Thee Quaker, Two Years In: Behind the Scenes of a Quaker Media Startup

Download the transcript

Jon Watts 

Hi Friends! It’s Jon Watts.

We released the first episode of Thee Quaker Podcast in May of 2023. That’s about 2 and a half years ago. 

If you’re a longtime listener, you may remember we did an episode in that first season about the bigger vision. 

Holly Baldwin
So I really resonate with the passage from Isaiah. Look, I’m doing a new thing. Can’t you see it? I’m making a way in the desert and I don’t mean to call.

And I don’t mean to call traditional Quaker spaces a desert, but I’m the kind of person that always hungers for, ooh, what if we could go a little bit deeper? What if we could awaken a stronger sense of the spirit in each other?

Jon Watts
That was Holly Baldwin, our very first clerk of the board, talking in that episode from Season 1 about our motivation for being a Quaker startup.

Anyway, we were dreaming of an organization with multiple projects and a whole creative team, working to bring Quakerism into the digital age in a deep way. And it wasn’t going to happen all at once.

You know… If the podcast did well, and the fundraising did well, maybe we could launch a second project, and maybe a third one, all in service of this vision of planting the seeds for a thriving future for the Religious Society of Friends.

We knew there would be a lot of challenges along the way. Maybe it would go slower than we planned. Maybe it wouldn’t happen at all—there were a lot of outside factors.

Quakers have a phrase—way opens—when you discern and plan and work hard, and then it goes better than you could have imagined. Well, I’m happy to say that way has opened for this leading, and you… our listeners, have been a big part of that.

So while we are in the thick of it, designing the Quaker Videos project, tweaking the Daily Quaker Message, and continuing to strive for excellence in the third year of the podcast, I thought I would take a moment and check-in. With you, our most important constituents. We make this show for you. Same with the Daily Quaker, and with Quaker Videos. So here’s our annual report. How are those projects going? Who are the people behind them? And how is truth faring with us? 

I spoke with each member of our creative team, and what they shared inspired me, challenged me, and even surprised me at times. Stay tuned.

Full disclosure, it is fundraising season… at the end of this mini-episode I’m going to ask you to consider visiting theequaker.org/support. Everything you’re about to hear was made possible by people like you, so your support makes a big difference.

Jon Watts

So we’re going to begin our journey behind the scenes of this podcast. Thee Quaker Podcast is about midway through its third season. We’ve published a total of 63 episodes,our audience is now a little over 11,000 listeners a month. Here’s one of those listeners:

Ayana Gray 

Listening to recent episodes, kind of going back even into the older episodes, it felt modern, it felt applicable, it felt accessible. Anytime you’re joining a new anything, and especially a new faith, it can feel really daunting. People are using words you don’t know, terms you don’t know, and you feel kind of silly asking questions. So I always look for the accessible points. And this was one of those. This podcast was one of those places where I’m like, Okay, I don’t I don’t feel silly for it, like wondering and asking questions. I feel like I’m being talked to. Like, no pun intended like a friend.

Jon Watts 

That was Ayana Gray, speaking with our podcast producer Zack Jackson. Now let’s hear a little bit from Zack.

Jon Watts
Hey Zack.

Zack Jackson
Hey Jon!

Jon Watts
How’s your Friday?

Zack Jackson
It’s going great. It’s chilly, but productive.

Jon Watts
Yeah. So just have a couple of check-in questions here for you. The first of which is just, you know, what do you like about doing this job? What do you like about being the podcast producer for the Quaker podcast?

Zack Jackson
I don’t know if people realize this, but I don’t know these stories before I start researching them and talking to people. So I’m learning these stories along with you all. I didn’t know who Benjamin Lay was until a couple of months ago, and now I reference him all the time! So I’m getting to learn all of these stories along with people. And just the idea that I get paid to meet interesting people and hear interesting stories and then get to tell them to you, I feel very much like a young kid who’s picking up cool rocks and then showing them to his parents along the way, and you all get to look at the cool rocks with me.

Jon Watts
So second question, you know, what? What are the challenges to doing this work?

Zack Jackson
I think the challenges are wrapped up in the things that I love about it. These episodes will have, I don’t know, sometimes up to six hours worth of interviews that I have done with incredibly interesting people, plus all of the reading and the research to synthesize what ends up being about 25 minutes worth of content that needs to be concise and simple and make sense and hold people’s attention, but it’s also a really good reminder to constantly be looking for what is essential, that it is always so much easier to talk for an hour than it is to concisely say something in just a minute or two.

