From Colorado to Angola, this podcaster helps communities tell stories for change
Catherine de Medici Jaffee thinks well-told stories can promote positive action. So she shares podcasting tools with people who work to better the planet.
She then turned storytelling into a career and at first considered creating documentaries. But something felt off, she says: “The camera would come out, and the people stopped smiling.” Jaffee wondered whether her subjects would feel more comfortable speaking into a microphone than being filmed.
Her solution: podcasts, both less intimidating and more accessible. In 2017 she founded House of Pod, a nonprofit that helps would-be podcasters tell stories centered on their communities, which often lack a platform. A National Geographic Explorer, Jaffee recently worked with Angolan biologist and environmental anthropologist Kerllen Costa on Guardians of the River, part of the National Geographic Society’s Okavango Wilderness Project, which surveys
