Almost half of Puerto Rico's doctors have fled the island over the past decade, leading to a lack of specialists and treatment and incredibly long wait times. And this isn't just an inconvenience. People are dying from lack of care. Why is Puerto Rico's health care system collapsing, and why are doctors fleeing the island?

We take a look at its deeply dysfunctional private medical system and why attempts to fix it, and create a universal health care plan on the island, are being hindered by Puerto Rico's status as a US colony. Its massive unpayable debt, held by investors in the US, means that it cannot make its own economic decisions, even when it affects the livelihood of poor Puerto Ricans living there. But there might be a fix, getting rid of Puerto Rico's debt and rethinking its colonial relationship to the US. This episode first aired in October 2024.

Credits:

Making Contact:

• Episode Host: Salima Hamirani
• Producers: Anita Johnson, Salima Hamirani, Amy Gastelum, and Lucy Kang
• Executive Director: Jina Chung
• Editor: Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong
• Engineer: Jeff Emtman
• Digital Marketing Manager: Lissa Deonarain

Music Credits:

• Daniel Birch – Indigo Strokes
• Axletree – Goldfinch- Flight to the North
• Mindseye – Spores
• Soft and Furious – So What

Learn More:

• Boricuas Unidos en la Diaspora
• The Nation Magazine
• Puerto Rico's Unnatural Disaster

Making Contact is an award-winning, nationally syndicated radio show and podcast featuring narrative storytelling and thought-provoking interviews. We cover the most urgent issues of our time and the people on the ground building a more just world.

Federal food programs, like WIC, face big changes coming out of the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health. Meanwhile, a single moms collective in Ohio holds it down for the single pregnant and parenting people in their community. Motherful's resource pantry serves their 325-strong membership out of a garage three times a week. We talk to members and founders to learn what's it's like to participate, how it all started and where food justice is headed for them now and in their wildest dreams.

Featuring:

• Kay Riley- college student and Mom to baby Wisdom, Motherful Member
• Rugi Ngaide - Ohio supreme court translator, Mom, Motherful member
• Lisa Woodrow - Co-Founder and Co-Director of Motherful, Mom
• Heidi Howes - Co-Founder and Co-Director of Motherful, Mom
• Rebecca Piazza: Senior Advisor for Delivery, Food and Nutrition Service, Mom

Making Contact Team

• Host: Amy Gastelum
• Staff Producers: Anita Johnson, Salima Hamirani, Amy Gastelum, Lucy Kang
• Executive Director: Jina Chung
• Digital Media Marketing: Lissa Deonarain
• Engineer: Jeff Emtman

Music

• HoliznaCC0, Sky Scraper

Learn More:

• Motherful
• Changes to WIC

Making Contact is an award-winning, nationally syndicated radio show and podcast featuring narrative storytelling and thought-provoking interviews. We cover the most urgent issues of our time and the people on the ground building a more just world.

For Black Maternal Health Week, we celebrate the important work that Black midwives do in their communities. In this week's show, we'll hear a conversation about how one woman followed her calling to midwifery in a story brought to us by the podcast _Re:Work_ from the UCLA Labor Center.

Featuring:

Kimberly Durdin, licensed midwife and co-founder of Kindred Space LA and the Birthing People Foundation

Credits:

Making Contact

Episode host and producer: Lucy Kang

Producers: Anita Johnson, Salima Hamirani, Amy Gastelum, and Lucy Kang

Executive Director: Jina Chung

Engineer: Jeff Emtman

Digital Media Marketing: Lissa Deonarain

Music credit: "Documentary" by The_Mountain via Pixabay

Re:Work Episode "The Calling" Credits:

Hosted and produced by Veena Hampapur and Saba Waheed

Learn More:

Making Contact homepage: www.focmedia.org

Re:Work from the UCLA Labor Center: https://reworkradio.labor.ucla.edu

Making Contact is an award-winning, nationally syndicated radio show and podcast featuring narrative storytelling and thought-provoking interviews. We cover the most urgent issues of our time and the people on the ground building a more just world.

