Uplifting Series Finds Kindness, 450 Million Tune in! with Sarah Yourgrau (Summer Series #4.2)
Sarah Yourgrau is the talented producer and co-host behind Mike Rowe’s heartwarming series, Returning the Favor. This acclaimed show has 105 episodes with over 450 million views, and celebrates unsung heroes across America, restoring our faith in each other. She is among a handful of people who have really seen the scope of our true potential as neighbors and communities. You will be sent soaring by her stories, of one act of kindness at a time.
Highlight
Listen
About Our Guest:
Sarah Yougrau is a two-time Emmy Award-Winning producer, and social anthropologist dedicated to building narratives that inspire social cohesion and more fertile common ground.
With over a decade of on-ground field experience, interviewing and filming within hundreds of diverse communities across America, Sarah has transferred her practical industry, anthropological and cultural knowledge to Common Ground Studios (CGS), a storytelling studio offering creative strategy, media production, narrative, and conversation-design, to help us more effectively communicate between each other.
Her experience and worldview first truly came together when she was chosen to produce Mike Rowe’s Facebook Watch series, Returning the Favor, where he tours the United States on a mission to uncover all the kind and generous people who are making a difference in their communities—and surprise them with a gift that helps them do more good work. Sarah came into these communities cold, and spent weeks finding the key “givers and doers” the show would feature—often having to spend a lot of time knocking on doors and developing trust before she could begin to uncover anything.
In this episode, we talk about all kinds of insights her journey has afforded her; helpful perspectives that we can all use every day to navigate our own circles with more hope and less fear. She has been everywhere from rural Virginia, deep in the Appalachians, to all the way up in Idaho, and she’s learned a lot about people who you don’t often see on national news.
With her disarmingly connected style and knack for synthesizing the complex, Sarah’s uniquely humanizing approach surely energizes the entire production process—both behind and in front of the camera. That gives her—and now all of us—a window into how similar we all are in our hopes and dreams.
Whether she’s journeying deep inside various subcultures to host a viral docuseries with over 450 million viewers on Facebook Watch; traveling globally to investigate the most authentic cultural rhythms of wanderlust-inducing locations for Marriot Bonvoy’s Storybooked series; creating intimate connections through soulful and comedic interviews on Netflix; or facilitating speaking with brands and organizations, Sarah’s grounded and engaging presence acts as connective tissue between her subject and audience.
Her skill with storytelling enables all of us to feel like we were right there with her, learning about what’s going right in communities across the country—and proving, once again, how very similar we all are when you get down to our roots, and how much our communities benefit from those who simply want to do good by one another.
References Mentioned:
- Sarah’s Website
- Common Ground Studios Website
- Stream ‘Returning the Favor’ on Facebook Watch
- Iain Kerr CoG Episode #116
Chapters:
- 00:00 – Intro & Welcome
- 03:42 – There Are No Mundane Moments
- 05:24 – Producing ‘Returning the Favor’
- 21:55 – Break
- 24:11 – Gamifying Curiosity
- 35:06 – “I’m Not Attached to the Person I Was”
- 38:22 – Stories Are What Keep Us Human
- 42:38 – Sadness Carves Out Your Capacity for Joy
- 46:22 – Find Compassion & Patience with Others
- 48:34 – We Have So Much in Common
- 55:06 – Closing