Our first guest today is Lauren Mucciolo, Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker and producer of Born Poor, a PBS Frontline documentary.
Her goal with the project: To show authentic stories of being poor in America; of growing up poor; of being generationally poor.
Lauren and her team followed people over 14 years to bring this project to life. They built relationships at first with the children of the documentary, maintaining that bond through their teen and adult years.
Up close, Lauren saw the trauma of childhood poverty and the impact of ongoing stress.
“We really focus a lot on what the kids saw and felt and experienced and feared, but the context around that is what the parents were going through.”
Being embedded with these families showed support at the community, family, and neighbor level, but Lauren hopes Born Poor will get people talking about the “tremendous amount of dysfunction” at the state and federal levels.
Even after almost a decade and a half, this project isn’t done yet. Lauren and her team are going to keep checking in with the families as long as they are open to the project.
Congratulations to Lauren and team on this amazing effort, and thank you for uplifting these families’ voices and experiences of poverty in America.
We then welcome Kasumi Quinlan, co-founder and CEO of Lemontree. This platform addresses the problem of invisible hunger that impacts millions of this country. It looks like skipped meals, rationed groceries, and searches for food between paychecks.
Their solution is simple: help people get food assistance where they are. Lemontree doesn’t require smartphones, app downloads, or technical fluency. They’re building out the public health infrastructure around food insecurity one text message at a time.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kasumi was working to match volunteers to food pantries to deliver groceries during the lockdown. What she and her team found was shocking: many people were volunteering and asking if they could trade their volunteer hours for food. The folks needing help didn’t know how to get it, so they answered the call for volunteers to try to get their foot in the door.
“There are more food pantries in the U.S. than there are McDonald’s. So why aren’t people taking that help?”
The answer to that question is simple. People don’t know how to access the resources.
Through Lemontree, Kasumi and her team brainstormed how to get folks the best information for them. What started with Kasumi giving out her personal phone number and helping callers with research is now a full-scale operation that utilizes AI, integrates feedback from users, and exists in 11 regions.
And all this without requiring people to download an app. It’s done via text message. Over a million families to date have used this service to access the resources in their area. Just like a tree, the service is branching out organically from their home base of New York City.
“I think that makes a big difference for people to know that somebody else is thinking about them.”
Kasumi urges our listeners to engage in acts of kindness through volunteerism and building community so that we can strengthen our social safety nets.
We close the show by talking to our co-host David Ambroz about the project he has been working on for nearly 20 years. He lives in LA, and he has secured funding for a community college to create a dorm building for foster youth transitioning out of care.
“Instead of emancipating these kids into homelessness or poverty, we can emancipate them into a two-year education, a vocational skill, a transfer degree. We could actually give them the tools they need to thrive.”
The importance of a brick-and-mortar dorm and the bond that secured its funding is that this is not one-time use. It is not a voucher. It is a permanent fixture that will house thousands of young people.
David urges other states to consider building these dorms to help transitional youth land on their feet instead of aging them out of foster care with nowhere to go.
Television producer
Lauren Mucciolo has made more than a dozen broadcast and digital documentary films for PBS Frontline, many of which are co-productions with British broadcasters that have aired on Channel 4 and BBC’s Panorama, Storyville and current affairs series. In 2025 she produced two documentaries for Frontline just nominated for News and Documentary Emmy Awards -- “Born Poor,” which opened Frontline’s 2025-26 season, and "Alaska's Vanishing Native Villages," which takes viewers to the most remote corners of Alaska to see the Native villages fighting for their survival against climate change.
Mucciolo is a seven-time Emmy nominee who has won two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards and a Best Director award from the Royal Television Society, among other honors. Her room-scale virtual reality film “After Solitary” -- lauded for pushing VR storytelling and demonstrating the potential for VR in journalism -- received an ONA award for storytelling innovation and a South by Southwest Film Festival Jury Prize.
Since 2019, she has been the Executive Producer of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism, a student-powered newsroom that produces national multimedia investigations in partnership with professional newsrooms, such as “Lethal Restraint,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist with The Associated Press, Frontline and the University of Maryland.
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Executive Director, Lemontree
Kasumi is the Co-Founder and Executive Director/CEO of Lemontree. She began her journey at Lemontree in a community engagement role, where she spent thousands of hours working directly with families. Kasumi helped usher Lemontree through a pivotal transformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2023, she became Executive Director. Under her leadership, the organization has grown from a small direct service program to a national platform that has connected over 900,000+ families to food, using AI and real-time feedback to modernize the safety net. Kasumi is an alum of Fast Forward’s Tech Nonprofit Accelerator and was named one of Hunter College’s 40 Under 40 in NYC Food Policy. She leads a team of technologists, organizers, and optimists working to reshape food access with data and dignity.
Outside of work, Kasumi spends a lot of time thinking about food (shocker). She loves finding new recipes, grocery shopping, and learning about our food systems. She is, technically, an award-winning chef (according to the NYC Parks Department).
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