In the late 1990s, psychologist Dr. Joseph Gone, a professor and member of the Aaniiih Gros Ventre tribe, returned home during his doctoral training to the Fort Belknap Reservation in north central Montana. There, he set aside Eurocentric concepts of psychology he was learning in school and instead asked tribal members how mental illness is addressed using traditional Indigenous practices. What he learned changed the trajectory of his career. Listen to find out how he helped bring precolonial cultural and spiritual practices into substance use disorder treatment in contemporary Indigenous settings. This show first aired in July 2024.

Featuring:

Dr. Joseph Gone, psychologist and interdisciplinary social scientist at Harvard University and member of the Aaniiih-Gros Ventre Tribal Nation of Montana

Credits:

Making Contact:

• Episode Host: Amy Gastelum
• Producers: Anita Johnson, Salima Hamirani, Amy Gastelum, and Lucy Kang
• Executive Director: Jina Chung
• Editor: Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong
• Engineer: Jeff Emtman
• Digital Media Marketing: Lissa Deonarain

Music credits:

• Songs: The Horses are Coming, The Gift, Song of Honor
• Album: The Return of the Buffalo Horses
• Artists: Darrell Norman and Ramon Kramer https://www.blackfeetculturecamp.com/d-norman/

Learn More:

• Dr. Joseph Gone
• American Indian Health and Family Services, Detroit, MI

Making Contact is an award-winning, nationally syndicated radio show and podcast featuring narrative storytelling and thought-provoking interviews. We cover the most urgent issues of our time and the people on the ground building a more just world.

On today's program we honor the life and legacy of civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs (27 June 1915-5 October 2015).

Through the lens of the documentary film _American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs_ we present a close and personal view of Boggs' activism. The film plunges us into Boggs' lifetime of vital thinking and action, traversing the major U.S. social movements of the last century; from labor to civil rights, to Black Power, feminism, the Asian American and environmental justice movements and beyond.

Boggs' constantly evolving strategy—her willingness to re-evaluate and change tactics in relation to the world shifting around her—drives the story forward. Angela Davis, Bill Moyers, Bill Ayers, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Danny Glover, Boggs' late husband James and a host of Detroit comrades across three generations help shape this uniquely American story. As she wrestles with a Detroit in ongoing transition, contradictions of violence and non-violence, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the 1967 rebellions, and nonlinear notions of time and history, Boggs emerges with an approach that is radical in its simplicity and clarity: revolution is not an act of aggression or merely a protest. Revolution, Boggs says, is about something deeper within the human experience — the ability to transform oneself to transform the world.

Special thanks to Grace Lee (no relation), producer and director of _American Revolutionary_, and to raptivist Invincible_. _

Featuring:

• Grace Lee Boggs
• Grace Lee, Contributing Producer and Filmmaker

Credits:

• Host: Anita Johnson
• Contributing Producer: Grace Lee
• Executive Director: Jina Chung
• Digital Media Marketing: Lissa Deonarain

Music:

• Bontex, Creeping
• Blue Dot Sessions, Grand Caravan
• Invincible + Waajeed, Detroit Summer
• Audio Banger, the Garden State

Learn More:

• American Revolutionary Film
• Americans Who Tell The Truth
• Grace Lee Boggs Detroit Activist Dies At 100
• Invincible
• Emergence Media

Dr. Flemmie Kittrell was a Black home economist whose research in the field of early childhood education shaped the way we think about child development today. She became the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in nutrition and contributed immensely to programs like Head Start – even though her name is often left out of the history. We'll hear more about her life and work in a story from the podcast _Lost Women of Science_,_ _hosted by Carol Sutton Lewis and Danya AbdelHameid.

Featuring:

• Dolores Caffey-Fleming, Program director of Project STRIDE, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science
• Allison Horrocks, Public historian
• Lauren Bauer, fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution

Credits:

Making Contact

• Episode host and producer: Lucy Kang
• Producers: Anita Johnson, Salima Hamirani, Amy Gastelum, and Lucy Kang
• Executive Director: Jina Chung
• Engineer: Jeff Emtman
• Digital Media Marketing: Lissa Deonarain
• Music Credit: "Science Documentary" by Aleksey Chistilin (Lexin_Music) via Pixabay

