Introducing Into the Mix Season 4

Ben & Jerry’s is back with another season of Into the Mix, a podcast about joy and justice. Hosted by Ashley C. Ford and produced with Vox Creative, this season will bring you stories of struggle and success from the everyday people at the heart of our greatest fights — from voting rights, to cannabis justice, to dignity for migrant workers — today.

Episode #1: Vermont Green FC: From Stadiums to Sustainability

When you think of sustainability and social justice, you might not think of a Vermont soccer team leading the charge. With the professional sports industry generating roughly 350 million tons of carbon every year, most pro teams don’t even put sustainability on the bench. But what if sports could be fun and score big for sustainability and social justice? Not as a tagline or a charitable add-on but structurally: in how it runs, how it travels, what it does with its waste, its relationship with the community it plays for, and what it asks of the people who wear its jersey. Vermont Green FC became an answer to those questions.

Patrick Inferna, co-founder of the Vermont Green FC, joins Ashley C. Ford on this episode of Into The Mix to talk about environmental justice, a compassionate masculinity, social justice, and what it looks like to build true community.

Episode #2: Marley Dias: Protecting Every Story

Welcome to Into The Mix, a Ben & Jerry’s podcast about joy and justice. 
This season, we’re swirling up inspiring stories from progressive heroes. People who didn’t set out to be activists, but found themselves stepping up for something bigger than themselves.

You'd think challenging the publishing industry would take the combined efforts of writers, publishers, and activists. Instead, one ten-year-old (now twenty one) sparked the conversation. Marley Dias was ten when she looked at the books being assigned in her school and noticed that girls who looked like her were almost nowhere to be found. She didn't wait for someone else to fix it. She launched #1000BlackGirlBooks — a campaign to collect and distribute books featuring Black girls as the main character — and what started as a three-month project became an international movement that put diverse books into the hands of children around the world. Now a Harvard graduate with her own books out, Marley has grown her work from fighting for representation to transforming the systems that prevented it in the first place.

Marley joins Ashley C. Ford on Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry's podcast to talk about representation, resistance, and what it looks like to rewrite the rules from the inside.

Episode #3: Brittney Griner: More Than A Game

Welcome to Into The Mix, a Ben & Jerry’s podcast about joy and justice. 
This season, we’re swirling up inspiring stories from progressive heroes. People who didn’t set out to be activists, but found themselves stepping up for something bigger than themselves.

You might not expect a basketball superstar to become a cannabis justice advocate. Brittney Griner spent nearly ten months detained in a Russian prison for traveling with cannabis oil in her luggage. She came home to a cannabis justice system that is still arresting and locking people up for possession of a substance now legal in nearly half the country. The same world that punished her for simply being who she is, in locker rooms long before she ever set foot in a foreign cell. She decided to fight harder.

Brittney, a WNBA champion, two-time Olympic gold medalist, and one of the most compelling voices in the fight for cannabis justice and the wrongfully incarcerated, joins Ashley C. Ford on Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry's podcast about joy and justice.

Join Ben & Jerry’s and The Last Prisoner Project in the fight for clemency for those who are incarcerated for cannabis. Call on your governor to grant clemency for those with cannabis-related convictions here. 

Episode 4: Kyle Mesteth: Building Community One Skateboard At A Time

You'd never expect skateboarding to be a growing movement amongst indigenous communities in the US. For generations, the story told about reservation life has been defined almost entirely by what's missing: by poverty rates, by unemployment, by absence of resources. What rarely makes the headline is what people are building on their own terms, with their own hands, for their own communities.

Kyle Mesteth grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation, sovereign Oglala Lakota land in so-called South Dakota. After experiencing devastating loss, he turned to the one thing that kept him going, skateboarding. What started with a borrowed building and a stack of donated skateboards became Ground Control: a skate park, a recording studio, a film set, a music stage, and a garden where Lakota youth can create, compete, and see themselves as the main characters of their own story.
Kyle joins Ashley C. Ford on Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry's podcast about joy and justice to talk about community, creativity, and what it looks like to build hope from the ground up.

Episode 5: Jose Antonio Vargas: Defining American

Jose Antonio Vargas built a renowned career, won a Pulitzer Prize and then chose to reveal his truth. It changed his life and his life’s work in ways he never expected.

Jose Antonio Vargas came to the United States from the Philippines at twelve years old. He grew up here, built a prolific career in journalism here, won a Pulitzer Prize here, and did all of it without documentation. In 2011, he decided to self-report as undocumented and it changed his life, but not in the ways he expected. Jose’s story is about what it costs to be seen as an immigrant, and why the stories we tell about immigration need reform.

The stakes couldn't be higher right now. How we talk about immigration matters– storytelling has always been a tool for immigrant rights, but in this climate, visibility can also mean vulnerability. Jose is calling on journalists to rethink how they report on immigration: humanity over othering, community over isolation.

Jose sits down with Ashley C. Ford on this episode to discuss the alarming state of human rights in America today and how urgently the way we talk about it and report on it needs to change.