Conversations for Kate — a Listening Matters podcast Thursdays at 10 on Water Waves Radio.

This week: Katie Brown.

Katie Brown never set out to be a councillor. She was working at the council when she was made redundant — and instead of walking away from the town she loves, she stood for election. She's now one of sixteen unpaid Dartmouth town councillors, and she isn't yet forty.

She sits down with Julia and Stephen for a warm, unhurried conversation about what it actually takes to make a difference in a small coastal town — and about how hard it is to be heard. Dartmouth's three layers of council, the business rates people shout at her about in the street, a council meeting where one person turned up, and Facebook threads of a hundred and fifty angry comments with nobody in the room. Katie is honest about all of it, and clear about the one thing that would change everything: people talking to her.

Along the way there's ceramics and social activism, the film studio that grew out of Southwest Cork, the cameraman everyone calls Nick the Hat who has quietly built a creative network nobody knew was here, and a new radio drama called Hope Bridge that the town itself will help write. There's an invitation to the schools, and a plan to bring the council into the conversation.

And, as ever, the five questions — ending on the hardest one of all: what do you love about yourself?

Conversations for Kate is made for one listener. She's a woman in her forties who used to make things, who knew exactly who she was, and who has spent years looking after everyone else instead. She isn't short of motivation. She's tired, and she's quietly stopped believing the spark is still in there. So we don't tell her what to do. We bring her someone who's been somewhere near it — a filmmaker, a farmer, a lad who's just started out in our studio — and after each answer we bring it back to Kate. Not advice. Recognition.

Not therapy. Not coaching. Just listening properly for forty minutes, without anyone telling her to try harder.

Listen at waterwavesradio.net, or wherever you get your podcasts. No notes needed — just press play when you have a moment.

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