Jon Watts
Let’s talk about your listeners. I wonder if you could lift up just sort of one instance of when you heard from a listener and it surprised you or inspired you.

Zack Jackson
Well, there was one listener that I have been trying to get in touch with who said that they were inspired to find the podcast through a dream. And if you’re listening to this, please respond to my email, because I need to know what that dream was. 

But I’m thinking of this other message that I got from someone who said that they have yet to find a sort of spiritual community because they work on Sunday mornings, and I’m going to quote from them, “So being able to tune into an episode of this show has been one of the ways that I’ve helped develop my one person congregation in a hidden earbud at my work”, and I love the idea that somebody out there has this ritual that on a Sunday morning at work, they hide an ear bud in one of their ears, and they listen to this episode and to them, this is a spiritual experience. It may be crafted and edited and taken 40 hours to put together, but it is Spirit led, and that really kind of changes the way that I think about organizing these episodes as well. This is 30 minutes of worship as well as it is 30 minutes of storytelling and of exploration and of fun and music and whatever else that might be.

Jon Watts 

Ok so next let’s head over to our second, the Daily Quaker Message. Every day we send a quote or inspirational message or snippet of wisdom from a Quaker, to thousands of inboxes across the world.  The quotes range from historic to contemporary, and each month there is a new theme.

This project was launched last year, so it’s just beginning its second year. We now have almost 4 thousand subscribers from all over the world, and a majority of our readers open the email every day. One of them recently reached out, and I’ll read what they said. This is from Nicole in Scotland who is a reader of the Daily Quaker Message:

“I discovered The Daily Quaker Message as I was starting to fully take the next steps in my spiritual journey – The Daily Quaker really helped me find a sense of community and also a way to actually connect with my beliefs in a tangible way – it helped me feel confident enough to go to local meetings knowing that there were other people who cared about the same issues.”

Here’s my conversation with Maeve Sutherland, the editor of the Daily Quaker:

Maeve Sutherland

Hey, Jon.

Jon Watts

Maeve. Hi! Tell me a little about your job editing the Daily Quaker Message. What do you like about that work? 

Maeve Sutherland
Well, it’s year two, as you said, of this project, and I just am excited every time it’s time for me to research another theme, and when it’s time for me to go to the library to do that online research, to talk to friends, I just know I’m going to encounter this beautiful kaleidoscope of Quaker voices across centuries, and I am right there with the readers on the spiritual Journey. Right? I’m learning every month, and I can’t imagine a better job for my own spiritual growth than this one. 

Technology has brought us to this place of magic. It’s magic, and it’s easy to lose sight of that because we have our phones in our pockets, but it’s almost mystical that when I choose a piece of Quaker wisdom to share, there’s this community of beloved strangers all over the world who are reading that message on the very same day, and it’s helping them with their orientation towards Spirit and who knows what ripple effects that’s having in the world? It’s often invisible to me. Sometimes I get little love notes, which I really appreciate, but it’s making a real impact in the world. 

Every day, I hear a lot from readers who take the daily Quaker as sort of a. Grounding and a springboard. That’s not two opposite things. You know? They’ll take it to their worship sharing, their meeting for worship, their meeting for business, and they’ll say, let’s just read this piece of Quaker wisdom and have a little worship around it before we begin. There’s even a high school Quakerism class that starts every class with a daily Quaker message as a journal prompt. 

And probably the most powerful thing a reader has said to me about how the Daily Quaker has touched them is there’s a reader who had a really serious medical event that left her disabled, and after the event, she was feeling a lot of despair, and she said having this daily Quaker practice every morning has really helped her reorient towards spirit, reorient toward gratitude, and it really helps her through that difficult time.

Jon Watts 

Finally, we take you to our newest project, Quaker Videos. This project just launched last month, and we’re still working on the basic design and workflow, but we’ve already released some powerful videos thanks to our talented filmmakers Ellie Walton and Michale Candelori. Let’s start with Michael.

