About Janice Graham — Founder, Executive Producer & Host
OUR COMMON GROUND MEDIA GROUP
B. Janice Graham is the Founder, Executive Producer, and Host of OUR COMMON GROUND with Janice Graham and OUR COMMON GROUND Media Group, and the founder and producer of the TruthWorks Network.
Her career spans more than four decades of corporate senior executive leadership, public policy, organizational development, civil rights compliance, political strategy, community organizing, broadcasting, and social commentary. Across these fields, Graham has worked both within major institutions and alongside communities seeking to challenge the structures of power, expand opportunity, and secure meaningful representation.
Corporate Executive Leadership and Public Service
Before and alongside her media work, Graham held senior management and executive positions with major American corporations, including Wang Laboratories, Raytheon, Teradyne, INA Corporation, and Polaroid Corporation. Her responsibilities encompassed national human resources operations, equal employment opportunity, affirmative action, diversity, workforce development, organizational effectiveness, and regulatory compliance.
She later served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Boston-based Peak Performance Group, Inc., a management consulting practice specializing in nonprofit, political, and social-service policy implementation, strategic planning, organizational performance, and measurement.
Her public service included extensive work with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and state government, bringing her expertise in institutional accountability, equal opportunity, compliance, and organizational leadership to the public sector.
In 1998, President William Jefferson Clinton appointed Graham a White House Community Builder Fellow, extending her work in community development, public engagement, and institutional change.
Political Strategy, Electoral Leadership, and Community Organizing
Graham’s political leadership includes service as National Chair of the Campaign for a New Tomorrow during the 1986–1987 period, with the precise year to be confirmed. Her campaign strategic planning work for the Florida Democratic Party contributed to Bob Graham’s first successful election to the United States Senate in 1986.
As a political strategist in Palm Beach County, Graham organized a coalition of citizens to challenge the inequitable structure of representation on the County Commission. Through sustained political organizing, the coalition compelled the placement of a referendum before voters to establish a seventh commission district. The resulting change provided minority communities in West Palm Beach with fairer and more equitable representation in county government.
Her electoral organizing also included participation in the early exploratory committee efforts and campaigns of Ayanna Pressley, supporting her political organizing for both the Boston City Council and the United States House of Representatives.
Graham’s political work has consistently connected electoral participation with the larger responsibility of building community power, challenging institutional exclusion, and holding public officials accountable to the people they represent.
Civil Rights Advocacy and Community Empowerment
As a member of the Education Foundation of Palm Beach County, Graham introduced a community-wide initiative to confront racial bias and institutionalized racism in Palm Beach County schools. She served as the first convenor of Project Mosaic, bringing together community stakeholders to address educational inequities and institutional practices affecting students and families.
Her organizing work extended to nationally significant criminal justice campaigns. Graham was a leading founder of the Free Kemba Smith movement. Following an interview with Smith’s parents, she created the movement’s first website and began publicizing the case. She subsequently brought the case to the attention of George Curry, editor of Emerge magazine, whose investigation and coverage helped bring national attention to Smith’s circumstances.
In response to the imprisonment of Jamie and Gladys Scott in Mississippi, Graham organized a group of veteran activists known as the Gray-Haired Witnesses for Justice to address the sisters’ case. The effort drew upon the experience, organizing traditions, and collective voices of seasoned activists in the struggle against injustice.
Her advocacy also included work addressing sexual assault and domestic violence, including consulting and board service with a Massachusetts coalition committed to survivor advocacy and systemic reform.
Across these efforts, Graham has sought to move beyond public expressions of concern toward organized intervention, institutional accountability, and tangible change.
Education, Teaching, and Professional Scholarship
Graham served as an Adjunct Professor at Northeastern University and Babson College, bringing her extensive experience in corporate management, public policy, organizational leadership, and civil rights into higher education.
She earned a Master’s degree in Management from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), complementing a professional career devoted to institutional leadership, strategic management, and organizational effectiveness.
Family and Personal Legacy
Beyond her professional and public life, Graham is the mother of Tara and grandmother of Imani Janice, Miles Hughes, and Mason Turner. With another generation of her family on the way, she looks forward to becoming a great-grandmother.