Lost Women of Science: "Flemmie Kittrell and the Preschool Experiment" Credits

• Hosted by Danya AbdelHameid and Carol Sutton Lewis
• Written and produced by Danya AbdelHameid with senior producer Elah Feder
• Music composed by Lizzie Younan
• Episode sound designed and mastered by Alex Sugiura
• Executive producers: Amy Scharf and Katie Hafner
• Chief multimedia editor at our publishing partner, Scientific American: Jeff Delviscio

Listen to the full episode from Lost Women of Science: https://www.lostwomenofscience.org/podcast-episodes/flemmie-kittrell-and-the-preschool-experiment

Making Contact is an award-winning, nationally syndicated radio show and podcast featuring narrative storytelling and thought-provoking interviews. We cover the most urgent issues of our time and the people on the ground building a more just world.

In 1965 Margaret Crane was a young designer creating packaging for a pharmaceutical company when a scientist gave her a tour of the lab. Looking at the long rows of pregnancy tests she thought, well anyone could do that test at home! So she set about designing a prototype for America's first home pregnancy test. While the design of the prototype was simple, convincing the company, the medical community and conservative social leaders that at-home pregnancy testing was safe and necessary was an uphill climb for Crane, who is only now receiving credit for her contributions to the industry. This show first aired in February 2024.

Featuring:

• Margaret Crane - Graphic designer and inventor of the first home pregnancy test
• Wendy Kline - Dema G. Seelye Chair in the History of Medicine, History Faculty Purdue University
• Jesse Olszynko-Gryn - Head of the [Laboratory for Oral History and Experimental Media](https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/projects/laboratory-oral-history-and-experimental-media) at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
• Arthur Kover - Emeritus Professor of Marketing, Fordham University
• Alexandra Lord - Chair, Division of Medicine and Science at the National Museum of American History

Making Contact Staff:

• Host: Amy Gastelum
• Guest Producer: Anne Noyes Saini
• Producers: Anita Johnson, Salima Hamirani, Amy Gastelum, and Lucy Kang
• Executive Director: Jina Chung
• Editor: Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong
• Engineer: Jeff Emtman
• Digital Media Marketing: Lissa Deonorain

Music:

Podington Bear, Rhythm and Strings

Learn More:

• National Museum of American History https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_1803285
• A Woman's Right to Know, Pregnancy Testing in 20th Century Britain - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544399/a-womans-right-to-know/
• Predictor, by Jennifer Blackmer https://newplayexchange.org/plays/348156/predictor

Making Contact is an award-winning, nationally syndicated radio show and podcast featuring narrative storytelling and thought-provoking interviews. We cover the most urgent issues of our time and the people on the ground building a more just world.

Dr. Rebecca Crumpler was the first Black woman to become a physician in the United States. Working in the aftermath of the Civil War, she made immense contributions to public health, despite the racism and sexism she faced. We'll trace the course of her remarkable life and work with in a story brought to us by the podcast Lost Women of Science, hosted by Katie Hafner and producer Dominique Janee.

Featuring:

• Dr. Melody McCloud, Physician and author of _Black Women's Wellness_
• Dr. Joan Reede, Dean for Diversity and Community Partnership at Harvard Medical School
• Jim Downs, Historian and author of _Sick from Freedom_
• Victoria Gall, with Hyde Park Historical Society and Friends of the Hyde Park Branch Library

Making Contact Credits

• Episode host and producer: Lucy Kang
• Executive Director: Jina Chung
• Engineer: Jeff Emtman
• Digital Media Marketing: Lissa Deonarain
• Music Credit: "The Road From Home" by Sergii Pavkin from Pixabay

Lost Women of Science: "Dr. Rebecca Crumpler, America's First Black Female Public Health Pioneer" Credits

• Producer and host: Dominique Janee
• Host: Katie Hafner
• Managing senior producer: Barbara Howard
• Audio engineer and sound designer: Samia Bouzid
• Published in partnership with Scientific American

Listen to the full episode from Lost Women of Science: https://www.lostwomenofscience.org/podcast-episodes/dr-rebecca-crumpler-americas-first-black-female-public-health-pioneer

Making Contact is an award-winning, nationally syndicated radio show and podcast featuring narrative storytelling and thought-provoking interviews. We cover the most urgent issues of our time and the people on the ground building a more just world.