The City Club of Cleveland Podcast

For many Americans, Public Media is the home of NPR, PBS, and is synonymous with the likes of Mr. Rogers, Elmo, and Ken Burns documentaries. It is also a crucial resource for local journalism, discourse, and even emergency alerts. In July 2025, the Rescissions Act of 2025 was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump, cutting all federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting-which will close its doors in January 2026. The hardest hit are smaller market, rural, and tribal stations, some of which are seeing the loss of public safety grants intended to support disaster-prone regions of the nation. What are the impacts of these cuts? And what efforts are underway to support the most at-risk public media organizations?

Join Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne for the 2025 State of the County address at the Atrium Ballroom at the Huntington Convention Center in downtown Cleveland. The Executive will share key accomplishments, reflect on the progress made together, and outline his vision and priorities for the upcoming year.

Throughout history, young people have driven America's major social and political movements, and today is no different. From campus protests to debates over political expression, student activism remains a loud voice. Yet, efforts to silence these voices are also mounting.\r\n\r\nThat's why it has never been more critical to protect and foster youth leadership. A 2022 CIRCLE survey by Tufts University's Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement found that while 62% of young Americans say their political views are an important part of their identity, only 33% of those aged 18-21 feel well-qualified to participate in politics.\r\n\r\nAt the City Club's Youth Forum Council inaugural forum of the 2025-2026 school year, Youth Activism: How Students Can Create Change, we aim to equip students with knowledge and tools to take action on issues that matter to them. We will explore the significance of youth activism, share resources to amplify student voices, and discuss how educators and parents can support this work.

Celebrating 50 years in 2025, the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland has remained the leading nonprofit that empowers Northeast Ohio's LGBTQ community through advocacy, education, collaboration, and celebration. In fact, it is one of the first established LGBTQ centers in the nation.\r\n\r\nLeading the way is Phyllis Seven Harris, who has played a strong role as an advocate in Cleveland\'s LGBTQ+ community and has nearly two decades of leadership experience in Northeast Ohio. Her steady, strategic leadership comes at an unprecedented time when legislative policies and cultural shifts have impacted critical issues facing the LGBTQ+ community.

There is a tension in our region between those who view our future as constrained by resource scarcity and those who see ours as a region of plenty. Last year, Baiju Shah, President and CEO of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, pointed this out in an essay for Crain\'s, \"For too long,\" he wrote, \"our region has approached major opportunities in an \'either-or\' framing, with concern and caution. Focus on the lakefront or the riverfront? Develop new housing downtown, in neighborhoods, or suburbs? Grow research or businesses?\"\r\n\r\nPerhaps the time has come for an abundance mindset. Some national thinkers would certainly agree.\r\n\r\nBaiju Shah, chief executive of the region\'s chamber of commerce, speaks about his vision for how a mindset change might make possible the future many in Greater Cleveland hope for. He\'ll discuss the region\'s growth and how business and civic leaders can work together to unlock the region's full potential.

The national debate over the state of free speech continues to intensify. With the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah and the subsequent suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel over remarks regarding Kirk\'s death, recent events have reinforced a deep divide among Americans.\r\n\r\nAccording to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, there has been a continued decline in support for free speech, particularly among all students, and students of every political persuasion show a deep unwillingness to encounter controversial ideas. Meanwhile, Kimmel\'s suspension has drawn attention to the government\'s growing pressure on the media and private companies, and raises questions about what constitutes direct interference with First Amendment rights.\r\n\r\nIs free speech under attack? Or is the public\'s definition shifting? And what can we take stock of from current events, as well as long-term trends in this nation and our ability to exercise our First Amendment rights?

These days, becoming an entrepreneur seems riskier than ever. The market is fast-paced and increasingly advanced technology has changed the game. Today\'s entrepreneurial market is certainly not the same as those of past generations. What can we learn from those who know what it takes to build success, scale up, and improve our communities?\r\n\r\nKumar Arora is an entrepreneur, investor, and consultant behind many startups and brands you probably heard of: ILTHY(R), FutureLAND, Cleveland Cavaliers, and numerous Fortune 500 companies. His parent company Arora Ventures provides resources, investment, and consulting services to assist early-stage to mid-sized businesses. Consistently pushing the envelope on design and innovation, much of his work centers on the idea of creating novel products, teams, and scaling brands. His concentration lies in a variety of industries including consumer brands, entertainment, packaged goods, product development, marketing, & design.

In her recent book, P.O.E.T. (Power Over Emotional Trauma), Honey Bell-Bey asks, \"What do you do with what did not kill you?\" Trauma happens, she notes, but healing happens also.\r\n\r\nWidely known as the dynamic National Award-winning Poet Laureate (Academy of American Poets), Honey Bell-Bey isn\'t just a poet. She is also an Ohio Certified Prevention Specialist, and for decades, has used her talent in poetry as a vehicle for healing intergenerational trauma and other issues related to public health. Together with Dr. Scott Frank, an award-winning family medical doctor, Associate Professor Emeritus at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), and poet himself, they worked to underscore the importance of poetry as a public health need.

In 1855, an American named John Swanson Jacobs walked into the offices of the Empire newspaper in Sydney, Australia. The conversation that ensued between the editors and Jacobs, a fugitive slave, opened a path for both Jacobs and the Empire, a path for the newspaper to publish his story. Two weeks later, Jacobs brought them a manuscript titled The United States Governed by 600,000 Despots. This was not a typical slave narrative, and they published it.\r\n\r\nIn 2016, in the midst of other research, historian Jonathan D.S. Schroeder came across Jacobs\' autobiography, which had been all but lost to time. An extraordinary work, more sociopolitical critique than life story, Despots offers a first hand account of how the enslaved truly viewed the institution of slavery, unmediated by white editors and writers as so many other slave narratives of the time were.\r\n\r\nIn celebration of the 90th Anisfield Wolf Book Awards and Cleveland Book Fest, Schroeder will discuss Jacobs\' narrative and Schroeder\'s own scholarship with author, historian, and 2021 Anisfield Wolf Book Award winner Vincent Brown.

What if the conventional narrative of the 1960s civil rights era, by its very nature, limits the success, legal achievements, and persistence of Black Americans for generations? In Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, author Dylan C. Penningroth maintains that the fight for civil rights didn\'t begin with famous marches and courtroom cases of the 1960s. Instead, his research stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, and challenges nearly every aspect of our traditional understanding of civil rights history as we know it.\r\n\r\nDrawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth centers the everyday lives of Black Americans and sheds light on their centuries-long tradition of legal knowledge to assert their rights, protect their families, and shape their communities.\r\n\r\nDylan C. Penningroth is a professor of law and Morrison Professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in African American history and legal history and is a MacArthur Fellow. Before the Movement won eleven book prizes and was shortlisted for four more. He is also the author of the award-winning book, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South.