Listen to the experts. Talk amongst yourselves.
Local 27 and your Seattle Fire Fighters HealthCare Trust (SFFHCT) are proud to announce a new podcast with discussions on topics that directly affect our membership. The new podcast called, “Listen Up L27,” will start by featuring stories on health and wellness, and in the future will cover retirement, disability and other topics affecting L27 members and the fire service.
The podcast quietly launched in September because it was also suicide prevention awareness month and the first few episodes are specifically focused on mental health topics. The goal is to deliver rich, audio content on the go for a workforce that is always in motion.
From video to audio
The HealthCare Trust had been interested in creating videos regarding health & wellness topics. To this end, they worked with their partner agency, The Rhizome Collaborative, to help script, interview and record Dr. Marcie Hamrick and Dr. Beth Murphy at Station 2 in Belltown, Seattle. But when Rhizome began recording, both the founder Jen Pennington and videographer Ted Grudowski quickly realized the depth and intensity of the interviews would not make for an easy, quick video and knew they were heading into podcast territory.
“The ease and deep conversation between these doctors was so great, it would have been a crime to cut it into a bunch of little pieces. I mean you just can’t sum up mental health topics in any meaningful way in a video that’s two minutes or less. These doctors are natural teachers and there’s so much rich discussion to learn from,” Pennington said. She then brought this up with the Trust and it was agreed, that instead of a few small videos, they had enough content to do more episodes, each under 10 minutes. Long enough to get engaged with the material, but short enough not to lose interest.
“Delivering podcast content meets our members where they’re at. They can listen to it in the gym, on their commute, in the station, or anywhere else.”
tony savelli, Executive Board director
The new podcast platform also means topics can be expanded to include retirement, medical benefits, disability and basically any topics pertinent to the health, safety, and wellbeing of members. Tony Savelli, the vice chair of the HealthCare Trust and a director on the Executive board said, “delivering podcast content meets our members where they are at. They can listen to it in the gym, on their commute, in the station, or anywhere else.” The group is hoping to drop at least two podcasts per month. Stay tuned.