The Europeans has launched a listener-funded investigative politics miniseries for the first time.
The award-winning podcast has revealed that its latest series, Who Does It Best?, is funded entirely by audience donations, marking a historic first in its eight-year run.
With cross-border reporting, the project sees its team spend several months investigating which European countries are getting housing, childcare, and drug policies right, and what others can learn from them.
This latest series represents another creative shift for the podcast, following previous long-form projects including The Oatly Chronicles, This Is What a Generation Sounds Like, and Bursting the Bubble.
The editorial team describes Europe as a vast testing ground for public policy, and this miniseries sets out to examine the real-world outcomes of those experiments in a practical, solutions-focused way.
Episodes travel across the continent from Paris to Breda, Rome to Reykjavik, spotlighting policy success stories that are already improving daily life. Rather than focusing on political conflict, the series is built around what works and how those ideas might translate elsewhere.
When announcing the launch, Europeans co-creator Katy Lee said: โWe envisaged this series as, hopefully, a useful contribution in a time of quite grim politics.
โWe have seen in election after election, in country after country, people saying, โNobody is listening to me.โ And as abstract as it sounds, policies can be such a powerful tool for actually bettering peopleโs lives on a daily basis.โ
Who Does It Best? was made possible after the team launched a dedicated crowdfunding campaign to finance the additional reporting.
Although The Europeans has been supported by listeners and grant funding since its launch in 2017, this was the first time it asked its audience to directly support a specific editorial project. Fans raised the full โฌ15,000 target in just two months.
The weekly podcast is now also supported in part by Euranet Plus, a consortium of fifteen European radio broadcasters, while Patreon donations continue to cover core production costs.
The project is produced and presented by Europeans co-host Dominic Kraemer alongside producers Katz Laszlo and Wojciech Oleksiak.
One episode is reported and presented by Maja Stepanฤiฤ and Urลกula Zaletelj from the Slovenian parenting podcast ล ala za starลกe, stepping in while Europeans host Katy Lee is on maternity leave.
