Alright, it worked. It worked, this little voice memo straight into the podcast feed boom. Who needs a studio and engineers? Well sometimes we do, but this is quick and dirty. So Hi, it's Barretonday again and welcome to how the citizen Ish, at least this week of Citizen Stories, citizen ing stories. So you heard the launch uh announcement in the previous item in the feed Today Monday, April fourteenth, we launched the first actual story and it's a topic
near and dear to my heart. It's libraries. I have a an audio that you'll hear that sets up the story and then yeah, you're gonna hear the story of the Innovator and Residence program at Cosst Library in Memphis, Tennessee, and a woman named na Esco uh who took a library that we think of as a quiet place, a place to consume stories, and helped turn it into a much louder place, uh, place for people to tell their
own story or come together to do so. And this is very Black America whose stories are being erased right now. So find these stories on my Instagram. Baratunde on how the citizen Instagram spelled like that. On the Citizens Guide that's John Alexander, and you can also find them on my LinkedIn or John's LinkedIn. All of that out I'll have in the show notes on this episode, and you can sign up to get the daily emails about this as well as the summary of what we all did together.
If you go to stories dot howdocitizen dot com right at the tone, the tariff will be five jillion percent boop. Enjoy the audio of these videos make some noise. If you love your local library, they have palaces for the people, places where democracy is actually an action truly open to everyone. I've even served on the board of the Brooklyn Public Library,
That's how much I love them. So when I think of citizen as a verb and where we citizen, libraries are literally first on the list, which is why I want to share this story first, the story of a library in Memphis, Tennessee, that is showing up for the people.
When you think of library, you think of books, librarians somewhere quiet. This is not that library. My name is na Esco and I am the innovator in residence for podcasts programming at Kasid Library, a woman who at Memphis is majority African American. Right, we do have high poverty rates as well. So COSCID is positioned in downtown Memphis where a lot of the poverty is going on. This is a place for innovation. So you'll come and see my podcast studio. On the opposite side of me, you
will see the Fatiography videography lab. There is an entire performance space. Oftentimes you hear patron say, I didn't know a library had things like this, So that one thing that they thought that they could never do or participate in it is available and no cost to them. Here. I mean that just opens the door for someone to
really create a pathway. We live in an era right now when a lot of people are being silenced and I'm so proud to really sit down mentor someone and they actually feel like they can say what they really want to say.