Season 2
PathBreakers Podcast
An award-winning podcast from The Kresge Foundation exploring who has the power to shape their city
About PathBreakers Season 2
Four American cities and one central question: Who has power to shape what happens in their city? In Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis, and Fresno, we talk with community leaders building neighborhoods of opportunity, reclaiming narrative power, and creating the conditions for families to thrive. And we sit down with city leaders to ask what it looks like from City Hall. Hosted by Tracey Pearson and Jamie Bennett, with mayoral episodes hosted by Kresge President & CEO Rip Rapson. Listen now to the show that was honored by the Timbre Awards as the 2025 ‘Podcast of the Year!’
Featured Episode
Mayor Jerry Dyer with Rip Rapson
City of Fresno
Fresno’s mayor is betting hundreds of millions of dollars that downtown investment and a massive new housing development will define the city’s future. But whose Fresno gets built — and who gets to tell that story?
Explore the 4 City Arcs
Fresno: Community Narratives, Identity, and Culture
Whose story is this city? Fresno has historically been a city whose story has been told by outside forces — commercial media, state planners, agribusiness interests, national narratives that reduce it to a punchline. This four-episode arc explores how city leaders, working across different mediums, have spent their careers fighting to change that.
Mayor Jerry Dyer with Rip Rapson
City of Fresno
Fresno’s mayor is betting hundreds of millions of dollars that downtown investment and a massive new housing development will define the city’s future. But whose Fresno gets built — and who gets to tell that story?
Hugo Morales
Radio Bilingüe
Hugo Morales left Harvard Law and went back to the Central Valley fields where he grew up picking fruit. In 1976, he founded Radio Bilingüe, convinced that farmworker families deserved their own voice on the airwaves. Today it’s the largest Latino public radio network in the country.
Sarait Martinez
Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño (CBDIO)
For Indigenous farmworker communities in the Central Valley, cultural preservation isn’t heritage work — it’s survival. As executive director of CBDIO, an organization dedicated to the self-determination of Indigenous people, Dr. Martinez is building the infrastructure to make it possible.
Streams Sept. 23
Danielle Bergstrom
Fresnoland
Danielle Bergstrom spent a decade as a city planner before concluding that the most powerful thing she could give Fresno was information. In 2020, she came home and built Fresnoland, the local newsroom Fresno’s underserved communities never had. She built the newsroom on a simple premise: communities can’t shape decisions they can’t see.
Streams Sept. 30
Memphis: Built to Last: Creating the Conditions for Family Stability
The leaders building the city’s future aren’t waiting for change to trickle down — they’re constructing it neighborhood by neighborhood, family by family, generation by generation.
Mayor Paul Young with Rip Rapson
City of Memphis
Mayor Young grew up in Memphis, watched his parents build a church in the neighborhood. As mayor, he’s betting that the same community-up approach that shaped him can work at the scale of city government, where he’s laser focused on bringing more resources to housing and youth workforce development. He spoke with Rapson at the Cossitt Library in downtown Memphis.
Marlon Foster
Knowledge Quest
Marlon grew up in South City, Memphis. When he saw his neighborhood deteriorating, he decided to do something about it. What started as a small organization is now a sophisticated enterprise that takes a two-generation approach to economic mobility through a comprehensive home, health and opportunity approach.
Archie Willis III and Alex Willis Boddie
Urban Renaissance Partners
Most developers stick to areas of rapid growth, where investing is primed for success. Urban Renaissance in Memphis takes another approach. It works in places where projects don’t easily “pencil out,” and in doing so, has found ways to build everything from multi-family housing to early childhood centers and bring needed assets to South City and across Memphis.
Anna McQuiston
MidSouth Development District
Anna leads a quasi-governmental agency that’s smashing boundaries and borders to level up collaboration across a big region. Her public-private partnership is rooting out competitiveness and taking a “lift all boats” approach to bringing resources to a geography that is often overlooked, and is fighting the inertia of everyone looking out for themselves to do it.
Detroit: Building Neighborhoods of Opportunity
Meet three Detroiters, and one dynamic new leader in Mayor Sheffield, working to ensure residents in every corner of the city thrive.
Mayor Mary Sheffield with Rip Rapson
City of Detroit
Detroit’s future will be written in its neighborhoods. How does Detroit’s mayor ensure the city’s revival reaches every corner, and what does it take to govern a city in a moment when federal headwinds are coming on strong?
Orlando Bailey
Outlier Media
You can’t shape your neighborhood if you don’t know what’s happening to it. How one Detroit newsroom turned journalism into infrastructure for neighborhood power.
Caitlin Murphy
Live6 Alliance
A commercial corridor went from 10% occupancy to thriving neighborhood hub–and they’re just getting started. How one Northwest Detroit alliance is building opportunity block by block.
Simone Sagovac
Southwest Detroit Community Benefits Coalition
When a $6 billion bridge comes to your neighborhood, who decides what you get in return? The decade-long fight to make sure residents write the answer.
More episodes dropping soon.
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New Orleans: The Imperative of Health and Climate Equity
In a city that already knows how to survive, community leaders are building the food systems, green infrastructure, and public health frameworks to face what comes next.
More episodes dropping soon.
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About Our Hosts
Meet Tracey Pearson and Jamie Bennett, our co-hosts, who bring their unique experiences and questions to our PathBreaker conversations. They’ll be joined by Kresge’s own Rip Rapson, who will sit down with each city leader to set the city’s context.
Catch up with Season 1 PathBreakers
In America’s cities, progress doesn’t happen by accident. Listen to these 12 conversations with courageous individuals who challenge systems, imagine better futures, bring along communities, and create pathways forward for us all.