Introducing our new podcast - Nicole Goldin and the development of the global youth wellbeing index

With our new youthpolicy podcast “Stirring up the grounds” we want to look beyond and behind the high-flying rhetorics of youth policies and politics. With our guests we discuss and explore which policies for young people work, which don’t, and why. For the second episode, Nicole Goldin joined us to look back at the development of USAID’s youth in development policy and to discuss the upcoming global youth well-being index.

With our new youthpolicy podcast “Stirring up the grounds” we want to look beyond and behind the high-flying rhetorics of youth policies and politics.

With our guests we discuss and explore—from diverse points of view—which policies for young people work, which don’t, and why.

For the first episode, published in April, the new UN Youth Envoy, Ahmad Alhendawi, joined us to look at his first work plan and to discuss how youth policy and the youth sector have to change.

For the second episode, launched today, Nicole Goldin joined us to look back at the development of USAID’s youth in development policy and to discuss the upcoming global youth well-being index.

Generally, our podcast has three sections:

• We want our listeners to be introduced to each guest professionally, that means their background in youth work and youth policy and their position and influence in the youth sector. Some time of the interview will hence be dedicated to the experience of our guests in the youth sector, their previous and current work and their visions and ideas.
• We also want our listeners to be introduced to each guest a little more personally, without loosing the connection to youth issues altogether. We will, for example, ask whether there any youth activist, from current or older times, that have left a lasting impression on our guests, or whether there is any song, any music, any quote, that was or is meaningful for the youth movement, globally or regionally, that our guests find especially powerful or thoughtful.
• And last but certainly not least, we want to, as the podcast teaser says, “discuss and explore—from diverse points of view—which policies for young people work, which don’t, and why.”

Each podcast episode will be specific in relating to the work and perspective of our guests, to their approach of dealing with youth issues, and to the dilemmas and challenges they are faced with in their work.

After editing and post-production, the podcast episodes will typically be between 40 and 60 minutes including intros, teasers, intermezzos and extros.

One final word about our approach: while we will not shy away from asking critical questions, and from asking questions critically, this will neither happen in the sense of interrogation nor with a sense of entitlement - we want these podcasts to be conversations that are relaxed and informative, calm and meaningful, entertaining and insightful. We will try and inject a little humour, invite our guests to do the same, and hope that it shows and shines through.

You can find the full overview of episodes at https://www.youthpolicy.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/31/, where we list, for every episode ever published, a selection of quotes from the podcast, all links mentioned in the podcast with a time-stamp, the original audio file and a link to the episode on iTunes.

You can also subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, which we warmly recommend, as it will allow you to not only enjoy the audio but also the artwork - and we do invest quite some time in making the artwork both informative and entertaining: “Stirring up the grounds” in iTunes.

Feel free to share your feedback, including suggestions for future interview and conversation partners: podcast@youthpolicy.org.

Photo credits 1 - the great header image on our podcast page is from Julia Svanqvist. Here are Julia’s Flickr profile and Julia’s blog. The iTunes artwork of our podcast uses another great image from Caro Willis - here is Caro’s Flickr profile.

Photo credits 2 - on this page, for the second and third image our thanks goes to Peter Brud and Hanna Urschler, both from the great youthmedia.eu community.

Featured Image Credit:el patojo via Compfight cc