Her commitment to preserving history, sharing experience, and documenting the struggles and achievements of earlier generations is also deeply personal. She understands the responsibility of leaving a record through which her grandchildren and those who follow can know not only the history of their family, but the world in which that family lived, worked, struggled, and contributed.
She has been blessed to be Mother to Tara, Grandmother to Imani Janice, Miles Hughes, and Mason Turner. And of this date, expecting to be a Great-GrandMother.
When Passion and Truth Find a Microphone: Voicing the “Black Truth” of the Matter
Graham’s broadcasting career began in 1985, when she was recruited to host the local portion of a nationwide 24-hour NAACP membership campaign in West Palm Beach, Florida. The experience revealed a natural ability to engage listeners around the political, social, and cultural issues shaping their lives.
Within a week, OUR COMMON GROUND took to the airwaves at WPOM-AM 1600. What began as a local radio program grew into a distinctive forum for serious conversation about race, politics, culture, public policy, community, and the continuing struggle for justice in America.
Graham brings to broadcasting the perspective of an executive, policy professional, organizational strategist, community advocate, and interviewer. Her style combines rigorous analysis with an ability to draw guests and audiences into conversations that are challenging, accessible, and deeply human.
The Sun Sentinel described her as having:
“A lyrical voice that blends with a razor-sharp analysis and friendly forthrightness.”
The late Lee Ivory, founder and editor of the Palm Beach Gazette, wrote of Graham and OUR COMMON GROUND:
“Janice Graham and her OUR COMMON GROUND talk show provide hope, courage and education to people who otherwise might give up on growing and struggling for a better understanding of the world beyond their lives. Her smooth, patient, yet challenging style sets this show apart.”
Ivory described OUR COMMON GROUND as the “respect yourself headquarters of Palm Beach County,” reflecting a relationship Graham cultivated with listeners through a simple but defining message: “I respect you.”
Murray Green, then Vice President and General Manager of WFLX-TV, the FOX affiliate in West Palm Beach, described Graham as:
“A talented producer and an outstanding interviewer . . . a pleasure to work with . . . [who] touches subject matter and topics of serious concern with a friendliness that audiences love.”
WFLX became the television home of OCG — The TV Show, extending the program’s conversations beyond radio for a brief time.
Journalism, Commentary and Community
Graham’s political views and cultural commentary have appeared in radio and television and in national and regional publications. Her radio journalism, The OUR COMMON GROUND® Commentary, was also published as a weekly newspaper column.
Over the years, OUR COMMON GROUND and Graham’s work have been recognized and covered by publications including the Palm Beach Post, Miami Herald, Miami Times, Amsterdam News, and other media outlets.
When Graham entered daily talk radio, she was among only four African American women in the country hosting programs devoted to politics, public affairs, and current events. She brought to the microphone a perspective still too rarely heard in American media: that of a Black woman examining power, policy, race, community, and democracy on her own terms.
Her broadcasting style has always resisted conversation for conversation’s sake. She asks difficult questions, listens carefully to the answers, and challenges guests and audiences to move beyond easy rhetoric. She speaks truth without surrendering either humanity or justified outrage.
That relationship created what became known simply as the OUR COMMON GROUND family—listeners, guests, thinkers, activists, scholars, artists, organizers, and community voices who returned broadcast after broadcast to think, question, learn, and engage.
The Work Continues
Today, OUR COMMON GROUND carries forward that tradition in a changing media environment. The microphone may have changed. The platforms may have changed. The need for informed, independent Black public conversation has not.
I’ll Be Listening For You
OUR COMMON GROUND continues to move beyond the rhetoric of problems toward the difficult work of understanding, accountability, engagement—and solutions.
OUR COMMON GROUND — smart and insightful people discourse . . . refining and finishing the genius within.
We testify to the fullness of Black life—our struggle and resistance, intellect and imagination, grief and joy, failures and victories, courage and creativity.
Memory becomes testimony.
Testimony becomes history.
And one generation speaks to the next.
Bearing witness is not simply looking backward. It requires us to recognize and document the history being made in our own time—and to leave an honest record for those who will come after us.
I’m Janice Graham, and I’ll be listening for you.
OUR COMMON GROUND with Janice Graham
Speaking Truth to Power and Ourselves