Boston Community Podcast Lab

In keeping with its mission of fostering new and diverse journalistic talent, Futuro Media has developed the Community Podcast Lab, dedicated to developing, piloting, producing, and distributing new audio projects by emerging POC storytellers.

The Community Podcast Lab will be piloted in Boston. We’ve partnered with MASSCreative and WBUR to create a 15-week course focused on elevating the stories and skills of people of color from Boston. The Lab itself will be hosted out of the PRX Podcast Garage and will be totally unlike anything else currently available.

The Community Podcast Lab will stand apart from other podcast incubators in the depth of tutorials, information and skills acquired, duration of the course, the engagement of dedicated personnel and community organizations, and we will be providing a competitive attendance-based stipend for participants to ensure our course is accessible to all.  We want to focus on people with no prior experience in media, from underserved and underrepresented communities. Our goal is to provide them with the access, skills, and tools to be able to produce and distribute their own stories and to contribute meaningful pieces of history and culture from the perspective of people of color to the rich narrative of Boston life.

Why Boston?

One in five people in Boston are Latino. Of the 23 largest cities in the United States Boston has the 5th highest proportion of foreign born residents with over 25% of its population, according the 2000 census. Boston is a majority POC city with African Americans, Latinos, and Asians accounting for 22.8%, 19%, and 9.3%, respectively.  Yet this is not the Boston we are familiar with. While Irish and Italian immigrants dominated the 1900s, and remain large ethnic populations, the new and largely invisible face of Boston is that of brown and black people. We are committed to bringing the Community Podcast Lab to the city of Boston to shed light on the city’s underserved narratives around people of color and elevate those stories.

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Outtakes From the Lab

Listen to podcasts from past participants:

• Vilma Uribe’s FROM LOVERS TO HOMIES
• Bernadine Desanges’ BREAKING THE SILENCE 
• Maria Cristina Del Valle’s Distory: A Podcast About Life With Disabilities
• Paula Elliott’s WHEN A SCHOOL DOOR CLOSES

 

The Community Podcast Lab is in partnership with MASSCreative and WBUR and hosted by PRX Podcast Garage, and is made possible in part by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Heising-Simons Foundation.