Fix The News

What if we've confused keeping people safe with giving them a good life?
Meet Teun Toebes, Dutch healthcare innovator, author and dementia advocate on a mission to change how the world lives with dementia. At 21, most of us are figuring out what to do with our lives - but Teun decided to move into a locked dementia ward in the Netherlands. Not as a patient, and not as a carer, but as a housemate. For three and a half years, he shared his life with people whose voices are too often overlooked. His experience sparked an international movement, a documentary called Human Forever, and a campaign to open the doors of locked nursing homes.

But this isn't simply a story about changing aged care. It's about friendship, freedom, dignity, and the extraordinary things that can happen when we stop defining people by what they've lost.
(Podcast Image Credit: Teun with housemate. Stan Heerkens)

In this episode:
Why a 21-year-old nurse decided to move into a locked dementia ward
What three and a half years living alongside people with dementia taught him
How football, a motorcycle and a very fast speedboat can change the end of a life
Why good intentions don't always lead to a good quality of life
What communities in South Africa and an intergenerational school in America can teach us about dementia
The Open the Doors movement and the push to rethink locked nursing home wards
How living alongside people with dementia changed his understanding of death, grief and what it means to be human  
Timestamps:
00:00 The Housemate 
00:57 Meet Teun Toebes
03:26 Why a 21-year-old moved into a dementia ward
06:05 Zero Risk, Zero Life
08:19 Becoming a Housemate
11:31 Motorcycles, Speedboats and Friendship with Art
13:24 Midpoint Reflections
15:50 What Happens When You Challenge the System?
17:42 What If a Nursing Home Is Your Only Option?
19:37 Human Forever: Rethinking Dementia Around the World
23:18 Open the Doors: Freedom vs. Safety
26:17 Dementia Rights Are Human Rights
27:31 What Families Need to Know About Dementia
28:47 What Happens When All Your Housemates Die?
30:48 The Power of Paying Attention
32:02 Final Reflections

Curious to find out more?
👉 Explore Teun's documentary, Human Forever
👉 Discover Teun's books, including The Housemates
👉 Support his work through Article 25 Foundation

About Fix The News:
Fix The News is a solutions-focused media platform sharing stories from the frontlines of progress - exploring what’s working in the world and the people making it happen.

Subscribe & follow:
If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast and leave a review - it helps more people find these stories.

Production credits:
Hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose
Produced by Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

What happens when the systems we've relied on stop working? And who gets to decide what comes next?

A year after the dismantling of USAID sent shockwaves through the international aid sector, the world's leaders, philanthropists and changemakers gathered in New York for the UN General Assembly and Climate Week. The funding crisis was far from over, and the big questions about what comes next remained unanswered.

Amy spent a week in New York talking to people who weren't waiting for the old systems to be fixed. From former aid workers building a lifeboat for abandoned programmes to a dating app helping tackle HIV, she discovered some unexpected ways of doing things differently.
In this episode, Amy and Gus unpack five conversations from New York and ask whether the messy middle might be exactly where new possibilities begin.

In this episode:
The Lifeboat Crew: How Rob Rosenbaum and a group of former USAID workers helped redirect more than $170 million towards programmes at risk of closure.
Grindr's unexpected mission: CEO George Arison on using a global dating app to help millions of people access HIV prevention.
A billion people in ten years: Felix Brooks-Church on Sanku's extraordinary growth and a business model designed to solve hidden hunger.
Rethinking philanthropy: Judith Lingeman from the Postcode Lottery Group on the power of trust, unrestricted funding and giving organisations room to dream.
A world without single-use plastic: Nicky Davies from the Plastic Solutions Fund on bringing 35 foundations together, changing the systems behind plastic pollution and why cities could lead the way.
Five very different conversations that all ask the same question: what becomes possible when we stop assuming the way we've always done things is the only way?

