How ‘Radio Ambulante’ is sparking connections with in-person Listening Clubs

In media entrepreneur Carolina Guerrero’s family, enjoying stories has long been a group activity. Her mother used to listen to radio shows with her 10 siblings. Growing up in Bogotá, Colombia, Guerrero and her nearly 30 cousins continued the tradition, cramming into her grandparents’ living room every Sunday to watch TV together.

Decades later, Guerrero’s nonprofit media company is helping thousands of people around the world do essentially the same thing with Radio Ambulante, the award-winning Spanish-language podcast she co-founded in 2012. 

“We started thinking … how can we just do something offline?” says Guerrero, CEO of Radio Ambulante Studios. “We decided to launch these in-person listening spaces to privilege the conversation and make sure that listeners could just build community.”

The concept is simple — fans meet up at Listening Clubs to collectively listen to and discuss Radio Ambulante episodes — and has been a runaway success. 

Kicked off in 2019, the project has expanded to more than 1,000 Listening Clubs in 140 cities on nearly every continent — a testament to what media organizations can achieve when they prioritize community as much as content. 

Radio Ambulante’s producers believe that the clubs “create more democratic societies,” says Juan David Naranjo Navarro, head of communities at Radio Ambulante Studios. “We believe that when you go and meet some people who have different opinions than yours, who have different experiences than yours, who have different backgrounds than yours — and you accept that those opinions, those experiences, are as valid as yours — you are a more democratic person. You are a person who is more able to engage in civic discussions to improve the way in which you live.”

To facilitate civic discourse among Latino voters, Naranjo Navarro recently led five election-focused listening sessions around the country — three in battleground states — using content from Radio Ambulante’s 300-episode catalog. The project, funded by the American Press Institute, kicked off in New York City in October.

“We’ve been thinking about Latino communities in the U.S. as a monolithic force, like, they all think the same way, they all vote the same way,” says Naranjo Navarro. “That’s not the case. … We wanted to provide those safe spaces for Latinos to talk about those topics that matter to them,” he says — and maybe inspire more of them to vote.

‘Another atmosphere’

Building community has been a priority for Radio Ambulante Studios since the beginning. 

In 2012, Guerrero and business partner, husband and Radio Ambulante host Daniel Alarcón, founded the podcast with $46,000 raised via Kickstarter. It was intended to speak to the global Latino community, celebrating its shared language as well as its diversity. Inspired by Radiolab and This American Life, Guerrero and Alarcón leaned into character-driven storytelling with “a clear narrative arc,” she says.

“We created Radio Ambulante to make sure that we let the protagonist of the stories tell the stories and make sure that you relate to it … react, empathize,” Guerrero says. “Basically, we … wanted to complicate your idea of Latin America.”

Radio Ambulante‘s listenership steadily grew, and NPR started syndicating the podcast in 2016. 

The idea for the Listening Clubs percolated organically, prompted by feedback from listeners and discussion in the Club de Podcast Radio Ambulante Facebook group. Started in January 2018, today the group has over 11,000 members.

Every time a new podcast episode dropped, “our Facebook group went crazy with discussions [and] debates,” says Naranjo Navarro.

“People want to have conversations about the things they just learned [from the podcast], about the things they just realized, about the emotions those stories give them,” says Naranjo Navarro. “We started thinking, ‘How can we help our community do these Listening Clubs and gather with other people all around Latin America and the world?'”

In 2018, Radio Ambulante piloted the Clubs in 20 cities in the U.S. and Latin America, supported by a $50,000 grant from the News Integrity Initiative. 

“It was a fantastic idea, and our listeners loved it,” says Guerrero. “We had so many great stories from those Clubs.” 

Some were small and informal, like three friends in Boston, while others had nearly 30 attendees. The team even received a tweet with a photo of people peeling potatoes at home while listening to the podcast.

“What we believe is that when you listen to the podcast in the place with other people, there is another atmosphere … like you are more engaged with the story,” says Naranjo Navarro. “You are paying attention and you have all the thoughts, all the emotions right after you listen to the episode [and you are] ready to go and talk about them.”

The team officially launched the Clubs the following year at the start of the next Radio Ambulante season.

“We invited our community using our newsletters, using our social media, using our Facebook group,” says Naranjo Navarro. “We created … a forum for people to register, and it was a success immediately.”

The team put together a suite of resources to set Listening Clubs up for success from the beginning.

A small grant from Facebook and the Lenfest Institute enabled the team to create “a dedicated website for the Listening Clubs,” with a mapping feature to help participants find local clubs and tools for organizers in English and Spanish, says Guerrero.

They also created a suggested code of conduct and a PDF manual to help organizers facilitate and moderate conversations. 

“[W]e suggest that they agree on … basic rules that would allow them to have a safe space, a constructive space, a nice conversation and debate without disrespecting others,” Naranjo Navarro explains. 

Every time a new episode drops — weekly, during the September to April season — Radio Ambulante Studios sends organizers question guides to “spark conversations about that episode,” says Naranjo Navarro. 

Additionally, Radio Ambulante Studios provides downloadable coloring sheets for participants to color while listening to help people feel at ease while listening with people they don’t know. (The producers suggest that organizers provide Play-Doh for visually impaired people to keep their hands busy.)

