Five Years, Forward for 2026!

We are starting the year with a heart of gratitude and a clear plan for what comes next. We celebrate five years of Strictly Facts by looking at how this community-built project became a classroom, a living archive, and a love letter to Caribbean voices. Along the way, we reflect on the milestones of 2025. We revisit why this space exists: to center Caribbean history as a global story rooted in everyday life. Our growth didn’t come from hype. It came from trust—the emails, classroom shares, kind reviews, and the steady support of a diaspora that knows the value of telling our own stories.

Now we turn the mic to you. Year five is a year-long celebration shaped by listener ideas. Send us your hopes and questions. Tell us what you want to learn, who should join us, and how this show can keep serving the region and its global family. We’ll keep honoring the past, standing in the present, and building a more complete record of Caribbean life together.

Chapters

• 0:00 New Year Welcome And Mission
• 0:59 Haiti Independence Shoutout
• 1:19 2025 Milestones And Awards
• 2:51 Five Years Of Building Community
• 4:18 Evolving Focus And Core Values
• 5:13 Listener Gratitude And Trust
• 5:13 Invitation To Shape 2026
• 7:01 Thank Yous And Celebration Sign-Off

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, hosted by me, Alexandra Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics, and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture. Hello, hello everyone. Happy New Year and welcome back to a brand new season of Strictly Facts, a Guide to Caribbean History and Culture. I'm your host, Alexandria, and it feels good to be back with you all for our very first episode of 2026. I hope the start of the year finds you well, grounded, hopeful, and surrounded by community. Whether you are tuning in from the Caribbean, from the diaspora, or anywhere in between, thank you for being here with us as we step into another year of storytelling, learning, and celebrating our beautiful region. And of course, I could not start off the year without also setting a very happy, belated Independence Day to our Haitian brothers and sisters across the world who just celebrated 222 years since their declaration as the world's first black republic. So big up, big up, big up, big up. Before we move forward, I want to take a moment to look back with gratitude at 2025 because it was truly a milestone year for the podcast. Over the past year, we continued to deepen our conversations about Caribbean history, culture, migration, identity, and memory, and we welcomed incredible guests, students, scholars, elders, creatives, and community voices to the show. Together we explored the topics that stretched from the political to the deeply personal, reminding us that Caribbean history is not abstract. It is lived, embodied, and always unfolding. In the midst of doing this, something really magical happened. Strictly Facts was honored with three podcast awards in 2025 by the Alliance for Women in Media and Care Biz Network out in New York, recognizing us for our podcast excellence. These awards don't belong to us alone. They are truly reflection of all of you as well. The listeners who tune in every episode, they honor the educators who bring these conversations to our classrooms, both literally and figuratively. They belong to the students, uh, to the elders who share their wisdom and knowledge with us. They honor Caribbean storytelling as intellectual labor, they honor our ancestors' voices, and they honor the region. And for that I am truly grateful. And as if the start of the new year wasn't meaningful enough, this month also marks five years of strictly facts. Five full years, which to me seems crazy just to think about that, you know, we've been on this journey together for so long already. You know, for me, thinking about it, five years of researching, of recording, of editing, of growing, questioning, laughing, and honestly, sometimes even a little bit of crying. Um, five years of building a digital space dedicated to honoring Caribbean voices, Caribbean stories with accuracy, with warmth, with care, with dignity. And when the show began, you know, I said this many moons ago now, the goal was simple but urgent. It was to create a space where Caribbean history could be told fully, not as a footnote, not as a backdrop, but as central, global, and deeply human. Over the few years we've been doing this thing together, the podcast has grown not just in audience, but in depth. Our conversations have moved from introjectory storytelling to richer, more layered reflections about power, belonging, gender, migration, environment, memory. We've expanded our lens while still holding onto the core intention. Caribbean people deserve to see themselves reflected in our history with dignity. And five years later, I'm really truly incredibly proud of what we've built together. This podcast, for me and for I'm sure many of you, has never been just a show. It has always been a classroom, a community archive, a love letter, and a space of remembrance. As I reflect, I think of how many of you have been here since the beginning, and how many of you have also recently discovered us and decided to stay. I'm grateful for every message, every kind review, every episode shared with a friend, um, anybody who's posted their Spotify wrapped and all of those things. It's really meant a lot to me. And you have helped this project grow, not through hype, but through trust. And that means more, truly, than you know. So as we enter 2026, I want you to all be invited into helping shape the future of Strictly Facts. This will be a year-long celebration of our five-year anniversary, and we're planning to mark it in meaningful ways, more reflective conversations, more collaborations, more storytelling that centers the voices and histories that deserve the spotlight. And I'd love to hear from you. So, what would you like to see in 2026? Environmental history, diaspora stories, cultural traditions, women's history, a live event, workshops, maybe? Let me know. Your hopes and ideas have helped shape this space. So please reach out, message us, email me, and tell us what inspires you, what you want to learn, and how this podcast can continue to serve this community. Because the work has always, always been collaborative. As we begin this new year and celebrate this major milestone, I want to say an immense thank you. Thank you to every guest who has shaped and shared wisdom and research. Thank you to every listener who presses play. Thank you to the scholars, students, educators, cultural workers, and families who make this space for Caribbean history in our lives. Thank you to Breadfruit Media, my podcast family, of course. And thank you all just in general for trusting me, trusting strictly facts with our stories. I'm honored to continue this journey with you. And it wouldn't be, you know, an anniversary celebration if we didn't do it with a little dancehall style. So I'm kicking off our year's Strictly Fact Sounds with the baddest birthday tune. So in the words of Busy Signal, happy birthday, my friend, or my podcast. One more year, pandemic guanola vibe, give thanks for life. Next year we're doing it again. So here's to 2026, to five years of strictly facts, and to all the stories still waiting to be told. I'm Alexandria. This is Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, year five. Stay tuned. We're just getting started. Lickle more. Thanks for tuning in to Strictly Facts. Visit StrictlyFacts Podcast.com for more information from each episode. Follow us at Strictly Facts Pod on Instagram and Facebook and at Strictly Facts PD on Twitter.