Exclusive: A Visit to the Third Place
We go behind the scenes of the all new Third Coast experience, plus an exclusive sneak peek at the schedule
Today kicks off “Third Place,” a two-week virtual experience from the team behind the Third Coast Conference. For the uninitiated, the Third Coast Conference in Chicago has long been hailed as the radio/podcast industry’s premiere event — a place to be inspired, to build a network of peers, and to honor ambitious audio. But if everything about this year’s Third Place event feels different, that’s on purpose. We spoke with Program Director Emily Kennedy and Executive Director Shirley Alfaro, about what to expect at this year’s virtual event.
Read to the end of the story for an exclusive preview of what’s coming next.
It would have been easy for you to cancel this year’s Third Coast event, or to pull back significantly. Instead, you have “reimagined” the experience entirely. Can you outline some of those changes and explain what influenced this new approach?
Kennedy: We know that a lot of folks in our community are struggling this year, and we wanted to do something that felt meaningful, but not a one-to-one translation of our in-person programming. We created Third Place as an interrogation of this moment.
Over the past few months, Isabel (Vázquez, Senior Producer), Maya (Goldberg-Safir, Artistic Director), Shirley (Alfaro, Executive Director) and I all really felt the exhaustion of endless Zoom calls and wanted to create an experience that felt different, that looked different, and that was conscious of our current moment — and tried to rethink all that we’re missing without in-person gatherings. We wanted to create something that actually feels valuable to people right now. We also wanted to let people bring their full selves to these events — and for folks to feel a little more OK with not having to pretend that they’re not working next to a pile of unfolded clothes, or with kids/partners/cats/roommates just out of the corner of the frame.
[We also wanted to] ask our presenters to explore aspects of their work that they feel genuinely inspired by — and not do the thing that they feel like they’re supposed to present, or talk about.
Building Third Place has really been about getting in touch with elements of creativity, joy, slowness, mystery, and connection. In some ways, it’s a reflection of the ethos we’ve had on our programming team for many years.
Let’s talk about your lineup of speakers. The presenters announced on Friday represent a younger and more diverse community of speakers than we’ve seen at recent Third Coast events. How did you go about selecting this year’s presenters?
Kennedy: We’ve been really intentional about creating more diverse lineups in Third Coast programming for the past few years. Our 2019 lineup was meaningfully more diverse than conferences before (and people noticed).
Our goal as an organization is to be a transformative and disruptive space for the audio industry. We believe that this is a deeply urgent role to play in the industry and we can’t overstate that. This means being critical and intentional about who we’re giving platforms to, and when, and why.
At the core, we believe a more equitable, inclusive and anti-racist industry makes for more inspired creators, and better stories. We also don’t always get this right, and we’re grateful for our community keeping us in check (we really, really do read the feedback form).
We were inspired to invite a number of presenters who we got to know through our annual Third Coast/RHDF Competition, which we use as an engine for all of our programming. Beyond crowning winners, the Competition is a key way that we get more familiar with makers from around the world.
This year, Third Coast is offering “collective pricing,” a variable pricing model that makes it possible for almost anyone to attend, regardless of their financial circumstances. Talk about why you instituted this model and whether it will be sustainable when you return to in-person events (hopefully in 2021)?
Kennedy: We’ve been pushing to introduce collective pricing at our organization for a long time.
Over the past decade, The Third Coast Conference ballooned in size, and [it] went annual in 2016, and with that have come a lot of learning experiences in trying to make our conference more accessible. In a lot of ways, having a contract with a corporate hotel made sense when we’re bringing in so many people from around the world for an in-person event, but that also meant that the costs to produce our conference were high.
We’re thrilled to center accessibility at the core of our organization alongside our new Executive Director Shirley Alfaro. This builds on work we’ve done in past years including the travel stipends initiative last year (we raised $15,000 in just a few weeks from the producer community to give out over 40 stipends of up to $500 to producers who otherwise would not have been able to attend the conference).
Shirley, can you talk about the vision you have mapped out for the Third Coast organization and how that has influenced this year’s event?
Alfaro: The evolution of Third Coast has been growing for quite some time, before and since I’ve arrived. This year, more than ever, has been a global call for transparency, accountability and collective action. As a staff, we heard this and made a commitment in time and labor to be self-critical of our personal values, and of Third Coast’s values. And so, together we named the following core values in 2020: Transformation & Disruption, Imagination, Accountability, Responsiveness & Growth.
We were motivated by recognizing the failed actions of complicity, the honest feedback from our community, and the urgent need to create an organization that mirrors the world we live in. We hold these values as foundational to all Third Coast programming, including in the creation of Third Place.
How do you want participants to interact with this year’s event?
Kennedy: It was really important to us to create the same feeling of spontaneous connection that exists in real-world gatherings. Instead of spending a weekend away at the Third Coast Conference, makers will have the opportunity to dwell in Third Place, however they like to most, over the course of two weeks.
We’re building a world where community can converge in a couple ways: first, when we register for Third Place, you create a member login, and once we officially open, you’ll have access to all the social functions of being a member of the Third Place website: from seeing a digital Member Directory, where you can directly message other attendees, to adding images & text to your profile, to getting updates and announcements directly on your profile.
Second, we’re creating a portal to another platform, that you can only reach through Third Place, where we’re actually building community common areas that capture that same kind of spontaneous interaction, networking, and exchange of ideas. We kind of want to folks to come experience it rather than to explain it before you get there, but here’s what we can promise: many spaces for community dialogue that can’t happen anywhere else, options for both introverts and extroverts, an unknowable number of new friendships, inspiring conversations, opportunities for spontaneous parties and goofy hang-outs, as well as grassroots, organized movement building activities, all within the virtual bounds of Third Place.
You’ve been releasing the Third Place lineup in parts. Can you give us a sneak peek of programming that our readers will be excited to see?
Kennedy: Sure, there are three sessions we’re really looking forward to sharing with with participants:
Thursday, October 22:
- Host Chenjerai Kumanyika will talk with three local journalists who covered police and policing in 2020, including Tuck Woodstock.
Saturday, October 24:
- Chicago archivist and member of The Blacktivists Stacie Williams will lead a maker session about the significance of archives for audio storytellers, including ways of activating your own media-related collection in ways that create conditions for justice and equality.
- Producer Stephanie Foo is joins to discuss mental health.
Saturday, October 31:
- Journalists who have been covering extremism around the world, including Luisa Beck, will join to discuss about what they’ve learned so far, and what comes next.
And nearly every day, we’ll announce a surprise “drop” into the world — audio ephemera, provocative thoughts, curated announcements. One of these first “Audio Advent-ures” is a unique collaboration with Sarah Geis of Audio Playground. We’re also working on a piece with Erica Heilman.
Third Place kicks off Monday, October 19 at 7 pm CST, and continues through October 31. Tickets can be purchased on a sliding scale ($25-$495).
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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