Garden of Love, DTES (GOLD) Podcast: Stories of Indigenous Cultural Reconnection and Healing from the Downtown Eastside

Holding Space and Uya’am Gaak Cultural Society are seeking funding to produce six episodes of our integrated knowledge translation project, a podcast highlighting the work and impact of Elder Rhonda Stephens and Uya’am Gaak Cultural Society to foster cultural and spiritual reconnection among Indigenous peoples living in and around Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. This project is currently in its pilot phase, with the first four episodes of the podcast telling stories from the V6A Community Garden focused on resilience, strength, and healing from the land, provisionally titled Garden of Love, DTES (GOLD) Podcast. The REACH award will help us to widen the scope of the podcast to include land-based healing activities currently run by Uya’am Gaak and to continue to engage research users with whom we already work closely. The podcast directly engages research users in the planning, recording, and production phases. As the podcast is currently structured as a limited four-part series due to budget constraints, we are seeking funding to transform the podcast into a regularly scheduled output for disseminating research findings in the form of stories, interviews, poetry, music, and field recordings.