Michael Candelori

I probably say the biggest challenge is that we’re trying to reach a bunch of audiences here. We’re trying to speak to people who are well versed in Quakerism, who live it and experience it every day. We’re trying to reach Quakers who maybe are not quite as connected to the global community and don’t maybe grasp all of what the Quaker world is. And we’re also trying to speak to folks who are seekers or don’t even realize that they’re seekers, folks who may not have been inclined to ask questions about Quakers, but then find themselves in the receiving end of our content, and hopefully it does something to further their curiosity and push them into a process of learning more about the kind of wild, in my view, wild and expansive world of Quakers.

Ellie Walton

I think often, not all Quakers is a generalization, but there’s a real humility. And I think it was even in Michael’s amazing film about, like, you know, hiding, don’t hide your light under a bushel. There’s a sense of, like, sometimes not wanting to have the spotlight. And yet, all of this incredible work is happening in by people just living out these values on it day to day. But that doesn’t always get amplified. I think the challenge as a filmmaker of really capturing some of that quiet resistance too has been really beautiful. We are so bombarded in the digital space by a lot of negativity and conflict, and I feel like we all just are craving something that’s really about how people are showing up for one another right now. I think people want to feel connected, and I think in the digital space, is how, how so many people are finding stories right now. 

Michael Candelori

It’s just so exciting to watch the comment sections erupt underneath some of our posts, and just to watch the conversation that happens among Quakers, among non-friends, and it’s happening in the context of our media project is really just energizing, and it keeps making me push harder to create content that furthers that conversation more. As you said, Quaker video project is very new. We’re in the seventh or eighth week of our first season, but when I go around and speak to people, they know Thee Quaker Podcast, they know the Daily Quaker Message, and their belief in the power of those projects has helped us bootstrap the video project, because people recognize already that we’re a media organization that’s focused on the right things and doing things in a friendly way. And so while I wait for our video project to bring in more feedback and more supporters. I’m grateful that we can lean on the infrastructure that exists already because of the other media we’ve already been publishing.

Jon Watts 

Friends, thank you so much for being on this journey with us. The 21st century is full of serious challenges, and great potential. Now is not the time to hide our light under a bushel. Let’s be the bold, courageous truth tellers that we are called to, and that our spiritual ancestors equipped us to be.

I’d like to ask that you please consider supporting our work. All of these projects cost money, and of course we are still in the startup phase. Help us make a statement about the importance of Quakerism in the age of the internet, and go to theequaker.org/support.

Here’s what our creative team said when I asked why our mission is worth supporting:

Zack Jackson

And so I think what the work of Thee Quaker is doing is taking this wisdom that has been forged through fire, and putting it in a format that people can absorb more easily: through video, through podcast, through these daily meditations. So I think that work is more essential now than ever that we have a whole generation of spiritual seekers who are looking for wisdom and just don’t know where to find us.

Ellie Walton

That’s what gives me most fire, because anytime I’m on edge of something and it feels really hard, like no we can create, like, really thoughtful, intentional, beautiful stories that are inspiring and that connect to people who are really seeking some kind of sense of like meaning right now.

Maeve Sutherland

Thee Quaker project is meeting people where they are, which is online, and we have this expertise. This is our mission, and we’re the organization who is most prepared to usher Quakerism into the future. And, you know, invest in that longevity of spirituality in our culture. And we just, we just all need to decide that this is worth investing in.

Michael Candelori

Every dollar that goes into Thee Quaker, you will hear it and see it and like it and share it, hopefully. And that, I think sort of is it’s beyond transparency. We’re not just telling you what we’re doing with the money we raise. We’re giving it back to you, and I hope that is a meaningful exchange that will keep people supporting us.

Jon Watts

You can make a difference in our work. That is, you can make a difference in how Quakerism is discovered, and how it’s practiced, for generations to come. Just go to TheeQuaker.org/support. That’s TheeQuaker.org and hit the button that says “donate”.  We are a 501(c)3 so all contributions are tax deductible. Thank you.

Jon Watts

This special episode of Thee Quaker Podcast was recorded by me, Jon Watts, and edited by Zack Jackson. It was mixed and mastered by Zack Jackson. I made the music. Special thanks for everything to our creative team… Maeve Sutherland, Michael Candelori, Ellie Walton, and Zack Jackson.

Just a reminder the show is taking a few weeks off for winter break. We’ll be back in your feed January 13. 

Hosted by Jon Watts.

Original music and sound design by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

Mixed and mastered by Zack Jackson.

Supported by listeners like you (thank you!!)