Hope Is My Middle Name

Terri Oyarzun can’t imagine life without goats. She grew up with goats, she met her husband out herding goats, and together they rescued 55 “Charlie Brown” goats and trained them to fight wildfires. Today, the 5,000 strong Goats R Us herd works with government agencies, universities, and communities to find innovative solutions for fire control and prevention, while advancing animal husbandry and livestock management in California’...

What do you do when your hometown has been ranked in the top 4 US cities most vulnerable to coastal flooding? If you’re Nancy Metayer Bowen, you run for office. And you become the first Haitian-American to be elected to office in Coral Springs, Florida. Now as a city commissioner, Nancy is hard at work, what storms may come – hurricanes, Imposter Syndrome, sea level rise – building a more sustainable future for her family...

Out of prison and addiction into a full-time job with big-time responsibility, Kyle Wedge transformed his life in no small way, with the help of a whole host of folks who had faced that same hard recovery. Now, as Field Operations Manager at MaineWorks, he is helping people move from incarceration and addiction into aliveness and connection. 

Founded in 2010 by Margo Walsh, MaineWorks is an employment company offering suppo...

Where’s your creek? Atlanta’s own Sally Sears asks, as she spills the tea on how she and her neighbors discovered an urban paradise, hidden in swaths of kudzu, swamped with sewage and asbestos, but there nonetheless, waiting for them to reclaim it. 

This is the story of Zonolite Park, an industrial wasteland abandoned for decades, declared a brownfield by the EPA, only to be rescued by a handful of locals who believed it co...

When a young Alan Graham chided a homeless man panhandling next to a taco stand in Austin, he could not have imagined that 36 years later he’d be living in a vibrant neighborhood of formerly homeless people, a neighborhood that he built. 

In 1998, real estate developer Alan Graham launched Mobile Loaves and Fishes to help communities offer food, housing, and employment for neighbors coming up off the streets. What started o...

Kegan Hilaire was hard at work as a bouncer in Philly, with no plans to become an organic farmer. Until one day, he cracked open a pasture-raised egg with an impossibly orange yolk and he wondered, “Why is this egg so much better than the ones in the grocery store?”

This is the story of a nightclub bouncer who found himself in the middle of a field with a handful of seeds and a dream to bring healthy, organic food to everyone, e...

Doug Naselroad says, “Recovery from a substance abuse disorder is not that different than recovery from a catastrophic disaster. It's a work that you're going to be doing for the rest of your life.” That understanding energizes Doug’s work helping people recover from addiction by teaching them to build stringed instruments. Doug lives in the small town of Hindman, Kentucky, which on July 28, 2022 was all but destroyed after severe ...

Bayou Dave, aka David Rivers, has a calling. It involves a whole lot of trash and a vision for a clean, healthy, vibrant world that his kids can grow up in. So every day, he goes out on Houston’s Buffalo Bayou on a big makeshift barge and picks up trash—167 dump truck loads every year. He’s been called King of the Bayou, and he notices every little shift in the ecosystem. To hear him talk about the return of the snakes, or the bald...

Betty Reid Soskin became a park ranger at the age of 85, bringing a wealth of experience to the National Park Service. As Betty says, “What gets remembered is a function of who’s in the room doing the remembering,” and Betty’s history is helping other untold stories come to light at Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California. From working in a Jim Crow union hall during the war, to st...

In the age of TikTok and Instagram, it seems there’s no place we haven’t seen, but if you’ve ever been to Alaska, you know there’s a whole lotta world left to discover—a world on the forefront of climate change, the energy transition, advocacy for Native rights, and... regenerative tourism. Because in the midst of all that Alaskans are navigating, including challenges with transportation, supply chain, and food security, they’re se...

Kevin Berthia and Kevin Briggs are an unlikely pair. But their friendship saves lives. And it was hard won, founded on what matters – mutual respect, trust, and listening. They met when Sergeant Briggs was in the state highway patrol and Kevin Berthia was jumping off a bridge. Today they stand side by side as suicide prevention advocates, helping people know they’re not alone, that there is hope and a future. It’s been many years n...

Are America’s small towns in decline? Not if you ask Beth and Tim Reese. They’re part of a powerful revitalization effort in Capon Bridge, West Virginia, a town of 400 nestled on the Cacapon River, at the “Gateway to the Mountains” of Appalachia. The community of Capon Bridge believes that restoring old buildings, rather than tearing them down, attracts young people and new businesses, like the Farmer’s Daughter Market & Butche...

Ron Pringle believes in a hunger-free America. And he’s determined to help build it. But with more than 38 million people, including 12 million children, experiencing food insecurity in the United States, it could take a lifetime. Ron's powerful personal story energizes his work as CEO of Inter-Faith Food Shuttle, a massive force for good in North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham area, growing and serving millions of pounds of food per ye...

John Christian Phifer’s life revolves around death. He performed his first burial at the age of six, wrapping a grasshopper in a shroud of leaves, and today he digs bigger graves on a sweeping nature preserve in the hills of Tennessee. With each funeral, the land is restored and loved ones have wide open space to grieve and to celebrate the life we all are so lucky to live. Hear how John Christian went from mortician to man with a ...

Truckers make the world go round, especially these days with serious supply chain disruptions, the ongoing crisis of the pandemic, and the ever-increasing importance of front-line workers. We talk with two truckers out there delivering hope and crucial supplies on rough roads, in bad weather, in the face of loneliness, isolation and invisibility. They’re risking their lives for us every day, and they have some great stories to tell...

Twenty-six year-old farmer George Patterson expands on his family’s coal-mining heritage with a new enterprise—reclaiming abandoned mine land to grow food and restore the land for generations to come. When George’s dad told him he could go to business school or go into business, he set up shop in a shipping container on a mine site, with air mattress and shotgun in tow. George worked by day and binged YouTube by night to teach hims...

Iraq War veteran Jon Turner takes us from an ambush in Ramadi to a homestead in Vermont, where he’s found a way to heal a traumatic brain injury through farming. Hands in the dirt, boots on the ground, Jon Turner is on a mission to build community and serve our country as a farmer, father, teacher and always, as a veteran.

Hosted by Kate Tucker, Hope Is My Middle Name is a podcast by Consensus Digital Media in co...

Grief can make us do the wildest things, and sometimes it takes getting lost in the middle of nowhere to find where we belong. For our debut episode, we follow long-distance hiker Brittany Comins on a 2,000 mile journey through loss, gratitude, and the great outdoors. 

Hosted by Kate Tucker, Hope Is My Middle Name is a podcast by Consensus Digital Media in collaboration with Reasonable Volume.