the MDN Collective, or of course Michael McAfee who took over for Angela at PolicyLink.
But also people who are less known, like Nse Ufot, who is the CEO of the New Georgia project, and working to fight against the attempts to disenfranchise people and put up barriers to voting in the state of Georgia. So, again, it's like, when you think about the areas that seem to be the reason to be most pessimistic, it's important to focus in on the people who are actually doing the good work to not let that negative future come about, but to actually create the brighter future. And the great thing is that the pages of SSIR are filled with examples of these kinds of people, and that's what I think keeps us moving forward and excited every day.

Carrie Fox:
I really love that, and I'll make sure that we link to a number of those articles and resources. You're speaking my language, we spend a lot of our time working on issues of democracy and inclusion, and the harms to democracy that are often caused by social media and by technology. And so you're really hitting something that I also agree is necessary and urgent to be addressing. And I'm glad that you're spending so much time. We will look in the pages of SSIR for some of that leading edge content. Michael, thanks for being with us today. Thanks for everything you do and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Michael Gordon Voss:
Thanks very much, Carrie, it was great being with you tonight.

Carrie Fox:
And that brings us to the end of this episode of Mission Forward. Thanks for tuning in today. If you're stewing and what we discussed here, or if you heard something that's going to stick with you, drop me a line at carrie@mission.partners, and let me know what's got you thinking. And if you have thoughts for where we should go in future shows, I would love to hear that too.
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