Timestamps:

00:45 Introduction - Amy & Gus
03:45 Rob Rosenbaum, Project Resource Optimization
13:36 George Arison, Grindr
19:39 Felix Brooks-Church, Sanku
25:52 Judith Lingeman, Postcode Lottery Group
32:49 Nicky Davies, Plastic Solutions Fund
42:39 Closing Reflections - Amy & Gus

Find out more:
👉 Project Resource Optimization
👉 Grindr
👉 Sanku
👉 Postcode Lottery Group
👉 Plastic Solutions Fund
About Fix The News:
Fix The News is a solutions-focused media platform sharing stories from the frontlines of progress - exploring what’s working in the world and the people making it happen.

Subscribe & follow:
If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast and leave a review - it helps more people find these stories.

Production credits:
Hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose
Produced by Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

How do you get the world to pay attention to a problem it thinks it's already solved?
Around a billion children are exposed to dangerous levels of lead. It can be hiding in cookware, spices and cosmetics, or released through industries like battery recycling. For a child, exposure can mean losing up to six IQ points - irreversible damage that, multiplied across hundreds of millions of children, becomes an enormous drain on human potential. And yet, unlike so many global challenges, we already know how to prevent it.
Meet Drew McCartor, President of Pure Earth. For the past 17 years, Drew and his colleagues have been sounding the alarm about lead poisoning: gathering evidence, understanding the scale of the problem and building the playbook for how to solve it. Now, after decades of “yelling into the void”, the world is finally paying attention - and Drew believes we have an opportunity to eliminate lead poisoning altogether.
In this episode:
Why around a billion children are exposed to dangerous levels of lead
The surprising places lead is still hiding - from cookware to spices
What losing four to six IQ points means for a child - and an entire country
How a Craigslist ad led Drew from unpaid intern to President of Pure Earth
Why Pure Earth spent years wondering if they were crazy
The young boy in Bangladesh who brought the human cost of lead poisoning home for Drew
What changed when the world finally started paying attention
Why Drew believes we can eliminate lead poisoning altogether
About the title: A Useful Truth comes from a 1786 letter by Benjamin Franklin about lead poisoning: “You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist before it's generally received and practiced upon.” Almost 250 years later, it feels remarkably apt.

Timestamps:
00:00 A Useful Truth
00:55 Do you ever feel like something is wrong but no one will listen?
03:20 Haven’t we already solved lead poisoning?
05:00 What does lead poisoning actually mean?
07:43 The curse of the Industrial Fairy
10:20 What’s harder: solving lead poisoning or convincing people it matters?
12:31 From Craigslist ad to President of Pure Earth
14:50 How do a group of hippies change the world?
17:36 Midpoint reflections
20:09 When the world finally started paying attention
22:57 What happens when you get the thing you’ve spent 17 years working towards?
25:07 Lead and the global funding crisis
29:06 The story that makes lead poisoning real
33:58 The solutions are already here
34:46 What happens if we raise the IQ of a billion children?
39:01 What’s possible if we solve lead poisoning?
44.59 Final Thoughts

Curious to find out more?
👉Check out the Pure Earth website
👉Support their work
👉 Listen to Drew's TED Talk
👉 The Pure Earth SCALE Initiative to protect 500 million children from lead exposure

About Fix The News:
Fix The News is a solutions-focused media platform sharing stories from the frontlines of progress - exploring what’s working in the world and the people making it happen.

Subscribe & follow:
If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast and leave a review - it helps more people find these stories.

Production credits:
Hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose
Produced by Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

What if we could catch the next pandemic before it starts?

For most of human history, we’ve discovered outbreaks after people start getting sick. But what if we could spot a dangerous virus as it emerges, track it as it spreads and give health workers the information they need to stop it - in real time?
Meet Dr Pardis Sabeti, geneticist, disease hunter and professor at Harvard University. Pardis has spent more than two decades on the frontlines of some of the world’s deadliest outbreaks, from Lassa fever and Ebola in West Africa to COVID-19. Now, through Sentinel, she and her team are trying to build something even more ambitious: an early-warning system for infectious disease that can work anywhere - including communities across Africa where laboratory resources are limited and outbreaks can easily go undetected.
From why many “emerging” diseases may actually be diseases we simply haven’t detected to the devastating consequences of global health funding cuts - this is a conversation about how close we are to changing our relationship with infectious disease, and what it will take to stop the next outbreak before it becomes a pandemic.

