Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society

This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy speaks with Marcus A. Ruzek about how to help and how to hurt our nation's veterans.

Marcus Ruzek is the Senior Program Director at the Marcus Foundation. Marcus is a combat veteran who served as an Army Special Forces Officer (Green Beret). He served in the Army for 13 years and received three Bronze Star medals. His work at the foundation focuses on military veterans and free...

This week on Givers, Doers, and Thinkers, Jeremy sits down with Aaron Withe to discuss the peculiar challenges government unions pose for a healthy civil society. 

Aaron Withe is the Chief Executive Officer of the Freedom Foundation. He began his career at the Freedom Foundation in 2015 and was appointed CEO in 2021. Aaron is the author of Freedom is the Foundation: How We Are Defeating Progressive Tyranny by Taking on the Governmen...

This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy speaks with Alexandra O. Hudson about how cultivating the misunderstood virtue of civility can help us overcome our individual anxieties and social pathologies. 

Alexandra Hudson lives in Indianapolis, where she is an Adjunct Professor at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. She was a Novak Journalism Fellow and the creator and developer of a TV series called ...

This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy speaks with Oren Cass about the rising cost of thriving, our broken labor movement, alternative visions of the free market, and how to build stronger families and communities. 

Oren Cass is the executive director of American Compass, an increasingly influential nonprofit policy organization based in Washington, DC. Oren is the author of The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the R...

During this week's episode of Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy speaks with Joshua Mitchell about how and why today's neo-puritans think our liberation depends on destroying those mediating institutions that constitute civil society.

Joshua Mitchell is a professor of political theory at Georgetown University. He was on the start-team for Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in Doha Qatar, and has taught courses there...

This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy speaks with journalist Ericka Andersen about why so many women have stopped attending church and what can be done about it.  

Ericka Andersen is a freelance journalist and author of a new book titled Reason to Return: Why Women Need the Church and the Church Needs Women. Ericka writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Christianity Today, World, and other out...

What are the characteristics of genuine charity? During this week's episode of Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy Beer and James Whitford explore this question together.

James Whitford is the Founder and CEO of True Charity. James founded the True Charity Initiative to advance the cause of privately funded effective charity at the most local level nationally. His work has appeared in the Heritage Foundation’s Index...

This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy sits down with leading philanthropy scholar Les Lenkowsky about the giving landscape in America and how it may or may not be changing.

Leslie Lenkowsky is a leading scholar on philanthropy and has been a faculty member of Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Policy since 2004, and, for five years, was the director of Graduate Programs at IU's Center on P...

We’re back with the fifth season of Givers, Doers, & Thinkers! To launch the next ten episodes, Jeremy sits down with Carrie Tynan, CEO of the Adolph Coors Foundation in Colorado.

As CEO, Carrie oversees all the foundation’s operations--both charitable and non-charitable--and implements the trustees’ vision for America. She loves visiting nonprofits and learning how they are improving the lives of the people in their communities...

To close the fourth season of Givers, Doer, & Thinkers, Jeremy sits down with political philosopher Mark T. Mitchell about why and how the health of the American constitutional order is connected to private property.

Mark is the Dean of Academic Affairs at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of The Limits of Liberalism: Tradition, Individualism, and the Crisis of Freedom, The Politics of Gratitude: Scale, Place, and Communit...

This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy chats with the Ian Rowe about why we need to replace our obsession with equity with the empowering concept of agency. 

Ian V. Rowe is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on education and upward mobility, family formation, and adoption. He is co-founder & CEO of Vertex Partnership Academies, a new network of character-based, International Baccal...

This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy sits down with theologian and journalist Rusty Reno about how and why the strong gods are reappearing in American society and what that means for our common future.

R.R. Reno is the editor of First Things, a journal of religion and public life, and serves on the board of advisers of the Edmund Burke Foundation. After earning his doctorate in religious studies from Yale, he taught th...

This week of Giver, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy speaks with nonprofit leader Jay Hein about innovative social impact investing, religion and social policy, and what the George W. Bush White House got right. 

Jay Hein is the president of Sagamore Institute and serves as managing director of an impact investing platform called Commonwealth. Together, Sagamore and Commonwealth advance game-changing ideas through innovations and inves...

Today on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy talks to investor and commentator David Bahnsen about the intersection of current trends in philanthropy and economics, including why stakeholder capitalism is a bad idea.

David L. Bahnsen is the founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group, a national private wealth management firm managing over $3.5 billion in client assets. David is a founding trustee ...

This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy speaks with Mary Eberstadt about family breakdown, identity politics, and atheism.

Mary Eberstadt holds the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C. and is Senior Research Fellow at the Faith & Reason Institute. She has written many works, including How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization; Adam and Ev...

This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy speaks with journalist Teddy Schleifer about how American billionaires practice their philanthropy and why it matters.

Teddy Schleifer is a reporter and founding partner at Puck who covers the influence of Silicon Valley billionaires. He’s based in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes about the tech fortunes being made and deployed during this extraordinary era of capitalism, divin...

This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy sits down with businessman and philanthropist Dean Riesen about his effort to deliver and access clean water in Tanzania and what the rest of us can learn from his work.

Dean is the Managing Partner of Redrock Partners, a private equity investment firm. As part of the firm’s work, he has served as the Chairman of Romano’s Macaroni Grill, Chairman of Famous Dave’s of Americ...

This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, we talk to theologian Gary Anderson about the surprising things the biblical tradition has to say about the poor, charity, and charity’s rewards.

Gary Anderson is the Hesburgh Professor of Catholic Theology at the University of Notre Dame and holds a doctorate from Harvard University. He is interested in all dimensions of biblical studies. His specialization is in the Hebrew Bible/Old Test...

Kicking off the fourth season of Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy sits down with Tim Reichert to discuss philanthropy and restoring the middle class.

Tim Reichert is an economist and businessman living in Golden, Colorado, and running for Colorado's 7th district congressional seat. He is the founder and CEO of Economics Partners, a firm of economists with offices in the US and Israel. He was a Partner at both Ernst & Y...