Blog Posts

I landed Saturday, and spent a few nights wandering the empty, sun-bleached alleys of Nashville’s booming south side — behind the Country Music Hall of Hall of Fame, Music City Center, The Johnny Cash Museum and all the rest of Broadway. I am seeing America for the first time in a long time. So much…

The longer we produce “Friends & Neighbors,” the clearer it becomes what type of people resonate: self starters and creatives, to be sure. Optimists, catalysts, builders, and those who value empathy, relationships and community. People who share their humanity — their very humanness — with humility: the full spectrum of feelings, strengths and weaknesses, confidences…

So many cool things have happened in my life when I’ve quieted the worried voices in my head, stuck out my hand, and introduced myself to a perfectly good stranger. Roger Clark was one of those perfectly good strangers.  It was the fourth year of our annual Holiday Benefit in New York City, somewhere in…

Even as a kid from Iowa, I imagined farms as bucolic, self-sustaining places: silos full of corn to feed cute, muddy pigs; fresh milk from a well-loved heifer; eggs from the family hen. But of course, farming hasn’t been a ma ‘n pop operation for years. It’s big, big business: pesticides, fertilizers, antibiotics, growth hormones.…

When Christofer and I began imagining our PBS Documentary, Mister Rogers & Me, remembrances of Fred Rogers were not yet a cottage industry.  It was surprising, then, in the earliest days of my research, to discover Tim Madigan’s just-published memoir, “I’m Proud of You: My Friendship With Fred Rogers.”  More surprising still, Tim and my…

When my colleague and dear friend Áine Kerr left Facebook to co-found her second startup, she left a note on my desk that read, “The future begins at the edge of your comfort zone.” Áine grew up in Monaghan County Ireland, just shy of The Troubles, and just prior to The Celtic Tiger.  She began…