Beyond these resources, Radio Ambulante is pretty hands-off when it comes to how the Clubs are run, leaving details up to individual organizers. 

“What we always say is that we are not the owners of each Listening Club,” says Naranjo Navarro. “The organizer and the people who go to the Club are the owners of each Listening Club.”

‘Easier than it looks’

One such organizer is Luisa Pareja, an aspiring sound healer who also works for a nongovernmental organization in Panama City. After reading about the Clubs in the Facebook group, she decided to start one in her community. 

“Bored of the chitchat” in typical social settings, she says, Pareja wanted her Club to be a space where people could skip the small talk and have conversations with real depth.

“It just connects people on a different level,” says Pareja. “I did the Listening Club because I wanted to have friends, basically … and to chat about more deep things. … It is an opportunity to connect in these times where connecting with people seems so difficult.”

Pareja advertised the Club on Instagram and started a WhatsApp group to help organize it. She held her first meeting at her home in September 2019, and the Club met regularly until the pandemic. Though other Clubs pivoted online, Pareja put hers on hold until it was safe to gather again in person. 

Today, her Club has around 30 active members who meet at a local café and occasionally hold special events. For instance, they held a celebration tied to an episode about the Panama Canal, inviting the historian interviewed on the podcast. An episode about cholitas — Indigenous Bolivian women known for their mountain climbing — prompted a listening session and discussion during a walk in the woods with a local feminist hiking group.

Pareja says being a Club organizer requires a time commitment but “is easier than it looks” because of the quality of the content and the show’s support with promotion.

“I think the stories they tell are very heartwarming, and they are … a way to kind of get to know the region,” says Pareja. “It brings all of Latin America together.”

Past episodes have covered everything from trans youth in Argentina to narco-terrorism tours in Colombia to the migration of Venezuelans to Brazil — stories that are location-specific but still have universal appeal.

“What we say is a good story that’s well-told, that’s well-narrated, can talk to everyone in the world,” says Naranjo Navarro. “It doesn’t matter where it happens. It doesn’t matter who is the main character of that story. If it is well-told, if it has, like, this narrative style that we have in Radio Ambulante, if it makes you think, it is a story that can talk to everyone.”

‘New ways of funding’

In the run-up to the election, Radio Ambulante Studios focused on talking to Latino voters. In January, it started Central, a serialized podcast with a different focus each season. For its second season, Central is currently running a limited series on Latinos and voting with post-election analysis.

Funded by a $5,000 API grant, the election-related listening sessions were held in New York, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and Florida. The sessions used Radio Ambulante episodes “to spark conversations about the topics that matter most to the Latino communities,” says Naranjo Navarro.

“And then we, of course, recommend for people to listen to our new series [Central],” he adds. 

Two of these sessions took place as part of existing Listening Clubs in New York City and Gainesville, Fla. Participants at the other events are considering continuing to meet as Listening Clubs. Around 100 people participated overall, with 91% agreeing that the events “allowed them to have conversations they wouldn’t normally have elsewhere,” wrote Naranjo Navarro in an email.

Discussion included “what it means to be Latino in the U.S., their concerns and hopes for the upcoming presidential election, their reasons for supporting one candidate over another, their perspectives on political representation at both state and national levels, and their experiences with xenophobia and discrimination,” he continued. “We also used this experience to continue understanding the Latino communities for the journalism we do on a daily basis.”

Like its public media counterparts, Radio Ambulante Studios relies on listener support. Though it does not track how many Listening Club participants donate, anecdotal evidence — notes from donors about why they give — suggests that many do. 

“All these efforts to build the community, that has helped our membership program a lot,” says Guerrero. “People think that they are part of something bigger than themselves, and the efforts of the Listening Clubs is just one component of that. … It’s really amazing.”

Still, Naranjo Navarro says, “Right now … we’re looking for new ways of funding.”

This year Radio Ambulante Studios moved its podcasts from NPR to the iHeartRadio platform, which “is bringing more revenue from sponsorship,” says Guerrero. (Though “the relationship has changed,” episodes of Radio Ambulante are still available on NPR’s website, she adds.)

The Listening Clubs themselves are also creating opportunities for funding. 

“We have this catalog with so many stories and so many topics,” says Naranjo Navarro. “And since last year, we started seeing some organizations, some corporations, even some other news outlets that want to have Listening Clubs in partnership with us using some of our previous episodes, and that has become also a [source of] revenue for us.”

For example, Radio Ambulante Studios recently partnered with Roche Pharmaceuticals on a listening event and discussion about violence against women in the healthcare system. More than 150 health-care professionals, journalists and influencers attended the event, says Naranjo Navarro, which brought in much-needed revenue. 

The International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency, and the Mexican Supreme Court have also used Radio Ambulante episodes to facilitate conversations about youth unemployment and human rights, respectively. 

Moving forward, Naranjo Navarro wants to continue exploring relationships with organizations while also expanding the core Listening Clubs project. That includes plans to create a more robust online platform to help Club organizers more easily create and manage events, and for participants to connect with them.

“For the future, we … want the Listening Clubs to keep growing,” Naranjo Navarro says. “… If people listen to us in every city in the world, there might be a Listening Club in every city in the world as well. That’s a perfect way to engage with people near you, with your communities.” 

“You become someone more tolerant about other people,” he adds, “And that’s what this world needs.”