Episode description

Solving community problems can begin with a simple, common goal of being a good neighbor. Deep human relationships with people make the hard conversations—where we don’t agree—possible. Finding common ground with different backgrounds can be hard, but focusing on caring for your neighbors strengthens communities and personal relationships alike.

Personal stories are an incredibly powerful tool for community building. Stories are the ways we make sense of life. When you tell someone your story, they stop seeing you as an issue or an enemy, and look at you as a person. This shared humanity lets us see the world through others’ perspectives, which is critical to being a good neighbor. 

Future Hindsight and Shelter in Place share a common goal: to help us realize our best selves. Shelter in Place focuses on the microscale through personal stories and motivation. Future Hindsight hopes to inspire listeners go from the personal to get engaged on the community level and help realize our society’s full potential.

Many whose life has been overturned by the pandemic are struggling — yet the Shelter in Place team’s response was not simply to flee, but to create. Narrated by Laura Joyce Davis, Shelter in Place  is the podcast that follows their travels — physical and emotional — through the pandemic. Through open-hearted storytelling and with an inviting voice, Laura gives us the agency to face the day, with a friend.

She writes to explore the triumph of the human spirit in a broken world. A Fulbright scholar, Laura also won the Poets & Writers Exchange Award, earned Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices nominations for fiction, and was a finalist for WNYC’s podcast accelerator. In previous lives, she was a running coach, a capella singer, and scholarship athlete.

Laura's writing has often intertwined with nonprofit work. She writes for Micro Business Mentors, a nonprofit providing entrepreneurial loans and training in developing countries. As a Fulbright scholar to the Philippines in 2010, Laura spent a year working with sex trafficking survivors, whose courage in the face of corrosive injustice inspired her novel, which won the 2013 California Writers Exchange Award.

You can follow her on Twitter @LauraJoyceDavis.