Grounded Futures

Amplifying Ideas and stories of everyday thriving

"It Matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories." ― Donna J. Haraway

Knowledge Sharing

Mentorship, Skill Sharing and Residency.

Our Shows

Grounded Futures hosts podcasts that focus on how we can thrive in our everyday.

emerging voices

A page dedicated to amplifying voices from below.

What is grounded Futures?

GROUNDED FUTURES is a media production and mentorship collaborative.

Our Mission

We are a platform for youth, women, and gender nonconforming folks voices to talk about every day thriving amid the ongoing disasters we’re collectively facing. We create content that is relevant to all of our lives — today and into the future. At GROUNDED FUTURES we are anchoring our work with youth because we believe that every young person deserves to thrive every day, and that solidarity begins with them.

A 2014 study revealed that voices with higher pitch—typically female voices—are perceived as less authoritative, or less trusted sources of information.

WE ARE CREATING SPACE FOR YOUTH AND GENDER-DIVERSE FOLKS TO TELL THEIR OWN STORIES.

Our Methodologies

WE ARE USING PODCASTING AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION AS A TOOL TO AMPLIFY VOICES FROM BELOW.

Youth Autonomy

As a global community we are currently facing unprecedented unrest and uncertainty for the future. Youth and young adults need more options, more creativity, more resources, and concrete support on how to traverse the often hard road ahead. Youth also deserve respectful engagement, one that is anchored in the belief that young folks can lead their own lives, and that they know what is needed to ensure a thriving life. Trusting youth is where we begin our conversations.

Feminisms

Podcasting has the potential to dismantle the tradition of male dominated stories within our media. Who has access to resources has typically driven who tells stories. Access to resources in multimedia production is a privilege that has, until recently, been reserved primarily for white cis-men. Podcasting creates the opportunity to thrive even without the support of major broadcasting companies and publishers, the format also lends itself to grassroots community storytelling.

To ensure the voices from below actually get a chance to thrive, we have created a mandate that focuses on mentorship and skills training, as well as providing a space to promote and distribute content. We believe that better representation in media arts and deep listening can help us push back against these ingrained biases.

Representation in our media has the potential to shift our social norms and power dynamics. We believe that provided with the technical skills, youth, women and gender-diverse folks can use their voices to create equity in our media content.

Our mentorships provide the opportunity to learn to create a podcast from concept through to post-production. Emerging artists will work alongside the Grounded Futures crew to gain technical skills. These skills carry inherent barriers in much of our society. Attending full-time school to gain these skills is disproportionally inaccessible to youth and women. And further, jobs that pay industry rates are still dominated by men. At Grounded Futures we pay all folks industry rates for their work.

Skill-sharing is our way to combat the patriarchal academic traditions that have always oppressed women and gender nonconforming folx. As well, to push against the dominant behaviours, which continues to marginalize youth voices as an afterthought. And then we want to go a step further and actually provide an online space that celebrates the learned skills and hosts the content created by our mentees.