In winter of 2020 the Never Too Late team began to plan an event to mark Youth In Care Day in Ontario, a day set to celebrate, advocate and connect young people in and from the child welfare system which falls on May 14th—5/14 it is often called. Calls for a coffee house/art exhibit event led us to checking out venues and beginning to think about hosts and acts. At the same time, we had begun to explore the medium of podcasting as a way to make “educational” clips for the very select group of people who were attending our training series “Training for Humans, thinking of becoming permanency for a young person who had aged out of care.
These 2 worlds collided in March and April of 2020, when we had to end our in person podcasting sessions for our trainings and our dreams of an event space were quashed. But riding on the high of how much we had enjoyed our first taste of podcasting, and wanting to not let go of having some kind of way to acknowledge 5/14 we decided that this was our chance—to explore using podcasting in a different way—to focus on giving people the chance to talk about how this life changing event, the pandemic, was impacting on them, the good, the bad and the ugly, all first voice experts of the the child welfare system. We were focused on the telling, on letting people get a chance to talk about what this time was like for them; the triumphs and tribulations, the challenges and celebrations. In the past, we had engaged outside “help” to record and produce out podcasts but this time we decided to do it all in house to see if we now could do it ourselves.
#14 Stories was that podcast, released on May 14, 2020 it has been heard over 1000 times throughout the world and at NTL podcasting became something that we now felt very comfortable engaging in—recording, editing, and producing a number of those educational pieces over 2020. In early 2021, through the generosity of FRAYME and their Great Big Stories Grant we were given an opportunity that doesn’t often happen—to look back at the making of #14 Stories, to reflect on how participating in that podcast felt, the impacts on participants even today, and what they have learned or lessons they have for others doing this work.
And then we got to do more. We got to ask people, youth with lived experience of child welfare who had NOT participated in the original podcast how it felt the first time they heard these stories, what resonated for them and why and why they decided to be part of this new 14 Stories production. 7 new participants, 7 past participants—14 (more) stories.
