Podcast highlights those making a positive impact in the world

After earning her bachelor’s degree in communications, Suleima Rivas commuted for two years from New Rochelle to New York City for a job at Yelp.

Forty minutes on the Metro North line in the morning, with coffee in hand, and then 40 minutes back after work. Both ways, she listened to podcasts — “The Daily” from the New York Times, “The Journal” from the Wall Street Journal, the “NPR Politics Podcast” and others.

Then the pandemic hit, and Rivas — like millions of others — started working from home, which made her rethink where she wanted her life and career to go.

“After you take away the work culture and being in the city, you’re just stuck with the actual job,” she says. “What do I enjoy doing? I realized I’m really into politics and figuring out how things work.”

She explored graduate-school options and found Binghamton University’s Master of Public Adminstration program in the College of Community and Public Affairs (CCPA) — somewhere in New York state but still far enough from home to have new surroundings and meet different people.

Little did she realize her love for podcasts would play a big part in her Binghamton experience.

The “Do Good Well” podcast started in late 2020 as a way to highlight CCPA’s people and programs, with a focus on making a difference in the world. Hosts and guests talked about philanthropy, the Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (GMAP) program and what advice alumni would give to current students.

There was only one problem: Someone needed to edit the episodes that had been recorded. Rivas had hosted the discussion with alumni and asked Cory Rusin, director of recruitment and internship placement for the Department of Public Administration, about when the episode would be posted online.

When Rusin learned about Rivas’ experience with audio production and interest in helping out, she chatted with Associate Professor and then Department Chair Thomas Sinclair, and they figured out how to make the podcast into a graduate assistantship so that Rivas could be compensated for the time she put into it.

“Something that I was very much interested in doing just fell into my lap. It ended up being my everyday job, and I couldn’t be happier,” Rivas says. She got to work compiling and shaping all the episodes that were “in the can,” releasing one a month during the fall 2021 semester.

Starting this spring, she began to pursue ideas of her own, based on suggestions from faculty, students and staff. She tries to match knowledgeable student hosts with each discussion so that the episodes dig deeper into the topics at hand, often with a social justice theme.

“I was talking to a classmate who did a paper on voting rights, and I was telling him, ‘Oh, we should do something about the midterm elections,’” Rivas says. “There’s a lot of information out there, like how to register, what the midterms are, important things about gerrymandering and the census — all these nuanced topics that we as public administrators know because we are learning about them, but the everyday person maybe wouldn’t.”

The March episode of “Do Good Well” featured an interview with Abdul Waheed Ahmad, MPA ’18, who told about his experiences fleeing Afghanistan before the Taliban’s 2021 takeover. As a senior security official for the Afghanistan government, he had overseen security reform and worked closely with the U.S. and other international allies.

“CCPA is so broad, and the podcast reflects what you can do with a degree,” Rivas says. “I definitely want to work in an area where I can inform the everyday public on information that pertains to public administration.”