When everything shut down in March 2020, I had just returned from a production trip to Puerto Rico, where I had been working on BUT NEXT TIME, a podcast in which listeners travel with community advocates as they uncover hard-won lessons from people experiencing wildfires and storms, finding ways to forge a more just and equitable future.

Over the next year we found creative ways to continue the project, recording interviews remotely and devising homemade “studios” for our hosts that they could assemble in their closets, with fabric boxes and foam.

This project was one of several that grew out of RISE-HOME STORIES, a groundbreaking collaboration between multimedia storytellers and social justice advocates seeking to change our relationship to land, home, and race, by transforming the stories we tell about them.

I’m thankful to filmmaker Luisa Dantas for inviting me on this journey, and so thankful to this collective of people I had the pleasure of working with through creative and personal challenges as the pandemic unfolded around us.

Rose and Chrishelle with members of Movimiento Cultural de la Unión Indígena in Santa Rosa, California.