A World of Possibilities
A World of Possibilities is an award-winning one hour weekly radio program that penetrates behind the headlines to uncover the deeper meanings of events. It offers in-depth analysis, informed commentary and an exploration of new approaches to our most challenging problems. Our aim is to open minds and inspire new possibilities.
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Geektopia: Google's Innovation Culture
Google, as it celebrates its tenth birthday, booms, while GM bites the dust. With $20 billion in annual revenue, Googler's generate a million dollars a piece for the company. And we the people generate two billion searches a day. Is this another Silicon Valley dot-com fantasy, or could this culture ...
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The Power in Your Person: Dolores Huerta's Farmworker Odyssey
She raised 11 children and co-founded the United Farmworkers Union with Cesar Chavez. At age 78 she still criss-crosses the country to ignite her singular passion for social justice among youth two generations younger. Dolores Huerta is on a restless path to inspire the "Power in Your Person", tem ...
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Green Purchasing
What we buy individually is small potatoes beside the quantities purchased by large firms and governments. Little noticed by the rest of us, the market for green products is being decisively boosted by the deliberate choices of city governments, universities, hospitals, and corporations. Filling the ...
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Long Time Coming: Bernard Lafayette's Civil Rights Journey
Today we hear how a close associate of Martin Luther King, together with a pioneering generation of activists, led the desegregation of lunch counters and intercity buses, voter registration movements and Poor People's Campaigns. And we'll hear why, despite the many unfulfilled promises of that era ...
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Green Chemistry: Better Living Through Nature
Currently, there is woefully little research and development in the green chemistry field and there are no universities teaching it. We need massive investments to make it viable. This week's program will feature leading researchers who will delineate the vision of a green chemistry economy and how ...
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Second Chances: Finding Purpose in the Second Half of Life
Now that the sixties generation is entering its sixties, we'd all better take a deep breath and stand back. Author and cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien has written a wise guide to The Second Half of Life, and asks questions about the elder quest when youthful ambition or abandon no longer suff ...
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Nobody's a Nobody: Renouncing Rankism, Defending Dignity
At one time or another just about all of us have endured someone pulling rank on us. In this insightful and provocative conversation, Robert Fuller affixes the name "rankism" to the full range of diminishing behaviors that infect our personal and professional relationships and calls for the creation ...
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Foundations as Catalysts
We explore two very different realms, foreign policy and venture philanthropy. In each we'll see how foundations use their independence to catalyze dramatic new solutions to some of the world's most pressing problems. In the process, their initiative often attracts others in the public, private and ...
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Teach Your Children Well: Reforming Education in Schools and Society
There's no more powerful way to transform society than through education. But all too often, we fail to adequately prepare our children for life's challenges. In four stories, we'll explore successful initiatives to transform patterns of dysfunction, from public health campaigns to community buildin ...
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Replenishing the Breadbasket: Food and Philanthropy
Today's rapidly rising food prices and warnings of food scarcity evoke a haunting echo from a generation ago. Join us as we examine a new "Green Revolution" and the "Blue Revolution", two major foundation-supported initiatives to address two troubling food production trends: low productivity amid gr ...
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Philanthropy and Health: The Challenge of Effective Giving
We all see the urgent unmet needs out there, and many of us come up with great ideas to address them. In this, the second in a series of five programs examining the role of foundations as key partners with communities, we'll hear how local civic organizations are inventing ways to deal with the chal ...
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Shattered Dreams: The Struggle to Reconstruct Iraq
While the White House seeks to persuade the American public that the "surge" is reducing violence and enabling Iraqis to create a self-governing democracy, Iraqi and international NGO's are struggling to make that goal a reality. We speak with aid workers, conflict mediators and development speciali ...
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Foundations as the Fifth Estate: Private Wealth for Public Benefit
Foundations don't always make back their bets, but at their best they are readers and seeders of promise. In this five-part series on foundation philanthropy, we'll trace the impact of such catalytic grant making on American society. We'll see why foundations play an indispensable role in addressing ...
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Studs Terkel: A Heart as Big as the World
Despite his best efforts, like the very establishments he excoriates, Studs has become an American institution. A man of the people, he is also an unapologetic liberal and intellectual in a country that respects neither. In this program, drawn from a nonstop three-hour conversation, Studs reflects o ...
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Resilience: Adaptation and Transformation in Turbulent Times
Resilience ... the capacity to absorb shocks to the system without losing the ability to function. Can whole societies become resilient in the face of traumatic change? In April 2008, natural and social scientists from around the world gathered in Stockholm, Sweden for a first-ever global conference ...
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Vanishing and Reemerging: Reviving Biological and Cultural Diversity
The mechanistic world view that has dominated Western thinking has much to learn from healthy, well-balanced biological systems, as well as from indigenous cultures that have a symbiotic relationship with their environment. This weeks show was recorded at a major international conference on biocultu ...
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Hard Power / Soft Power: Peace Building at the Pentagon
A landmark 2005 directive issued by the U.S. Defense Department for the first time placed post-conflict "reconstruction and stabilization" on the same level with the U.S. military's role as war-fighter. But the implementation of this directive has led many to fear that in embracing "peacebuilding" ...
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Women Who Wouldn't Listen: Wangari Maathai and Frances Moore Lappe
Continents apart, in entirely different contexts, two remarkable women took it upon themselves to make a difference. While still in their twenties, Wangari Maatthai, founder of Kenya's pioneering environmental initiative, the Greenbelt Movement, and Frances Moore Lappe, author of the pathbreaking fo ...
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What Good Are These Things For? The Pragmatic Push to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons
In a landmark January 4, 2007 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, former Defense Secretary Bill Perry, former Sen. Sam Nunn, and former Republican secretaries of state George Schultz and Henry Kissinger called for "a world free of nuclear weapons." While this goal has been around since the invention o ...
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Russia Resurgent: The Once and Future Super Power
Fueled by rising revenues from its vast oil reserves, Russia is experiencing a sudden comeback from its economic and political collapse just sixteen years ago. This program will consider what Russia?s re-emergence as a global force could mean for the already diminishing constraints of arms control a ...
A World of Possibilities