In this episode:
How Pardis and her team tracked Ebola as it spread through West Africa
Why many “emerging” diseases may already be circulating
How Sentinel is building an early-warning system for outbreaks
What Rwanda got right with Marburg
What global health funding cuts look like on the ground and in the lab
Why stopping the next pandemic will take more than technology
Why Pardis still believes we can build a world where outbreaks are stopped before they become pandemics
Timestamps:
00:00 The Disease Hunter
00:42 If Pandemics Keep You Up at Night
02:51 Inside the 2014 Ebola Outbreak
03:38 The More You Test, the More You Find
04:39 Building an Early-Warning System for Disease
07:05 Are Diseases Emerging - or Are We Finally Detecting Them?
08:48 How Did Pardis Know COVID Was Coming?
10:36 Is Another Pandemic Inevitable?
11:43 What Well-Timed Funding Makes Possible
13:52 Why Every Person Matters in a Pandemic
15:26 How Rwanda Stopped Marburg
16:35 Why Ebola Is So Hard to Stop in the DRC
18:26 Midpoint Reflections
19:29 What Global Health Funding Cuts Look Like on the Ground
21:39 Laying Off a Third of Her Team
23:52 “Philanthropic Survivor’s Guilt”
26:59 How Do You Take On a Trillion-Dollar Problem?
29:08 Why Technology Alone Won’t Stop the Next Pandemic
31:57 “I’m a Student of Humanity”
34:03 The Work You Don’t Get to Finish
Find Out More:
👉 Explore Sentinel
👉 Learn more about Pardis Sabeti and the Sabeti Lab
👉 Discover The Audacious Project at TED
👉 Read about Sentinel’s $100 million MacArthur 100&Change award

About Fix The News:
Fix The News is a solutions-focused media platform sharing stories from the frontlines of progress - exploring what’s working in the world and the people making it happen.

Subscribe & follow:
If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast and leave a review - it helps more people find these stories.

Production credits:
Hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose
Produced by Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

What if the knowledge we need most for the future is something we’ve spent centuries forgetting?

Meet Victor Steffensen, Tagalaka man, author, filmmaker, musician and co-founder of the Living Knowledge Network. For decades, Victor has worked with Indigenous communities in Australia and around the world to revive traditional ways of reading and caring for Country. His new book, The Knowledge, asks a much bigger question: what have we lost by separating ourselves from the natural world - and what might happen if we learned how to listen again?

From why the climate crisis may actually be an identity crisis to how Western science and Indigenous Knowledge Systems can work together and the deceptively simple idea that everything we create should help nature flourish - this is a conversation about Indigenous knowledge as you might never have heard it before. Not as something that belongs to a select few, but as the wisdom that underpins us all.

In this episode:
Why Victor believes we’re all Indigenous to the planet
Why he thinks the climate crisis is, at its heart, an identity crisis
What happens when a landscape loses its identity and how you bring it back
How ancient knowledge and modern science can strengthen each other
The possibilities of reviving cultural memory and practice
And why, instead of arguing about who created the mess we're in, it’s time to get on with cleaning it up
Timestamps:
00:50 Introduction to Victor Steffensen
05:21 Why Indigenous Knowledge is for everyone
09:17 The moment that sparked 'The Knowledge' for Victor
13:00 Indigenous Knowledge v Western Science
17:32 What Victor has learned from apply the Knowledge in different countries
20:06 Midpoint Reflections
22:40 The Knowledge Triangle
24:41 The Identity Crisis
31:21 What does this actually look like?
34:47 The job of cleaning up the mess
41:32 Final Reflections

Want to know more about The Knowledge?
👉 Read Victor's new book, The Knowledge(Available online & at all good bookstores)
👉 Explore the Living Knowledge Network
👉 Follow the team's work: Instagram. LinkedIn. Facebook. Video. 

Image Credit:
Harry Vincent - Living Knowledge Network
About Fix The News:
Fix The News is a solutions-focused media platform sharing stories from the frontlines of progress - exploring what’s working in the world and the people making it happen.

Subscribe & follow:
If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast and leave a review - it helps more people find these stories.

Production credits:
Hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose
Produced by Fix The News
Audio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That!

 This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.