The Public Service Project

Kevin Adler is an award-winning social entrepreneur, author, and sociologist focused on homelessness and human connection. He’s the founder and board chair of Miracle Messages, a nonprofit that has reunited more than 1,200 unhoused neighbors with loved ones. He's also the author of When We Walk By, and his work has been featured everywhere from The New York Times and The Washington Post to the George W. Bush Presidential Center and the Clinton Foundation. Nearly every mayor and community leader featured on the show this season has highlighted housing affordability and economic uncertainty as persistent challenges, and with the cost of living outpacing wages across the country (and other factors exacerbating that trend) we need to better understand the factors that drive homelessness, and the interventions that are most helpful to our unhoused neighbors. I knew Kevin would bring the expertise, and I hoped to discover what fuels his mission when things get hard. This conversation surpassed my expectations as we veered into the spiritual and philosophical roots of Kevin's work, his thoughts on spiritual gifts and "self interest, rightly understood" (#Tocqueville FTW!) and the discoveries he's made along his journey to address relational poverty. This is a soul deep conversation about humanity and dignity, and though the topic is difficult, the vibes are immaculate.

Vivian Satterfield has over fifteen years of experience working to make people and planet based-change. She's an organizer, policy maker, and coalition builder currently serving as Chief Sustainability Officer for the city of Portland, Oregon. The impact of her work has been recognized nationally, including being featured on Marketplace Weekend, The New York Times, and Science Friday on National Public Radio.Vivian joined us to talk about Portland's historic transformation to a new form of government and the community's role as a national and global leader in sustainability and climate action. Vivian also shares what's shaped her: from her Chinese-American roots, to her mother's work ethic, her love of her first home (the great city of Chicago), and her passion for her chosen home, Portland. Listen in for a dynamic conversation about people, power, and change. Yes, we can.

This episode originally aired June 10, 2026.In light of the recent wave of youth protests across the globe, we are re-airing this highly relevant episode.Sarah Sladen is a Senior global leader with 20+ years developing and implementing strategies at the intersection of social impact, youth and community development, economic opportunity and wellbeing across government, philanthropy, and civil society. As a current Senior Fellow at Georgetown University and the most recent Senior Advisor for Youth at USAID, Sarah knows what she's talking about when it comes to implementing a Positive Youth Development framework, leading everything from training and coalition-building to grant-making, and so many other tasks that I will probably never understand.As the granddaughter of a South African anti-apartheid activist and the child of parents with a serious case of wanderlust, Sarah brings a unique perspective to all the big questions: How are young people impacted by conflict and politics? How are brains shaped by trauma? How useful and responsible is the CVE lens? And how can we all live our best lives? It's a special gift to spend time with Sarah, and to trace the threads of conscience and courage in her family across time and place.

Mayor Lauren Simpson is the first directly elected female Mayor of the City of Arvada, Colorado. She’s also a Mom to a human daughter and countless foster kittens, all of whom benefit from her unique brand of curiosity and compassion. An international relations and comms expert by training and a true diplomat by nature, Mayor Lauren sat down to talk with us about a life and career that took her from Texas to DC to Colorado, and that challenged her to not only make sense of a complicated world, but help others make sense of it, too. She’s a community builder, a relationship manager, and she delights in winning over the naysayers. She’s also chosen to take the deeply personal experience of being diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year, and use it to motivate others to listen to their bodies and keep up with regular screenings. Lauren wants us to know that democracy is a contact sport, and despite the polarized political environment, we can find our way to each other if we embrace the power of positive assumption.Listen in for kittens and puns and a healthy respect for both hard and soft shell tacos, and check her out in People magazine (!!!) here: https://people.com/colorado-mayor-reveals-breast-cancer-diagnosis-during-city-council-meeting-11924500

Shifra Goldenberg is Chief Program Officer at Work for America, a nonpartisan nonprofit working to make public service a more desirable, accessible, and stable career path. Think matchmaker for aspiring public servants and city, state, and county employers. It's been their mission since 2024 to keep public servants in public service, and on this episode, Shifra makes an exciting ANNOUNCEMENT: WfA's Civic Match program is expanding eligibility and bringing new public servants into service, too! Listen to Shifra's episode to learn more about her path from art history and anthropology --> leading the launch of NYC's Covid vaccination sites --> thinking big about revitalizing public service. And enjoy pitstops, like the one where we ponder whether anthropology might actually be the most practical degree in today's topsy turvy AI saturated world. Shifra's a delight, WfA is insanely cool, and their link is here. If serving your community sounds cool, check it out: https://www.workforamerica.org/civicmatch?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=24036667436&gbraid=0AAAABEOWF1kypO5_fyMqD0DI36Rfv_hqH&gclid=CjwKCAjww-3VBhAcEiwAwUUIu48FcOLOw7xt6szdjRmsah44LGpuplwgijjnBX_St7742fTmGE5X3RoCe90QAvD_BwE

