Common Grounds: Conversations from The Roasting Room

The Coffee Roaster
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Some of the best conversations happen over coffee. Common Ground is a series of thoughtful, unhurried conversations with people shaping the life of Lincoln, Nebraska and beyond. Hosted by Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore, and presented by The Coffee Roaster. Learn more at coffeeroasterlnk.com

  1. Oct 21

    John Skretta: From Northeast High Classroom to LPS Superintendent

    Dr. John Skretta, Superintendent of Lincoln Public Schools, joins Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore in the Roasting Room for a conversation about mentoring, neighborhood schools, and what it means for a growing city to share a single school district.Skretta began his career teaching reading and English at Lincoln Northeast High School in 1995. He went on to lead Norris Public Schools and Educational Service Unit 6 before returning to LPS in 2024. He talks about the TeamMates mentoring program as it marks its 35th year, the centennial of Sheridan Elementary, and the range of focus programs and high school choices open to LPS students. He also explains the statutory provision that lets Lincoln grow as one city with one school district. Along the way, he credits the mentors who shaped him, including a personal note from Dr. Moore that he still thinks about decades later.Common Grounds: Conversations from The Roasting Room is recorded at The Coffee Roaster in Lincoln, Nebraska. These conversations are designed to help us better understand the people who share this place and the stories that shape it.

  2. Sep 18

    Lisa Guill: The Lives of Immigrants and Refugees, and Why Lincoln Welcomes

    Lisa Guill is Director of Communications and Development at the Asian Community & Cultural Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, and one of five editors of "The Lives of Immigrants and Refugees: Tales of Migration, Hope, Grief, and Finding Home in Nebraska," published by the University of Nebraska Press.The book collects thirty-one first-person essays by immigrants and refugees who now call Lincoln home. In this conversation with Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore, Lisa describes how an idea raised at a press conference in the spring of 2023 became a published anthology — the monthly workshops, the elders whose stories had to be captured by interview, the friends she describes asking again and again, and the editors paired one-to-one with writers who had never published anything before.The conversation widens from there. Lincoln is home to more than thirty thousand immigrants and refugees, roughly ten percent of the city. Lisa talks about what that has built: a resettlement infrastructure decades in the making, the New Americans Task Force, employers who bring English classes onto the factory floor, and a Four Star Certified Welcoming designation from Welcoming America that required evidence for eighty separate requirements. She also talks about what the visiting reviewers kept asking, and the answer that kept coming back — the people in Lincoln.Recorded in the roasting room at The Coffee Roaster.Common Grounds: Conversations from The Roasting Room is hosted by Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore and recorded at The Coffee Roaster in Lincoln, Nebraska.Asian Community & Cultural Center: https://www.lincolnasiancenter.orgLincoln/Lancaster County Welcoming Plan: https://welcominglnk.orgHelping Neighbors LNK: https://www.helpingneighborslnk.orgCultural Centers of Lincoln Collaborative: https://culturalcentersoflincolncollaborative.comThe book, from University of Nebraska Press: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9781496249647/the-lives-of-immigrants-and-refugees/Episode archive: https://coffeeroasterlnk.com/blogs/common-grounds

  3. Sep 8

    Albert Maxey on Coming to Lincoln in 1957 — Basketball, Police Work, and a Life in Art

    He was eighteen when he stepped off the train in Lincoln in 1957, recruited out of Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis to play for Jerry Bush. His new wife took one look at the stagecoach parked in the depot and asked what he had gotten them into. Albert Maxey never left. He flunked out, walked across the street to the police department because he needed a job, and stayed more than two decades — patrol, sergeant, detective, the FBI National Academy. He came back to Lincoln Public Schools as its first campus supervisor. He finished his degree in art education in 1973 and has been painting ever since. In this conversation with Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore, Maxey talks about arriving, about the Malone Center as the place he could find people who looked like him, about a night in Missouri when a restaurant refused to serve the team, and about his late wife JoAnn, who became the first Black member of the Lincoln school board and the first Black woman to serve in the Nebraska Legislature. Recorded in the roasting room at The Coffee Roaster in Lincoln, Nebraska.

