Introducing Unseen Atlanta—Shedding Light on Some of the City's Toughest Issues

Welcome to Unseen Atlanta, an Atlanta Mission podcast that brings you into the heart of our city's most pressing challenges—homelessness, addiction, and the human stories behind them. In this special teaser episode, hosts Rachel Reynolds and Jonathan Miller introduce the mission and vision of the podcast.

Transcript

Rachel: Welcome to Unseen Atlanta, an Atlanta Mission podcast where we shine the light on some of the city's toughest issues. We do this by sharing true stories from real people who've experienced homelessness and addiction. I'm your host, Rachel Reynolds. And  

Jonathan: I'm Jonathan Miller, your co host.  

Rachel: We have a really amazing season for you ahead. 

We have so many stories of homelessness, addiction. We have so many amazing subject matter experts. But I think the thing that Struck me the most with all these stories is just how generous they are with sharing them and how courageous they are.  

Jonathan: Each story is a gift and for someone to come in and share their story with us, um, is so courageous when we're talking to people who have experienced homelessness or addiction, we sort of put them in a category that we don't belong in. 

Right. It's us and them.  

Rachel: Yeah.  

Jonathan: Right. But when we start to talking. About things like I have had a hard time loving myself,  

Rachel: right? I think  

Jonathan: I'm in that bucket now, right? And I think a lot of our listeners might be like, Hey, that's something I've struggled with too. And that's exactly why we started this podcast to shed light, to increase understanding and empathy. 

Rachel: Yeah. I always tell people this, this place has changed my life more than anything else in my life has. And it continues to change my life. We talk so much about the transformation that happens in our clients, but I feel like the transformation has happened so much in me and that's everything from how I view the world to spiritually to emotionally to my parenting. 

So it's really totally changed my life.  

Jonathan: Yeah. Over the past two years, I've just been blown away. I've never worked in this in this space before. And something I hope our listeners get from this podcast is something I experienced working here. All those myths that you have about who people are and why they make the choices they make and and all the things that. 

You might assume of someone who's experienced homelessness or addiction. They're just not true.  

Rachel: This place. And I hope this podcast really shows you that we're more alike than we are indifferent. And we hope that every time you come to this podcast, you get to enter in a space where we're all humans. And we're all having a human experience and we're all having human interactions. 

Jonathan: And not only are we going to hear incredible stories and have this incredible human experience, we're going to be hearing from subject matter experts who are going to give us the why and the how behind all these complex issues.  

Rachel: And that's really what we want to show here is we want to show that we want to share the stories. 

Obviously those are, you know, there's so much power in a story, but we also want to be a resource. There's so much power in the why you'll hear that from these stories over and over again. Once I understood. Once I was in this position, once I understood why I took that drug, once I understood why that happened to me, then there's so much power in them just saying it and understanding it. 

For people who are experiencing homelessness, the thing that they often feel is unseen. We hear time and time again, I hadn't heard my name spoken in six months, I hadn't heard my name spoken in a year. People walked past me on the street. For those of us who aren't experiencing homelessness, and who aren't experiencing those issues, Circumstances. 

We see homelessness a lot in our city. We see addiction in our family. We see these things. A lot of times we want to unsee them. We don't want to confront them. We don't want to talk about them. And so this is really, we wanted to take this kind of this play on unseen and say, no, we're going to bring some of these things to light. 

We're going to make them seen. It's really going to be a journey as we dive into these stories, as we learn about these people, as we talk to these subject matter experts. So we're so thrilled that you decided to join us on this.  

Jonathan: So follow along on all of our socials. So you don't miss an episode.