Homegrown Mayor Zeb Smathers loves tending to his backyard in Canton, North Carolina. Before assuming office, he started as a community advocate at his family-run legal practice, Smathers & Smathers. Since 2013, he's represented Canton through numerous challenges, including a global pandemic, economic transition, and, more recently, Hurricane Helene. As we enter another hurricane season, we're sitting down with Mayor Zeb to find out what animates him, and how he’s learned to “GSD” (get shit done) in small town North Carolina. He shares his thoughts about why hopelessness is one of the greatest dangers to our democracy, and where he spots the greatest displays of courage, decency, and respect.

Jess Anderson is Mayor of Chapel Hill.Many know her as a public policy analyst, a Professor, a Mom, a wife, a friend, etc. but she's also the child of two clinical psychologists. After her own little demi-rebellion in high school, she tapped into her innate curiosity about people (again, psychologist parents!) and decided to explore how systems make life better or worse. Listen in for highlights from the journey, insights into the job of being mayor (spoiler: collaboration is mandatory, and failure to pass a budget is not an option), and reflections on career and life and being many things to many people - especially as a Mom.You'll leave this one wanting Jess to be your friend.

Nina Hachigian was the first U.S. Ambassador for City and State Diplomacy from 2022-2025, the first Deputy Mayor for International Affairs in the City of Los Angeles, and she currently leads the Alliance for Local Leaders International (ALLIES), which is a nonpartisan nonprofit that brings together professionals from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to solve the big challenges facing our cities, our country, and our planet. So naturally, Ambassador Hachigian is the perfect person to help us kick off Season 4 of the Public Service Project, where we will spend time exploring what diplomacy looks like at the state and local levels. She's here to explain why American cities benefit from diplomatic expertise, and how diplomats can grow enormously from serving communities across America.

Gary Barker, PhD, is President, CEO and Co-Founder of Equimundo Center for Masculinities and Social Justice. A quick Google search reveals how wildly impressive Gary is, so we'll skip the recap and go right into the questions driving this conversation: Why and how is Gary Barker so compassionate, resilient, and deeply principled? Where did that come from? How did his childhood experience witnessing gun violence shape how he thought about safety, and what predisposed him to look upstream for the causes of violence in communities? How do we all experience gender dynamics in our homes and in society, and how does economic pressure exacerbate the frailties baked into rigid norms around what is expected of men and women? What is equality, and how is a focus on care central to understanding that we are all underserved by the status quo? This episode weaves its way through Gary's life and somehow answers all of these questions, and that is why he's the best.For more on Equimundo, head here: https://www.equimundo.org/And for Gary's TED talk on revolutionizing the role of men in dismantling gender inequality: https://www.ted.com/speakers/gary_barker

Maryum Saifee is living, becoming, rethinking and rewriting the American dream. She is her parents' greatest wish come to life, and she holds herself to the highest possible standard when it comes to serving the country that made her. She challenges herself, and all those around her, to face each day with conscience, courage, and moral clarity, and she does it with humanity and grace. Her credentials are impressive, from time spent serving with PeaceCorps to AmeriCorps to the U.S. Foreign Service. She experienced the Arab Spring up close in Cairo. She witnessed the impacts of the U.S. troop withdrawal from her post in Baghdad. She helped shape the State Department's approach to tech and diplomacy, and she is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, but what comes to the surface in this conversation is not just where she's been - it's how it has changed her. Despite being separated from her vocation against her will one year ago, Maryum is not done. She's not looking away from the many contradictions that make us who we are. She continues to hold us all accountable: to ourselves, to each other, and to the promise we made to form a more perfect union. Stick around at the end of this episode for a special visit from Maryum's mom, whose relentless courage and incomparable work ethic have rippled throughout her community and across the globe through her own service, and her daughter's.