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Meet the change leaders: Ken Powley

Ken Powley
Team Democracy
David L. Nevins
By David L. NevinsOct 03, 2024
David L. Nevins
David L. Nevins serves as publisher of The Fulcrum. Additionally, Nevins serves as co-founder and Board Chairman of the Bridge Alliance. Nevins brings business acumen, vision and a tireless this-must-and-can-be-done zeal to the burgeoning movement to bridge divides to transform the political process. As a business leader, Nevins excels at building bridges between people and organizations from the right, left and center for civilized conversation and then action. He co-founded the Bridge Alliance because, as he says, “No matter how well managed and how well funded anyone organization is, significant political reform will not happen without an alliance to further collaborative interactions. Together we can and will raise the collective impact of all.” He is a member of the Aspen Institute Society of Fellows, with a focus on the Aspen Rodel Fellowship in Public Leadership, he established and continues to work with The Nevins Democracy Leaders program at Penn State University. Nevins graduated with honors in economics from Penn State in 1969 and received an M.B.A. in finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971.
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Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.

Ken Powley and Chris Newlon founded Team Democracy in early 2021. Its signature initiative is the nonpartisan Safe and Fair Election Pledge. The pledge is designed to create an important piece of common ground where Americans — including their elected representatives — can join together from opposite sides of the aisle in committing themselves to protecting the most essential guardrails of American democracy: safe and fair elections, and the peaceful transfer of power.

One of Team Democracy’s newer projects is the RAFT for America Challenge. Outfitters across the country offered pairs of participants, no matter what their differences, the opportunity to demonstrate that there is much more that unites us than divides us, and that we always do better by pulling together than by pulling apart. RAFT for America participants were treated to a transformative personal adventure in one of the most exciting and pristine places on earth!

Powley retired from a 46-year career at the helm of his whitewater rafting company to found Team Democracy. Powley brings a love of entrepreneurship and team building to his work in the nonprofit world, where, as he says, “I’ve come to think of democracy as being mainly a verb.” He and his wife, Penny, are proud parents of three. Of their six grandchildren, three called Kyiv, Ukraine, home until they were evacuated in the face of the Russian invasion. T

Powley, who lives in Mountain Top, Pa., prefers smaller government, reasonably limited regulation and lower taxes.

I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Powley for the CityBiz “Meet the Change Leaders” series. Watch to learn the full extent of his democracy reform work:

- YouTubewww.youtube.com


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An opinion essay exploring viewpoint diversity, academic freedom, political polarization, and why universities should encourage intellectual diversity to strengthen higher education and American democracy.

QunicaStudio / Getty Images

Viewpoint Diversity at Work and Play

I suspected that my answer to the gentle but surprisingly direct query about my politics would have a bearing on my long-term prospects to be welcomed at the dog park. Picking up on my questioner’s left-of-center sensibilities, I’d hoped my confession about being Strom Thurmond’s illegitimate child would not kill my chances to be welcomed back and deny Sadie, my ten-year-old beagle-dachshund pup, the opportunity to frolic with the other people’s left-leaning canines.

I passed the entrance exam. But I wasn’t surprised to learn that other first-time dog park visitors had not, and quickly concluded that self-deportation was in their best interest.

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The Power of Eating Together

The Varga family in 1986, when Michael Varga (top row, center) returned to the US after a Foreign Service Assignment.

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The Power of Eating Together

My mother loved to cook. She was most at home in her kitchen. As an Italian, she had grown up savoring a variety of Italian specialties, from lasagna to veal scaloppini to tiramisu. Our family was spoiled by always enjoying flavorful meals together. My father, of Hungarian descent, was a meat-and-potatoes man, but he loved that his wife learned to make goulash for him. Each night, my dad would arrive home from work just before 5 o’clock. He would have a whiskey sour and read the afternoon newspaper (The Philadelphia Bulletin) in his recliner, while we kids finished up our homework or were outside playing catch or “run the bases” with the neighbors’ children. And promptly at 5:30, my mom would ring a bell from the front stoop of our house. We, kids, filed inside to wash our hands and take our places at the kitchen table to break bread together.

Since my tongue cancer diagnosis in 2020 and the subsequent radiation treatments that have taken away my ability to eat solid food or taste anything, I spend a lot of time remembering how powerful food can be in bringing people together. Being a “companion” to someone means, etymologically (from Latin), sharing bread together.

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Jonah Goldberg: The right and left need to control the radicals in their own parties

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(Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images/TNS)

Jonah Goldberg: The right and left need to control the radicals in their own parties

It’s starting to sound like we’re in the middle of the Spanish Civil War.

For those of you who forgot, the Spanish Civil War was the great prequel to World War II, in which the combatants were proxies for the Communists and the Fascists. Stalin’s Soviet Union supported the former, Hitler’s Germany aided the latter.

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The Reward — Angela and James: An American Dynasty

Ring–Fitzgerald Homestead, Will County (1987). A house still true to its original form, carrying forward the Rings’ steadiness, aspiration, and good citizenship across five generations.

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The Reward — Angela and James: An American Dynasty

They got an early start; the morning light came on fast. The Ring siblings were headed to the Joliet depot with young Angela in tow — the same depot where Lincoln’s funeral train had passed in silence thirty years earlier. Now they were bound for the White City, forty miles northeast. The Columbian Exposition was a turning point for both Angela and America. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, pitched just outside the fairgrounds, rivaled the Exhibition itself.

One photograph captured it all. Taken in a fairground photo booth, the Ring siblings stood in their summer clothes, huddled around eleven-year-old Angela. Their faces were bright and open — a single moment preserved in time. Determined to outshine the 1889 Paris Exhibition and its Eiffel Tower, Chicago answered with George Ferris’s great wheel. At night, the city glowed, outlined in electric white light.

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