Seniors and podcasts: the Continuum Foundation launches the Voice of Seniors project
How do you turn a memory, a story from your hometown or decades of professional experience into a podcast that people will actually want to listen to? And how do you teach those skills to people who work with seniors every day?
This is the idea behind Voice of Seniors, an international Erasmus+ project in which the Continuum Foundation is responsible for one of the key parts of the whole undertaking: training educators in podcast production.
The idea is simple, but it works as a cascade. First, during a series of 6 international workshops, educators from several European countries learn the entire podcast production process – from the first idea to publication. They then return to their organisations and pass those skills on to seniors. Ultimately, the microphones are meant to end up in the hands of older people themselves, allowing them to tell their own stories, share their knowledge and speak up on matters that are important to their communities.
Voice of Seniors therefore does not see seniors simply as recipients of digital education. The aim is to help them become creators themselves. The project seeks to bridge the digital gap while making use of something that cannot be learned from a textbook: knowledge and experience accumulated over decades.
From an idea to a finished podcast
The training programme consists of 6 stages. Participants learn how to choose and evaluate podcast ideas, prepare content and scripts, use AI tools, work with microphones and recording software, edit audio, create video podcasts, and publish and promote the finished material.
The workshops take place in different European cities and are above all practical. Instead of hours of lectures, there are microphones, headphones, recording exercises, conversations, mistakes and corrections. Podcasting is difficult to learn from slides alone – you simply have to start doing it.
The podcasting part of the training is designed and led by Ola Stanisławska and Piotr Stanisławski, members of the Continuum Foundation’s board.
Podcasting has been their field for years. They are the creators of the Crazy Nauka podcast, which won the 2023 Podcast of the Year award in the “Science, Education and Technology” category. In 2024 they also received the Radio ZET Andrzej Woyciechowski Award for their online work. They also produce two series for Polish Radio (Polskie Radio): “Laboratorium zbrodni” and “Sekcja teorii spiskowych”.
In Voice of Seniors, however, they are using this experience in a slightly different way. This time the goal is not to produce another podcast of their own, but to show others how to create one independently – and how to then teach the same skills to seniors.
That is the main goal of the training part of the project: to build a European group of educators who know not only how to operate a microphone or editing software, but above all how to help older people find their own subject, their own way of telling a story and their own voice.
The Voice of Seniors project is co-funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ programme.
