Listen to Borrowed Wisdom with Robert Barry Fleming

Theatre in the 21st century is an inherently interdisciplinary craft, and Robert Barry Fleming, Executive Artistic Director at Actors Theatre of Louisville, finds inspiration everywhere. Each week, Robert talks with an unrivaled expert, full of ideas, strategies and challenges around their work, then investigates that which is consonant and connected to how they navigate their discipline and their world—no matter what the field. It’s a podcast about what we can learn from one another when such learning is approached with a spirit of openness.

Beth Howard is the Organizing Director of Southern Crossroads. She is from a working-class family in Eastern Kentucky. She has over 12 years of experience in grassroots community organizing and leadership development. Beth began her organizing career as Lead Organizer at Fighting Against Injustice Towards Harmony in Daytona Beach, FL where the organization won campaigns to secure a substance-abuse treatment program and mental-health services for incarcerated people in the county jail. After five years, Beth moved back to her home state of Kentucky and worked for nearly seven years as a chapter organizer and later as Deputy Organizing Director of Leadership Development for Kentuckians For The Commonwealth. At KFTC, she worked on winning campaigns to raise the minimum wage in Fayette County and to restore voting rights to more than 200,000 Kentuckians with felonies in their past. She also created an organizing apprentice program and a community organizing 101 intensive training program for KFTC”s grassroots members. In 2019, she graduated from Catalyst Project’s Anne Braden program, a transformational anti-racist organizer training for white social-justice activists and served as the lead staff support for KFTC’s organizational racial justice assessment and visioning process. She is deeply committed to liberatory organizing strategies to build a multiracial poor-working class people’s movement in the American South. She lives in Lexington, KY with her partner Andrew, their faithful dog Sandy, and their defiant cat Tadpole. www.bethhowardcoaching.com/

📚 References:

Southern Crossroads

An Appalachian Reawakening: West Virginia and the Perils of the New Machine Age, 1945-1972 by Jerry Thomas (2010)

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X Kendi (2017)

Owsley County, Kentucky, and the Perpetuation of Poverty by John R. Burch Jr. (2007)

Combahee River Collective

adrienne maree brown

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Produced by Elizabeth Greenfield
Audio Engineer and Editor: Paul Doyle
Original music by Omega Latham III
Opening song written & performed by Erica Denise

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