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March 11, 2024

Inclusion Initiative, IDEAS Generation, & The Justice of Investigative Reporting Featuring Grace Yung Foster, Dan Egol, and Jerry Mitchell

Show Notes
Guest Profile

In this episode, Grace Yung Foster, founder of The Inclusion Initiative, talks about the challenges of transracial adoption; Dan Egol, founder of IDEAS Generation, explains how intersectionality is important creating understanding; and Jerry Mitchell, founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, discusses the importance of investigative reporting in obtaining justice. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/erik-fleming1/support

Grace Yung Foster

Founder & CEO, The Inclusion Initiative

Grace was born in South Korea. At 3 years old, she was orphaned and abandoned at the local market. She immigrated to the US at 5 years old, eventually ended up in the foster care system, and then adopted.

Her experiences as an immigrant, a person of color in a very white community, and also her very difficult experience as a transracial adoptee and foster youth influenced her narrative of self-rejection of her Asian identity. She was in constant pursuit of finding “white belonging” for over 25 years. But now she has created that belonging for those who share these intersectional identities by leveraging her own lived experience and conveying why this matters. She founded The Inclusion Initiative to increase visibility through storytelling and community-building for professionals who share her lived experiences.

Grace has over 10 years of experience in leadership roles in both the corporate and nonprofit sectors. She has extensive experience with leading teams, building strategies for growing organizations, and honoring mission-aligned work by incorporating lived experience.

She holds an MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business, an Associate's degree in Business Administration, and a BA in Communications from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Dan Egol

Executive Director, IDEAS Generation

https://www.linkedin.com/in/danegol/

Jerry Mitchell

Investigative reporter/Author

The stories of investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell have helped put four Klansmen and a serial killer behind bars. His stories have also helped free two people from death row, exposed injustices and corruption, prompting investigations and reforms as well as the firings of boards and officials. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a longtime member of Investigative Reporters & Editors, and a winner of more than 30 other national awards, including a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grant.
His memoir for Simon & Schuster, Race Against Time, details how some of the nation’s most notorious murders came to be punished decades later. The New York Times made it an Editors’ Pick, and NPR selected it as a Best Book of the Year.
After working for three decades for the statewide Clarion-Ledger, Mitchell left in 2019 and founded the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit that exposes injustices and raises up the next generation of investigative reporters. The stories of MCIR have already led to two separate Justice Department investigations. Since summer 2022, the nonprofit, now a part of Mississippi Today, has been working with The New York Times on a series that has exposed allegations of how Mississippi sheriffs and their deputies have carried out horrific crimes, including torturing suspects, and the beatings and sexual abuse of those behind bars.