Month: May 2025

After a white police officer murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis, big banks announced plans to invest millions of dollars in smaller, Black-owned banks across the country to help those banks make more loans to small businesses in underserved communities. We'll hear from one South Carolina bank about how loan efforts are going. Also on the show: OpenAI is investing in hardware, and unions are receiving higher approval ratings.

From the BBC World Service: China might not be the first country you think of when it comes to the Arctic, but it’s staking a claim, calling itself a near-Arctic state. We'll hear how the Arctic has become a battleground for territory, trade and power. Plus, new research shows tropical forests are being lost at an alarming rate, but there’s currently no economic model that incentivizes farming communities to preserve them.

Millions of people across the country rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP for food assistance, including nearly 2 million people in Illinois. The program is fully funded by the federal government with states helping pay for administrative costs. But that could change. House Republicans are proposing an estimated $300 billion in cuts to SNAP spending and looking to states to fill the financial gaps. On top of that, they’re also looking to make working requirements for benefits steeper. Reset talks about what the impact of SNAP cuts could mean for Chicagoans with director of communications at the Greater Chicago Food Depository Man-Yee Lee mother and SNAP recipient Veronica Cox. For a full archive of Reset interviews, head over to wbez.org/reset.

This week, we hit the road to check out California’s Central Valley, where the future of agricultural innovation is taking shape. We visited a farm that’s piloting next-gen tools and a university research center that’s helping develop that tech. Today, we’re at an AgTEC Workforce graduation, a community college program in this region that helps upskill farm workers.