LIFESPAN
Autism Empowerment Podcast Amplifying Acceptance for All Abilities After a multiple-year hiatus, the Autism Empowerment podcast (formerly Autism Empowerment Radio) relaunched on December 30th, 2020, and is better than ever! Spectrum Life Magazine recently checked in with Autism
John: We were actually pretty prolific considering all the other things the nonprofit had going on. Autism Empowerment was founded on June 3rd, 2011. Autism Empowerment Radio launched June 14th, 2012, and Autism and Scouting Radio launched July 6th, 2012. What was your format? Karen: At the time, we were using a platform called BlogTalkRadio, and we were doing all our shows live with no editing. Most of our shows were interview-based where guests would call in. Although we’d prepare them in advance with proposed questions, the interviews themselves would develop organically from the answers people gave. That could be pretty stressful, I’d imagine. What if the guest didn’t show up or didn’t want to talk? Karen: Fortunately, we didn’t run into that very often. We tried to build a relationship with our guests ahead of time so they felt prepared. Many autistic people, myself included, are not big fans of talking on the phone. Knowing that, I always had a script prepared in advance with plenty of outs in case there were unforeseen circumstances like dropped calls or phone fright. John: One thing we couldn’t prepare for back then was sound quality. Since our new podcast is recorded in advance, that’s going to be a huge improvement. We’ll also be able to edit out things like dead space, dogs barking, toilets flushing, etc.
Empowerment co-founders Karen and John Krejcha to learn all the details. Congratulations! This has been a long time coming! Karen: Thank you! We are ecstatic to be in the studio again. There is so much to share. John: It’s been what? Six years since our last episode? Karen: Pretty close. Autism Empowerment Radio (which I hosted) had its last episode on December 8th, 2014, and Autism and Scouting Radio’s last episode (which John hosted) was February 27th, 2015. How many episodes did you produce? Karen: Autism Empowerment Radio had 89 episodes and Autism and Scouting Radio had 48, so we had 137 shows between the two. A few of those were crossovers and replays. We were happy with the number of shows we produced at the time because we knew very little about podcasting back then. I recently learned at a podcasting conference in 2020 that most podcasts never produce more than 7 episodes.
With all those shows, why did your podcasts stop? Karen: We both regret stopping. From the statistics we received, we had over 150,000 listens between the two programs, and the feedback we had received within the autistic and autism communities was positive. Unfortunately, we had no good way to sustain the podcast because Autism Empowerment was heavily involved in a variety of community outreach programs. John: There is a learning curve to the nonprofit world. Coming from a neurodiverse family, Karen and I co-founded Autism Empowerment as a calling to serve people within the autism and disabilities communities. We were involved in a lot of different projects at the time that needed our attention. Although rewarding, the more we became involved in local outreach, the less time we could dedicate to live shows. People often don’t realize the amount of planning and work that takes place behind the scenes of a nonprofit organization. We found over time that we were spreading ourselves too thin and something had to go. Karen: We didn’t want it to be the podcast. But we had to balance supporting our community with sustaining our Continued on page 14 www.spectrumlife.org
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