Podcasting can be helpful for people to gain various skills that stand out to employers. Meet two RespectAbility National Leadership Fellows, who have both worked on a podcast. Their podcasting skills helped them receive their Fellowship offers, as our team was able to see their skills in action. Learn from RespectAbility staff and Fellows on how you can create or work on podcasts in various ways, including interview and narrative.
Speaker Bios
Moderator: Eric Ascher (he/him) is the Senior Communications Associate for RespectAbility. He is responsible for supporting RespectAbility’s Director of Marketing and Communications in developing and implementing advocacy efforts and communications of various types. Ascher manages RespectAbility’s social media channels, website, and emails; organizes and develops webinars; and supervises Communications Fellows.
Rev. Ben Bond (He/They) is the Faith Inclusion and Belonging Associate at RespectAbility. Ben is ordained in The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) which is a mainline progressive Christian denomination in the United States and Canada. Ben is a queer multiply disabled person with lived experience both growing up with a disability and acquiring one later in life. Faith inclusion and disability have been at the center of their work for many years. Ben founded and co-chaired Yale Divinity School’s first disability student organization named DivineAbilities which was dedicated to centering disability issues at an institutional level as well as providing a space for students to explore interpersonally their relationship between disability and faith communities.
Noa Porten (she/her) is an Entertainment and News Media Fellow in RespectAbility’s National Leadership Program for Fall 2023. Porten’s love for storytelling began at a young age when she was introduced to dance and musical theater. That love for storytelling has interwoven with disability advocacy after her lived experiences with chronic illness led her to found and host Spooning with Spoonies, a podcast highlighting chronically ill and disability love and dating stories. Developing Spooning with Spoonies empowered Porten to pursue a career working at the intersection of business and entertainment to tell and amplify authentic stories and connect audiences to content that they can see themselves and their stories reflected in.
Hannah Roussel is a Faith Inclusion and Belonging Fellow in RespectAbility’s National Leadership Program for Fall 2023. Roussel is a neurodiverse, immunosuppressed person who is passionate about religion, community, and inclusivity. She recently finished her doctoral studies in History with a focus on late ancient Jewish literature. Her dissertation, “Mad Rabbis: The Intersection of Bodyminds with Personal, Communal, and Non-Human Relationships in the Babylonian Talmud,” uses theories and methodologies from both disability and mad studies to better understand how Babylonian rabbis thought about and portrayed madness in the stories they told.
