The Comundos Podcast was conceived from a live conversation between the coordinator of the NGO Comundos, Mr. Bart Vetsuypens (1) and one of his helpers, Mr. Jesualdo Freitas (²) about the NGO's processes and works.
Considering the existing challenges and the possibility of accessibility for production, broadcasting and perception of radio language, Radio Comundos revisits the NGO Comundos’ digital stories, published on the website. It addresses themes chosen by the course participants in production carried out in the course of their work. And, it still does an exclusive programme on some issues of the moment.

It bases itself on the Sustainable Development Goals, laid down by the UN (³), when thinking of and working towards the transformation of our world.

It looks on the Internet as an amplification of communication and a source of recorded events and even dares to say that it is a description of life in different locations on the planet. The NGO Comundos has been recording local stories expressed by their authors / real-life educators and students, both men and women, for over five years.

If Comundos is communication and co-operation between worlds, it presents a pedagogical importance when reporting works for solutions to problems such as the global climatic disturbance, basic challenges, such as obtaining water for drinking and agricultural purposes, own production of compost and seeds for sustainable agriculture, educational solutions for making rural schools effective, solutions for crucial behavioural issues in the field of youth, among many other possible and necessary solutions to contemporary challenges.

Demonstrating how it is possible to build and rebuild lives with collaboration and a sense of community, exploring natural possibilities, without, however, damaging the environment; quite the opposite, encouraging sustainable treatment and possibilities for recovery and strengthening of Nature.

The radio values self-esteem by giving voice and scope to people and communities when they are communicating to the World. The production of stories in places without digital equipment and internet, or almost without, are broadcast on the radio. The NGO promotes the construction of interactivity between the activists involved in the search to co-ordinate knowledge in places with cultural diversity on the different continents it covers.

It provides personnel exchanges and internships between educators and academic students from Belgium, and other countries, for involvement in communicative production processes at undergraduate and master's levels with communities within the scope of the NGO.

In the course of its recent inauguration, Radio Comundos carried out some programmes with themes such as the importance of trees for life by a story produced in Honduras; the importance of and threat to vegetation such as the savanna; the importance of preserving areas such as mangroves in Africa and the origin of communities that for two centuries have been producing agriculture in a sustainable format and supplying the region in its surroundings, as in the case of quilombolas; and, the issue of access on the part of different ethnicities to higher education involving the need to reduce or eliminate racial prejudice in Brazil.

There are also more than two hundred digital stories to be transformed into radio language put to music by well-known authors; not by commercial media, also valuing the force of art as a local and universal cultural support.

(¹)Comundos Co-ordinator

(²) History and Educommunicator Teacher;  Member of the Brazilian Association of Researchers and Educommunicator Professionals – ABPEducom

Blog: souprofessordoseculo21.blogspot.com

The first programs in Portuguese are online:

Do you want to learn how to make radio / podcast? Soon we will set up a format to use in the classroom.