  4. Sep 8

    Toni Rupe on Growing Junior Achievement Across Nebraska

    Toni Rupe is President and CEO of Junior Achievement of Lincoln, a nonprofit that brings financial literacy, work readiness, and entrepreneurship programs into K-12 classrooms through volunteers from the business community. In this conversation with Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore, Toni talks about the decision to extend Junior Achievement's reach across the rest of Nebraska rather than concentrate on Lincoln, why she believes rural students need economic education at least as much as urban ones, and how the organization traded a five-million-dollar building plan for a program that packs into a truck and sets up in a school gym. She also talks about the six years she spent on the Ceresco village board — including two as chair — and what running a small village taught her about leadership, sewer systems, and power lines. Randy served on the Junior Achievement board years ago, which gives the conversation a long view of how the organization has changed: from evening meetings at the Goodyear plant, to classroom curriculum packets, to online delivery and mobile simulations. Common Grounds: Conversations from The Roasting Room is recorded at The Coffee Roaster in Lincoln, Nebraska.

  5. Aug 21

    Steve Joel on Twelve Years Leading Lincoln Public Schools

    Steve Joel served as superintendent of Lincoln Public Schools from 2010 to 2022, the last twelve years of a 37-year superintendency that began in Kansas and ran through Beatrice and Grand Island. He is now Regional Director for the Central Region at the executive search firm McPherson & Jacobson. He came to Nebraska from Long Island in 1972 to play football at Doane, homesick enough that first fall that he planned to run away — a plan interrupted by a group of upperclassmen who took him snipe hunting. In this conversation, Steve talks with Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore about the fire that leveled the LPS district office at the end of his first year in Lincoln, the phrase "all means all" and where it came from, why he thinks Lincoln's schools outperform districts with similar demographics, and what he tells superintendents about listening to a community without being governed by its loudest voices. Marilyn describes the thirteen-year study in which she followed 254 Lincoln kindergartners through graduation — and what burned along with the district office. Common Grounds: Conversations from The Roasting Room is recorded at The Coffee Roaster in Lincoln, Nebraska.

  6. Jul 31

    Liz Ring Carlson on Authenticity, Soft Skills, and What Makes Lincoln Work

    Liz Ring Carlson has spent nearly thirty years in corporate communications, most of it in Lincoln. She is vice president of corporate communications and community relations at Ameritas, a founding board member of ECHO Collective, and a Kansas State history major who found her way into public relations more or less sideways.In this conversation with Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore, she talks about the peacock mug that reminds her to stop trying to fit in, the pandemic dinner her three kids staged to cheer her up, and the soft skills she looks for in interns that she says she cannot teach. She also makes a case for why Lincoln is an unusually easy place to make something happen — two degrees of separation, she calls it — and what the city needs to attend to as it grows.Recorded in the roasting room at The Coffee Roaster in Lincoln, Nebraska.ABOUT THE SHOWCommon Grounds: Conversations from The Roasting Room is an ongoing series of unhurried conversations with people whose work and ideas shape the life of Lincoln, Nebraska and our surrounding community. Hosted by Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore, recorded at The Coffee Roaster.Episode archive: https://coffeeroasterlnk.com/blogs/common-groundsListen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.#LizRingCarlson #LincolnNebraska #EchoCollective #Ameritas #CommonGroundsPodcast

  7. Jul 19

    Sarah Spitsen: From a Car Full of Candles to a College Classroom

    Sarah Spitsen has started five companies, lived out of her car for eight months to keep one of them alive, and later built a first-of-its-kind innovation and entrepreneurship degree from the ground up at Nebraska Wesleyan University. In this conversation, she talks with Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn Moore about founding Feya Candle Company, bringing TEDx to campus, her work with Make-A-Wish Nebraska and 1 Million Cups, and the idea she keeps coming back to: that in Lincoln, community tends to win out over competition. Recorded inside The Coffee Roaster in Lincoln, Nebraska.

  8. Jul 11

    Rick Alloway: A Life in Radio and the Art of Listening

    Rick Alloway has spent more than forty years teaching broadcasting at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and managing 90.3 KRNU, the university's student radio station — and this summer he is retiring. He joins Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn Moore to trace a career that started in a high school radio program at KFOR and carried him through the ad world and back to the university, where he signed the station on before dawn and taught generations of students to find their voice. The conversation moves from the decline of AM radio to the rise of podcasts and the storytellers they freed, and settles on the question underneath it all: in an age of bots, AI, and endless feeds, how do we know what to trust? It closes, fittingly, on a mug, a marriage, and a morning cup of coffee. Recorded at The Coffee Roaster in Lincoln, Nebraska

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Some of the best conversations happen over coffee. Common Ground is a series of thoughtful, unhurried conversations with people shaping the life of Lincoln, Nebraska and beyond. Hosted by Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore, and presented by The Coffee Roaster. Learn more at coffeeroasterlnk.com

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