POWERVIEWS
Listen :: Learn :: Liberate
PowerViews is the curated media and learning project of TruthWorks Network, created to bring important ideas, voices, knowledge, and resources into the OUR COMMON GROUND conversation.
Not every important voice needed to appear as an OCG guest. Not every important conversation originated at an OCG microphone. Across the expanding digital landscape were lectures, interviews, documentaries, speeches, YouTube presentations, book reviews, author conversations, historical materials, and cultural commentary that deserved our attention.
PowerViews was created to find them, gather them, and bring them into the room.
Knowledge Is Part of the Work
Education was central to the purpose of PowerViews.
We understood learning not as something confined to classrooms or universities, but as a lifelong responsibility—particularly for a people whose history, achievements and experiences have so often been omitted, distorted or interpreted for us by others.
PowerViews offered opportunities to recover history, explore culture, encounter new ideas and expand what we knew about ourselves and the world around us.
History was especially important. The project brought forward the people, movements, events and ideas that shaped Black life—from Africa and the African Diaspora to slavery, Reconstruction, resistance, migration, the Black freedom movements and contemporary struggles. Historical material allowed us not simply to remember what happened, but to ask how the past continues to operate in the present.
Culture mattered just as much. Literature, music, visual art, language, religion, film, and the traditions created across the Black world offered another way of understanding who we are, what we have survived, what we have created, and how we have imagined freedom.
And PowerViews was never limited to politics and the humanities. Science belonged in the conversation.
Medicine and health, technology, the environment, psychology, anthropology, archaeology, genetics, space, innovation, and emerging scientific discoveries all influence how we understand human life and our future. PowerViews sought material that could make those subjects accessible while also asking whose knowledge is recognized, whose discoveries are remembered, who benefits from scientific progress—and who bears its risks.
A lecture might lead us into ancient African history. A documentary might examine environmental racism, political struggle or an overlooked chapter of Black life. Selected audiobook recordings could introduce an important new book or author. TED Talks could open a doorway into science, technology, culture, history or a provocative new idea. Podcasts could bring us into conversations and investigations taking place beyond our own microphone.
PowerViews drew from documentaries, lectures, historical recordings, selected audiobook presentations, TED Talks, podcasts, interviews, speeches, book reviews, author conversations and other educational media—choosing the form that best carried the knowledge worth sharing.
The subject could change. The source could change. The medium could change.
The educational purpose did not.
PowerViews did not ask its audience simply to consume information. It invited us to watch, read, listen, question, investigate, and discuss—to encounter an idea, interrogate it, connect it to what we already knew, and decide what it might contribute to the work.
The common denominator was never the format.
It was value.
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Was there something here we ought to know?
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Something history had neglected to teach us?
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Something about our culture we should preserve?
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Something new science was revealing?
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Something that challenged what we thought we knew?
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Something that could enlarge our understanding of ourselves—or of the world?